Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Records of the Past

After Sallia and I looked over the soul fragment cubes, the two of us continued exploring the shop.

The most interesting thing we found was a small piece of paper at the back of the shop. Hovering above the piece of paper were two pens. Each pen had a different color ink, and after a bit of experimentation, Sallia and I realized that we couldn’t move one of the pens at all. Our hands would simply pass through it, as if it was a ghost. The other pen felt like a normal pen, except for the fact that it floated wherever we stopped moving it.

On the paper itself was what looked like a chat log.

Rathiel: Man, earnings for this month are really starting to drop. Average customers are only spending around 300-400 Achievement on average per visit now, and the average number of visitors has dropped around 8% from last month. This nursery is too poor now. Even if my shop is supposed to cater to new transmigrators, this is just miserable.

Reading this, I felt a sudden stab of pain in my heart. To think that 300-400 Achievement per customer was considered poor… I didn’t know whether I was supposed to feel better or worse after reading this. I had originally thought that Sallia was a very rich lady, and I was starting to make my way towards being wealthy. As it turned out, Sallia and I combined could barely match one day of spending for the former residents of this city. I couldn’t help but wonder how the previous residents of this city earned Achievement.

Astra: Perhaps you could try moving your shop to Nursery 6,419? Your nursery was hit pretty hard by the new reincarnation deal with the Eldrian branch of the Universal Tree, and the associated trade deals. I hear that they are experiencing an economic boom in some of the other Nurseries, though. Maybe it’s a good idea to move the shop somewhere so it'll be a little easier to find young Transmigrators with more to spend? Since you cater to those who are only a few worlds old, it’s best to go somewhere new transmigrators are still present but the average wealth is higher.

Rathiel: Needing to pay for rent for a new plot of land again would kind of sting, but it might really be my best option. The new people in this city are either too poor to afford more than a few upgrades these days. Nobody has bought a general ability in almost a week, and I’ve been forced to temporarily rent the Ability production cubes to another shop. Once my contract for this building is done, let’s talk some more about moving. I’ll give it serious thought if things don’t improve.

Astra: Sure! If you move to Nursery 6,419, let me know. I have a couple friends in that Nursery who can get some golems to help you move stuff. Much cheaper than robots these days now that mana rocks are so cheap. Also, I live much closer to that Nursery, so we could see each other more often. I swear, over the past few hundred years teleportation fees for long distances have just been getting worse and worse. 

Rathiel: Apparently, the Market has been sailing over a particularly chaotic patch of the multiverse recently, which is throwing PortalCorp’s tech off. They’ve been trying to shoehorn in some Binding and Manifestation solutions, but the company mostly uses technology. They haven’t quite managed to get their magic and tech to work together yet, and in the meantime it costs way more electricity to get things running on the teleportation side. I don’t know why the company never bothered messing with magic earlier, honestly. Tech is great, but combining the two is always the best way to get results. Sticking doggedly to just one or the other is a massive waste of resources and potential.

Astra: Ah, so that’s why. I hope we hit a less annoying patch of the Multiverse sometime in the next few centuries. If teleportation costs don’t scale down a bit within my next few reincarnations, I’ll have to drop my storage Ability and switch to something that adds a little less Glut penalty. I need access to other cities to sell crap, but if it costs me an arm and a leg just for basic long-range teleportation I’m barely making a profit, especially considering how much time it takes to find stuff to sell. At that point, I might as well just make my future purchases cheaper and not bother with raw material acquisition at all. I’ve been thinking about buying some abilities to let me use Essences in dimensions where they aren’t available, and then trying to found a religion. It may be horribly inefficient for Achievement farming, but it’d definitely be fun, and I should still break even after a few lives.

Rathiel: That does sound kind of fun. Although sticking to only being able to do stuff in worlds with no essences is a little niche, honestly. The odds are, what? One in sixteen for a planet with no magic at all? I think it’s better to be a little more well rounded than that. I’ve heard people sometimes manage to strike it rich by founding religions in worlds without any supernatural abilities at all, though, so we could try it if you’re really fixated on it. The real trick is surviving long enough for the religion to take off, since the first few decades only give a little Influence Achievement.

Rathiel: By the way, are we still doing board game night this weekend? Brendel said he was going on a date this Saturday, which means we’re down another person. At this point, I don’t think trying to run a game really makes sense anymore. I’ve still got two weeks before I can reincarnate again, so I’ve got plenty of time to kill. Do you want to do something else if it’s just the three of us?

Past that point, the conversation changed into a discussion about mundane scheduling for a board game, and alternate plans for a weekend hangout. I ignored those parts, skimming the conversation until I got to the end of the chat log. There, I found a few final messages before the paper had no more markings.

Astra: Things are getting really weird here. What the hell is going on? The Portals are on the fritz, and skeletons started popping up left and right. Those shouldn’t be able to exist in the Market. Also, I’ve heard a few pieces of news that don’t make any sense. Any updates from your Nursery?

Astra: Rathiel? Are you there? Please respond.

Astra: Hello?

Astra: Rathiel? Please be okay. I have to get out of my house for a bit and see if the city lord’s residence has issued a public notice, but I’ll send another message when I get back. I’m getting worried. Please let me know if you’re alright.

There were no further messages written on the paper.

However, as I looked at the paper, I felt a trace of sadness. I didn’t know Astra or Rathiel, but I could still feel Astra’s fear and loneliness when she had sent her final message to Rathiel. It felt… bad to look at it.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Sallia, who had been scanning the chat log with me. 

“Looking at this chat log makes me feel bad,” I said, after taking a few moments to silently mourn the members of this chat log. Seeing what had become of this city, I wasn’t very optimistic about Rathiel’s chances. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised of Rathiel was one of the corpses laying outside of the shop.

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Then, I shook off my negative emotions. No matter what had happened to the previous residents of this city…

They were dead and we weren’t. We needed to do our best to make sure we didn’t become like them. Right now, I didn’t have the power to worry about two people that had probably passed away long ago.

Sallia, by contrast, didn’t have a visible reaction to reading the chat log. Instead, she was simply fiddling with the pens in rapt fascination. “This paper and the pens are super fascinating. We can move one of the pens, my hand passes through the other one. How does it work? It even looks like these two lived pretty far away from each other, but they were still able to communicate instantly. That’s amazing! The military in this place must have had a massive advantage in communication, if even the civilians casually used tools like this.” Sallia’s expression was like a kid in a candy store, and for a moment, she gave me the impression of a little sister trying to look at her older brother’s toys. Since Sallia usually spoke pretty formally, the contrast was even more amusing. I couldn’t help but laugh as I watched her, and my gloomy thoughts dispersing once again.

“It looks like a text message, honestly. Did your world not have anything like that?”

“Were things like this common in your world? In mine, we had to send letters by courier. It usually took a week or two to get a message somewhere if you lived on opposite sides of the empire, and if you were expecting a letter back it might take over a month during the wet season because the roads would get really muddy. It was pretty bad. Instant communication…” Sallia shivered as she looked at the message log. “It’s like a dream.”

“Someday, if we get the chance, I need to introduce you to cell phones,” I said, grinning a little at the thought. “Though I have no clue how to make one, or if we can find them here at all. Still, I think you would find them pretty cool. Actually, considering how many space-age skyscrapers I’ve seen, I bet they exist somewhere in the Market, if only because there were buyers for it somewhere.” I sighed wistfully, longing for the ability to text and call… people. People who I could barely remember anymore, but that I remembered talking to while smiling. Suddenly, I really wished for a cell phone, even if I didn’t have anyone to call anymore. A small pang of loss and loneliness swept through my heart before I pushed it away. Survival. Right now, I just needed to focus on survival. I could deal with my thoughts and feelings later.

Sallia turned her attention back to the rest of the shop. “I do not think there is much else we can get from this strange letter-sharing device. Let’s keep looking around. This shop already gave us a few things, and perhaps there’s something else useful further in,” she said.

The two of us finished searching the shop. Under the counter, we found a small pool of glowing light. When Sallia showed it to me, and I touched it, I got another surprise.

Achievement Detected. Currently (unowned). Would you like to absorb some of it? There is currently 80 Achievement in this storage unit.

“So Achievement can be turned into this liquid?” I asked, looking at the small bowl of goo.

“Looks like it. I absorbed 1 Achievement from it to figure out what it was, and after that I reported it to you. Let’s split it – we might not have enough to really heavily invest in anything yet, but if those soul fragment making containers are anything to go by, we’re going to have a lot of uses for Achievement in the future.”

I nodded, and then thought ‘yes’ at the notification. A small confirmation box asked me how much I wanted to absorb, and I took 40 of the Achievement in the pool. Sallia took the rest. At the end of our shop-looting session, I was back up to around 85 Achievement, and Sallia had a little under 234. If I kept ‘eating’ one Achievement per day, I now had a little under three months worth of food before I starved to death. After some hesitation, I decided to buy one more stat in one of the physical attributes. It was obvious from the message log we had found that we wouldn’t find any ‘Ability’ containers in this shop, and I didn’t like our odds if we ran into something more threatening than the Skeletons we had seen so far. Besides, 35 days was enough time for the two of us to find other sources of Achievement, and another small boost in my physical abilities would make it easier and safer to move around without dying. Thus, I increased my Agility by 1 more point. While mental stats were definitely nice, right now I valued not getting stabbed in the face much more than being able to think better. And I have absolutely no idea what the Essence stats did, so I ignored the cubes that made Essence stats for now.

Sallia decided she had enough wriggle room to buy a few more stats, since right now she had almost 234 Achievement. She ended up getting 1 in all of her physical Stats for the price of 150 total Achievement, leaving her with 84. The difference was slight, but both of us felt better at the fact that we were just the tiniest bit stronger than before. 

Vaguely, I wondered if it might be a better idea to focus on one or two stats in the future. Since each 20 points in an Attribute increased its ‘grade’ by 1, the difference in each grade should be pretty substantial. However, since Sallia decided to improve her physical abilities equally right now, I decided it wasn’t my place to butt in with my opinion yet. I was also just guessing at the best way to improve was, after all.

Besides, it wouldn’t matter very much in the short term either way. It cost 20 soul fragments to get a stat to 20, and each soul fragment cost 50 Achievement each. In other words, it took 1,000 Achievement to get a Stat up to 20, and that was way too expensive for either of us to afford right now. Planning for the future was fine and all, but right now we were barely scraping by.

Sallia and I also experimented a bit more with the general mechanics of the Market and soul fragments, since we were already boosting our Stats a bit. We discovered that we couldn’t share Soul Fragments. Apparently, upon being created, a soul fragment was ‘attuned’ to whoever spent the Achievement to create it, and it was impossible to absorb a soul fragment that wasn’t attuned to you. If we wanted to share Stats, we would have to figure out how to trade Achievement with each other. Which also meant that the extra soul fragments laying around in the containers were totally useless to us, unfortunately.

With our spending temporarily out of the way, Sallia and I started to plan where to go next. The knowledge that we could loot Achievement from the destroyed shops might change our strategy pretty significantly, and the knowledge of how to use our Achievement was also welcome information. However, less than five minutes into our planning session, we were interrupted.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” a man’s voice called out from outside of the shop.