After we finished discussing our skill upgrades and finalizing our plans to get new bodies, we didn’t waste any time. I was the first one to activate the Market’s assistance in finding a place to buy more bodies.
Immediately afterwards, I felt a strange mental tug in my mind. It felt as if someone was insistently poking on my body and pointing me in a specific direction, over and over again. It was actually more than slightly annoying - but for now, I decided to be grateful for what it was. It was a way to navigate towards our destination easily.
A moment later, my friends activated their own guidance systems, and confirmed that all of us had similar experiences.
Sallia took the lead, and I followed her as the four of us started to stroll through the streets of the Market. We didn’t stop at any of the outlying buildings in the Market, for a very simple reason. At this point, we had probably exhausted most of the resources in the outer district of the Market. Most of the items were worse than what we already had equipped with us, and most of the soul fragments were too low tier to be useful. As for Skills, while there was still some value in loading up the rest of our glut cap with a few low-tier skills, it was still a better use of our time and resources to at least search for intermediate or advanced skills to use up our remaining glut cap. That meant that there was little value left in the outer Market beyond scattered storage units that held Achievement inside - and we would probably find much more Achievement in the inner districts. If we wanted to keep upgrading, it was time to start ignoring the outer districts and spending our limited time elsewhere.
Of course, while we were walking, we still ran into a few weak skeletons. As usual, we wiped them out and got a bit of Achievement as we walked, though the difference in my total Achievement before and after my first skeleton kill was quite minimal.
Slaughter: You have killed a Skeletal Foot Soldier for the first time
Achievement +20
20 Achievement brought me from 280,003 Achievement to 280,023. My friends and I didn’t even bother setting each skeleton up for assists before killing it - even that felt like a waste of time at this point, especially when we only had two months to get new bodies.
However, after the first three skeletons we found across an hour of walking, we spent the next few hours in near total silence. There weren’t any skeletons on the streets, there weren’t any other monsters in the nearby shops, there was just… nothing.
That was when I started to feel like something was wrong.
“Why are there so few skeletons here?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t expect to see many of them, because this seems like a low level commercial district, but we’ve still seen multiple shops that are clearly selling items for transmigrators. We’ve passed at least a few dozen shops selling soul fragments already. Shouldn’t there be some defenses set up to wipe out or slow down new transmigrators here? This violates our understanding of how the monsters in the Market work.”
“I’m also wondering that,” said Sallia. “At first, I figured maybe we were just passing through an area of the Market that had already been looted or something, which would explain why the numbers were on the low side. However, there should still be at least a few skeletons in each shop. I haven’t seen a thing, though. If we walked in and wanted to buy soul fragments, it doesn’t seem like we would run into any obstacles at all. Something is weird.”
I frowned. Based on the information we had gathered from previous visits to the Market, the monsters here had some kind of way to sense which areas were or weren’t already ‘protected’ by monsters. They would inherently move to areas that were unprotected fairly quickly after the local defenders were wiped out. We still hadn’t figured out how they knew which areas were unprotected, but we had seen it happen several times.
I sucked in a deep breath as I suddenly grew far more wary of our surroundings.
I asked. I immediately stopped using regular speech - it felt nice to talk out loud with my friends, but our communication bracelets were the most reliable way to make sure nothing overheard us.
Anise immediately tensed and pulled closer to me, and Sallia whipped out her own blade and started scanning our surroundings warily. Felix, however, frowned, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he scanned our surroundings.
said Felix.
I felt some of the tension bleed out of my shoulders. Felix’s words made sense. I also thought it made little sense for us to spend three hours taking a stroll under the nose of a monster while it watched us and did nothing. That just wasn’t how the monsters in the Market had acted.
But there was still obviously something wrong. The number of monsters we had seen was far too low, and the area was unnervingly quiet.
“You know, based on what we’ve seen in the Market, it still takes a while for monsters to react to a ‘vacancy’ in the area. Furthermore, we’re following the Market’s recommended path to the nearest area where we can buy more lives. Do you think there’s another survivor group just ahead of us?” asked Sallia.
I jolted. That made a lot more sense than my earlier speculation. Depending on how powerful that group was, they might not have outgrown the outer Market yet - so they could have stopped by every store to kill the monsters inside, loot the Achievement storage, and buy a few upgrades here and there. If they hit every store, then it made sense that we didn’t see any monsters, as long as we were close enough to them. After all, it took several hours for new monsters to fill in the gaps anytime a new vacancy opened.
“So there’s probably another group of survivors ahead of us?” asked Anise.
“It seems possible, at least,” said Sallia.
“Let’s assume that’s correct,” I said. “If Sallia’s guess is correct, that means we have a very important question ahead of us. Do we want to make contact with them, or avoid them?”
“I think this question is simpler than you make it out to be,” said Felix. “Do we feel confident in securing more lives on our own?”
I paused. It was hard to answer Felix’s question, because none of us had any clue what kind of roadblock the destroyers of the Market might have left behind. I took a deep breath, even though I didn’t need to breathe, and thought.
I had no idea what kind of threat we were facing… so obviously, I shouldn’t be confident in our ability to secure more lives. The one and only truly abnormal opportunity we had secured was the {Splinter of Annihilation}. If the people who destroyed the Market wanted to make sure no new transmigrators appeared, they would obviously set up a monster or guardian strong enough to prevent anyone from passing through the area and buying more lives - meaning that the one and only ‘true’ measure of strength we had was totally abnormal, outside-the-box encounters that propelled us far beyond what a transmigrator our age should have access to.
Since we had also saved the fourth world we entered, and gotten some concept-related abilities, and my friends had all managed their own abilities well, I suspected we were ‘above average’ for people who were five worlds old. Was ‘above average’ strength, plus the {Splinter of Annihilation}, enough to guarantee our survival?
Probably not.
So the best solution was to add more variables to the situation, and hope that they worked out for us - because if we did nothing unexpected, we were probably guaranteed to die.
“I suspect we aren’t strong enough on our own,” I said.
“I agree,” said Anise. “Meeting up with other survivors is a risk, but… I also think that fighting alone is a bigger risk. We can at least meet up with them and get a feel for them, before we reassess our next plans? But I think if the other group of people doesn’t seem bad, making some allies, even temporary ones, would be good for our chances of surviving.”
“I also don’t think it’s a bad idea to make contact with another survivor group,” said Felix. “There is strength in numbers, and I don’t see a reason for them to turn on us and hurt us. Our interests probably align at the moment, and betraying each other only to die would be dumb. Unless they’re lunatics we should be able to establish a temporary alliance.”
“I don’t know, there could be a reason to betray us. They might try to take our Achievement,” said Sallia. “Given the way the Market works, it’s obvious that there are ways to transfer achievement. If they realize how wealthy we are, they could threaten to kill us, then drag us over to one of those Achievement pools and then extract all of our resources.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“So let’s hide how much Achievement we have and see if we can make contact,” said Felix, after a while. “We won’t lie about our actual strength, but we’ll keep a few cards hidden, and we’ll pretend that we’re nearly broke after buying our last round of upgrades.”
“Sounds good,” I said. Anise also nodded, and Sallia gave a hesitant nod a moment later.
We started to speed up, in hopes of catching up to the other survivor group. After an hour of all-out sprinting, I finally heard something in the distance. I used my spatial sight and my soul sight to start looking around, and then grinned.
“I see two other potential Market survivors about a kilometer ahead,” I said. My friends nodded at me. It was time to see what our fellow surviving Market residents were like.
Author’s Note:
Join my Discord! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)