acaswell
patreon
Chapter 112: Silver City - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2023-06-22 05:35:56 +0000 UTCAuthor's Note: Minor edit to previous chapter. Someone pointed out that it's strange Miria doesn't try to extinguish the mist in Felix's father's lungs, and after thinking about it, I agreed. The mist is doing something... a little more conceptually screwy than one might expect, but Miria should certainly still try to extinguish the mist in his lungs and see what happens. This has been added to the previous chapter.
After Felix’s father died, we made a few quick prayers to the white dragon. I was a little surprised that Ella and Anise’s parents were still willing to pray to the white dragon, considering its rather lackluster support during the Orukthyri attack. However, deep-seated habits seemed difficult to shake.
After that, Felix cremated his father’s body with a few fire spells.
We spent an hour or two letting Felix and his mother take some time to themselves. This world didn’t seem to have any sort of complicated burial rituals: instead, Felix and his mother Amelia talked about the good memories they had shared with Collin before he died. After each speech, we drank a small glass of water, since we didn’t have alcohol.
We spent a few more hours mourning before we started moving again.
As we walked, I started to realize that there were some lingering issues left over from the encounter with the fog creature.
The patch of gray skin I had between my knee and about halfway down my calves now felt like ice, and it hurt when I moved. My legs didn’t handle weight anywhere near as well as they used to. I could still run, jump, and walk, but each step put me in pain. If I pushed my body to my limits, I would start to feel a crippling pain in my legs. It wasn’t as noticeable when I wasn’t walking or running, but it was definitely noticeable whenever I tried to move quickly.
I could tell that my speed had dropped a lot too. I could previously operate at well above the level of humanity, and easily outrun even trained couriers. I had been reduced to only being a little faster than a courier now that my legs were messed up. My speed enhancements were still excellent for helping to surpass orthanoid creatures, since their bodies weren’t much different from a regular human body. However, if I fought against even a middle-tier creature like an Orukthyri warrior in my current state, my injured legs would probably get me killed. Even trying to flee if one caught sight of me would be much harder now. It wasn’t a crippling injury, but it was definitely a major weakness I now had to overcome.
And unfortunately, I was the best off of the five people who had gotten harmed by the creature. After all, even if my legs hurt, I could still use them.
Felix was perhaps the worst off in the group. One of Felix’s eyes was now completely blind, and the pain he was in seemed to be nearly debilitating, even with his Grade 7 Willpower boosting his pain tolerance. A few times, he looked as if he were contemplating prying his own eye out of its socket, just to make the pain go away, and he spent most of his father’s funeral clutching his eye in pain. The only real upside was that he had only lost one eye, instead of both. If his eye didn’t heal properly, it might even impact his future as a craftsman: after all, having two eyes was critical for depth perception, and while Felix might be able to make do with one eye, it was far from ideal.
Anise looked like she had stuck her face into a vat of gray paint and gotten it smudged all over her face. She sounded like she was drunk when she tried to talk now. Her voice was slurred, and it sounded like she was trying not to cry sometimes when she spoke. Even Felix and I were having a hard time coping with the pain in our limbs, and Anise was a real child, instead of an adult in a child’s body. She had much lower pain tolerance than the two of us. Since her injuries only seemed to flare up when she tried to talk or chew, during Collin’s funeral, Anise quickly learned to move her mouth and nose as little as possible. Every time we drank a glass of water in honor of the fallen, she slowly tipped the liquid in the glass into her throat, moving her lips as little as possible to reduce the amount of pain she experienced. When I saw Anise clutching her jaw in pain every time she tried to talk, I felt a stab of pain in my own heart as well. In human years, Anise was just ten years old. Seeing a cheerful, sometimes ridiculous girl I considered a friend clutching her jaw in pain felt awful.
Ella’s arm looked almost like a charred tree stump after it had been struck by lightning. In addition to the unnerving gray color all of our injuries shared, her arm had a pale, waxy color to it. She was totally unable to move her injured arm, and even though she was trying to put up a strong front, I could tell that she was in a lot of pain. She started to twitch and shiver whenever something brushed against her arm, and even the others were starting to notice just how bad Ella’s arm was after our brush with the fog creature.
I spent most of the first day hoping that these issues were temporary. Even if the four injured were in a lot of pain, if they were just temporary wounds, they weren’t too bad. I still didn’t know exactly what was left inside of our injuries, keeping them from healing, but I hoped that our bodies would kill it off after some time. However, the pain throbbing in my legs was, if anything, getting worse as we traveled through the wastes. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but I swore that the gray patch of skin on my legs was getting slightly darker in color as we walked. I wasn’t sure if that was because my injury was worsening because I was putting my legs under a lot of strain, or if I was just imagining things.
As I observed the gray patch of skin, I started to get a bad feeling in my stomach. I was hoping that the injuries weren’t permanent, but… what if they were? I had never truly dealt with a permanent injury before. I had lost my arm near the end of my life on the islands, but less than a day had passed before I died after losing my arm. On returning to the Market, my arm had been completely restored, and so I had largely forgotten about the matter. After all, the injury had lasted less than 24 hours: there hadn’t been any time where I truly needed to contemplate the loss of one of my limbs and adapt to my new reality.
This time, I wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying. It might be the first time I really had to cope with a long-term disability. The idea of being crippled was a nauseating one. I was very used to the incredible strain I could put my body under with my high Fortitude stat, and my entire dream in this world was to explore the surface with my friends when I got older. Even if the surface was horrifying, for most of my childhood, I had been hopeful that we would eventually return triumphant and make people’s lives in this world better - and get a lot of Achievement while doing so. Suddenly losing access to my incredibly strong physical body made me feel vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt before. And the prospect of losing one of my major advantages in this world had a good chance of getting me killed.
For now, there wasn’t much I could do but hope that I was wrong. Perhaps I was just imagining things. In the worst case scenario, perhaps I could fix whatever damage had been done to us using my fifth absorption rune. After all, I had been very close to ready to form my fifth rune for quite a while. I sensed that I would probably be able to start forming my next rune ability in a day or two, meaning I could probably start right after we got to Silver City.
The first night after we got injured, Anise crawled into my tent a few hours after everyone else fell asleep, and then hugged me while crying. I was surprised to see her at first, but since she seemed to be in pain, I stroked her back for a few hours before she finally fell asleep. It was obvious that she wasn’t handling her injuries well. Seeing that just made me feel worse about the whole encounter. Even if we had escaped and survived, the fog creature had left scars on both our bodies and our minds.
The final day of our journey started off with me cautiously looking after Anise, making sure that she could handle moving around. If she couldn’t tolerate the pain, I used a little bit of alteration essence to provide some relief, no matter how temporary it might be and no matter how much my brain told me that I needed to save my essence for a possible fight. Seeing Anise and Felix in pain made it very hard for me to concentrate.
We had a light meal that morning, because our food rations were basically gone. We had enough food for a very light lunch, but after that, anything we wanted to eat would need to be foraged first. We spent the morning hungry, with our stomachs rumbling. Luckily, we at least had water to drink, thanks to our ability to create water using spells.
Meanwhile, Felix’s mother used her spells to scout the area as usual while we moved. With only one Mage scouting instead of two, Amelia needed to be far more cautious about where and when she spent her essence. We had a dangerous moment about halfway through the day where we nearly ran face-first into a warband of Orukthyri, and were only saved by Sallia’s rune-enhanced hearing at the last minute. We were forced to hide for almost an hour before the Orukthyri passed by our area, leaving us sweating at the thought of what could have been our last day alive on this planet.
Luckily, we survived, and we didn’t run into anything else before finally reaching Silver City.
“Halt! Who goes there?” called a voice from inside of the tunnel nearly the moment we set foot inside of it.
“We are injured and weary travelers from another city,” said Ella.
“Are you Adventurers?” asked the voice.
“Refugees,” said Ella, who grimaced as she spoke the word ‘refugee.’ “We have four shaper-casters in our group, as well as one shaper and one caster.”
“Six magic-users in total? And five shapers?” The man in the tunnel asked. “Do you expect me to believe that?”
“I expect -” Ella sounded as if she were on the verge of losing her temper for a moment, before she took a deep breath. She gritted her teeth, and in the next moment, her voice became much more polite.“We can prove it by using general shaping in front of you, if you let us.”
“Hmm. Fine. How are your injuries?”
“They seem painful, but not debilitating,” said Ella, frowning as she spoke.
“How big is your group?”
“Eight people.”
“Fine. You can come in. But you better believe that if you’re just boasting about having shapers in your group, we’ll toss you back out into the wastes. We don’t need braggarts to come in and waste our resources.”
I frowned as we started to walk forward again. I didn’t necessarily feel great about the guard of Silver City, at least. But I hoped it wasn’t indicative of the treatment we would receive inside the city as well. Perhaps this guard was just particularly ill tempered. Still, I felt a little bit of Ella’s frustration as she gritted her teeth and walked forward.
We continued walking down the tunnel, and my vision of the sky quickly disappeared, replaced with the oddly comforting sight of gray stone above our heads. I hadn’t realized it until now, but every moment we had spent under the orange sky and black sun, I had been on edge, expecting a dangerous creature to pop out of our surroundings and try to kill us. Even if I liked exploring interesting places, spending over a week traveling through dangerous lands while knowing that a single mistake might kill us was still very stressful.
A few minutes of walking later, we saw the person who had been speaking with us. They wore several strips of silver thread sewn into their clothing, and had the familiar blue color sewn into their shirt, showing that they were a spellcaster. Standing behind him were a few other guards and one other spellcaster, as well as a shaper who had his ear pressed against the floor of the tunnel. The shaper sat up for a moment, and gave us a friendly nod. Unlike the spellcaster, he didn’t seem overtly rude, which was a relief. Perhaps the vocal spellcaster was the exception here.
The spellcaster guard quickly took a look at us, frowning as he saw the patches of dirt on our clothes, as well as the colors hidden under layers of grime. He raised an eyebrow as he looked at my dress, and I realized that, unlike everyone else’s clothing, my dress was still spotlessly clean. It was heavily contrasted by the patches of dust on my skin that I had acquired over the last week spent traveling.
“At least one of you is dressed properly,” he said, before shaking his head. “Now, you said you had five shapers in your party? Well? Prove it.”
This person seemed unpleasant to deal with, so I decided to just get this over with as quickly as possible. In any case, the other guards and the shaper didn’t seem quite so rude, and I doubted any city would turn away five shapers looking for a new home. I quickly grabbed my backpack, as well as a bottle of water, and swapped the color of the two, before handing it to Sallia. She quickly swapped the color back, before passing it on.
The rude spellcaster had a sour look on his face as he realized that we hadn’t been lying, and the other spellcaster softly chuckled, before elbowing one of the nearby guards. They both glanced at the rude spellcaster, and I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t very well liked.
The spellcaster opened his mouth, looking as if he had just sucked on a lemon, but before he could speak, the shaper who had one ear on the ground gave us another warm grin.
“Welcome to the city, refugees! You can register for a place of residence at the ministry of war on the street behind the fort. It’s the building with silver borders and red colors splashed across the front. You can’t miss it. The clerk at the counter is pretty friendly, unlike some people.”
The rude spellcaster glared at the shaper, who simply ignored him.
My impression of the city improved a bit. One of the guards opened the gates for us, and we finally stepped past the fort and into the city.
After days of walking through the wastes, encountering incomprehensible creatures, and after the death of Felix’s father, we had made it to Silver City with the rest of our party alive.
Author’s Note: Join my Discord!
Comments
David Brims
I thought that was Sallia back when they first met up. I assume Sallia has since done her 5th and maybe also her 6th
Arkeus
iirc, yeah, it had been mentioned that way.
Dax
She had been ready to form her fifth rune for quite a while but had been putting it off, iirc.
Treviisolion
So, re-reading the last chapter, it sounds like the soul has been damaged? Though unlike Miria’s ability which weakens the overall effect, it targeted random specific body parts? I’m going to guess that Miria will find a way to heal it via a reversal of her death-water?
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
