acaswell
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Chapter 66: World Tiers- Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2023-02-25 05:19:12 +0000 UTCNote about Errors in previous chapter:
In the previous chapter, when I posted it, Miria’s Status Screen had two errors.
First, I didn’t add in her Swordsmanship Ability and her Rune to her ‘body’ stats, meaning her current body should have had an extra +25 to all physical Stats.
Second, I accidentally wrote that she had 22/50 Glut Penalty, instead of 23/50. I forgot to add in the 1 penalty from ‘Identity.’
These errors were corrected a little after I posted the chapter, so the version you read might have already been fixed. If you read the chapter right after I posted it, these errors are now corrected.
“What did you invest in?” I called out to Felix and Sallia as we looked through the shop. I had a reasonable idea what they had been planning on investing in, but it was good to double check, in case it factored into our planning in the next world somehow. I knew Felix had around 7,000 Achievement, and he hadn’t bought any abilities this time, and Sallia had around 1,500 Achievement after buying her Keyword Ability. After forming her runes she should have been up to around 1,700, by my estimation.
Felix shrugged. “I ignored Strength, since it seemed like the least useful Stat for me right now. Strength is useful, don’t get me wrong, but…” Felix shrugged. “I wanted other things more. Instead, I got every mental attribute and the other two physical Attributes up to Grade 1. After that, I put 10 points into every Essence category. I figure that it changes my stat range on birth. Specifically, instead of having 70 to 130 in a Stat, I have 80 to 140. Which means I can’t roll into Grade 3, no matter how unlucky I am. Based on how much Sallia struggled last world, having Grade 3 in an Attribute is… crippling. So I wanted to avoid that. And no matter which magic System is present in the next world, I’d like to have at least semi-decent Stats for interacting with it until I figure out which one I have extreme affinity for.” Felix paused. “And I bought the Identity Ability too. I like my name. I do wonder how it’s going to deal with my body shape, since I’m not very attached to my current looks, but I guess I’ll see next world,” said Felix.
I nodded. Felix’s words made sense. 10 points in an Attribute was actually an important break point, since it meant one would ALWAYS have at least Grade 4 in future worlds. While Sallia’s feat of getting every Important Stat in Grade 3 was incredibly unlikely, 10 points in an Attribute negated the influence of bad luck by a considerable amount. And since Felix didn’t know which Essence he had super compatibility with yet, investing evenly in all of them was reasonable.
Sallia shrugged. “I got 1 Grade into Absorption, since it’s my extreme affinity, and half a grade into Willpower, since it’s basically required if I don’t want to struggle with training. I was able to compensate for my low Willpower on the islands, because watching storms bumped me up to Grade 4 Willpower, but… at grade 3, trying to train is a nightmare. It’s just too hard to concentrate. Apart from that, I invested a little bit of the Achievement I got from training in the Market, and I got Fortitude up to +3.” Sallis sighed. “I put 1 point into every physical attribute the first time we were in the Market. I wish I had just gotten 3 points in Fortitude instead. I can’t do anything with higher Agility or Strength if I get sick and die before turning 4. Hopefully I don’t get unlucky this time,” Sallia said as she sighed. “I also bought Identity. Getting called ‘Aria’ all the time when we were living on the islands was… really frustrating. I really appreciated you two using my name, but I want my parents to use ‘Sallia’ and not ‘Aria’ as well next time.” I nodded. If I hadn’t had enough Achievement to get everything to Grade 1, I would have prioritized buying the Identity Ability as well. It might not be a particularly smart action, since we were facing an unknown threat and needed to grow as fast as possible if we wanted to live. But I also wanted to keep being… me. And a name was the foundation of my identity. I had felt incredibly uncomfortable during my first visit to the Market, when I hadn’t been able to remember my name. So even if it might not be ‘optimal,’ I didn’t fault Sallia for buying Identity.
As I got lost in my thoughts, I suddenly heard Felix cackle. “I found something!” I was closer to Felix than Sallia, so I reached him first. I saw Felix standing over a little basin of liquid, which had previously been hidden under the counter. I touched it, and grinned.
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Achievement Detected. Currently (unowned). Would you like to absorb some of it? There is currently 130 Achievement in this storage unit.
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I took one look at it, preparing to absorb a third of the Achievement… and then I hesitated.
Did I really need 43.33 Achievement? I already had 350 right now, and I had already bought all of the Stats I could in this store. The only thing we had left to do before reincarnating was getting some items, but those didn’t cost Achievement. The store owners weren’t exactly around to collect payments, after all.
In other words, I had no immediate use for more Achievement.
I looked at where Sallia had been rummaging through stuff in the shop. She was one of my two best friends. Right now, she had just gotten her most important Keyword Ability online, and she could definitely use another 7 Points in Fortitude to bring her up to 10.
I looked at the cash register, and thought for a moment.
I pressed my hand to the cash register.
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Would you like to pay for your Items?
There is currently no price calculation added to the Cash register. Please have whoever is manning the register enter the price for any physical items you are purchasing before trying to pay.
Error - no number entered
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I turned to Felix, and winked at him.
He took a look at the container, and after thinking for a moment, winked back at me. I knew we were on the same page. I grinned. “Don’t sell me out,” I whispered.
Felix grinned and typed in ‘200’ into the cash register.
Then, I ‘paid for my items,’ tossing 200 Achievement into the pool of Achievement. Instead of 130 Achievement, there was now 330 Achievement waiting for Sallia to use. And my Achievement dropped from 348 to 148. Since Sallia probably had a bit of Achievement left over, that should be just enough to push her to +10 Fortitude.
“Hey Sallia! We found a bit of Achievement! We already took our share,” I said. “The rest is yours! This store was surprisingly well off.” Sallia turned around, looking up from the pile of stuff she had been digging through, before grinning. “Good! I found a couple of old records that are interesting. It has some pretty useful information on the Multiverse, and a few tidbits on stuff like Skill Grades. I’m starting to realize the greater multiverse is a lot more… interesting than I first thought. You guys can look through it while I get my share of Achievement,” she said cheerfully as she started walking towards us.
After that, Sallia quickly ran over to the cash register and took a look at the small basin of Achievement. She looked at it for a moment, before she turned towards me and frowned.
“There’s no way there was 330 Achievement when we got here. How much did you put in?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “It was… all there when we got here?’
“Miria, this store may have been a little more prosperous than The One Stop Shop for the Enterprising Transmigrator from our first market visit, but I seriously doubt they had 330 Achievement squirreled away. Most people in the Market seem to spend whatever they earn pretty quickly. How much did you put in?”
“She put in 200 Achievement,” said Felix. I glared at him. He betrayed me!
Sallia sighed, before taking a step towards me and giving me a slightly crushing hug. “I appreciate the gesture, and I’ll take the extra 200 Achievement you’re loaning me, Miria. I need whatever I can get right now.” Then, she released me from the hug, and rapped me on the head. “But if you’re going to give me something, tell me, okay? I may have struggled a lot during our first world, and life definitely sucked sometimes on the islands. But I’m not made of glass either. If you do something for me, I want to know so that I can give you something equally amazing in the future.” She grinned at me. “And after I got my Rune Ability, and especially now that I have Grade 1 Absorption Essence attached to my soul, I’m not just a dead weight anymore. In the future, I’ll be the one supporting you instead of you supporting me. Okay?”
Then, with a relaxed grin, she absorbed the 330 Achievement, while I ruefully grinned. Maybe I hadn’t been giving Sallia enough credit after we returned to the Market. Part of me still thought of her as the girl from the islands who struggled with her insecurities because she was too weak to do what she loved. And while I doubted Sallia had overcome that mindset as completely as she was pretending she had, perhaps I needed to give her a little more credit, and a little more space to grow on her own. It was a small reminder, but I realized I would need to treat her differently now that she was gaining a little confidence and a few Abilities to back up her actions.
And I was excited to see where she would go in the future.
After that, Felix and I went to look at the records Sallia had found. The paper was a bit different from the message log we had found during our first trip to the Market, but it was very interesting in a different way. Instead of a chat between two friends, it seemed to be a message log from a mentor and his apprentice talking about the nature of the Market and the Multiverse.
Sel’thub: Edwin, I’ve noticed recently that your income for the past few lives has dropped. I try not to intrude too much into your life, because it’s best if you find your own way forward. However, may I ask if something is wrong? Are you confused about something? I know the Market can be overwhelming at first, and you’ve only had 4 lives to settle in so far, but if you need anything, please keep me informed. I brought you into the Market because I think you can succeed here.
Edwin: I struggled a lot in the last two worlds, honestly. They were… way harder than the first two worlds I was born on. The people and monsters were both much stronger. How do you deal with higher tier worlds?
Sel’thub: Ah, they were higher tier worlds? What Tier were they?
Edwin: The Market notification I got for the first one said it was a Tier 7 world, and the next was a Tier 8. What exactly does that even mean?
Sel’thub: I had forgotten to explain world tiers to you.
Selthub: All right, so you know how there are twenty total Tiers for Skills and Abilities, right? You start with Basic as the weakest Skill or Ability, then go to Intermediate, then Advanced, Expert, Master, Heroic, and so on and so forth, all the way up to Law-9 Grade?
Edwin: Yeah. Why?
Sel’thub: Just like Abilities, Worlds have 20 Tiers, according to the standard Market Evaluation. Well, technically there are 21 Tiers: Tier 0 worlds, while rare, technically exist. Those worlds are usually just filled with cavemen on the brink of extinction from some random disease or an impending ice age or something, but they’re quite rare.
Selthub: Anyway, a world’s ‘Tier’ is an evaluation of how much mana and essence the world generates per second, usually tied to how large the dimension was at the time of its creation. This directly influences how powerful magic, and to some extent, the powerful creatures, of a world are, although sometimes world might favor one specific ‘overlord’ quite a bit more than you would expect if you only looked at raw mana quantity. But it’s still a good way to generally evaluate how strong a world is, at least when it comes to individual fighting ability, since it directly influences the Stats and Ability Grades of non-Transmigrators. A Tier 3 world, for example, might have soldiers with around Grade five and a half average Stats, and an Advanced Grade Skill or two as a normal member of an army, and the elite soldiers of a stronger nation might even have an Expert Grade Swordsmanship skill or something. While a Tier 1 world might not even have enough essence to support an ordinary spellcasting System, meaning whatever humanoids live there will be fairly weak. It’s worth keeping in mind that Tier can be deceptive sometimes, since people in Tier 1 worlds might still have gunpowder or something to make themselves quite a bit stronger, but you can be sure there won’t be much spellcasting happening there, at least.
Edwin: So the Tier 7 and Tier 8 World I landed in were pretty strong?
Selthub: Well, relative to your age, yes. Tier 7 and Tier 8 Worlds usually have a fair number of people with Heroic Grade skills running around, even if they aren’t exactly everywhere. And they’ll usually have a couple Epic Grade Skill-users too. Considering your current strength, that would be basically impossible for you to defeat unless you somehow got a spaceship and stuck it into one of your item slots while I wasn’t paying attention. Which would probably even the odds quite a bit, but spaceships with proper weapons systems that work in all dimensions are a nightmare to manufacture, and I doubt you have the money for one. No offence.
Edwin: If even a Tier 7 world was so difficult for me to succeed in, what does a Tier 20 world even look like?
Sel’thub: I’ve reincarnated in a Tier 20 world exactly once out of my one hundred and eighteen lives. By my best estimation, the mid-sized powerhouses of that dimension might have something like Law-2 or Law-3 Grade Abilities and Grade 80 or Grade 90 Stats. They were way beyond me. I have no clue what the bigshots of that world were like, because I was too much of a small fry to even see them. In those worlds, I strongly recommend you don’t try to get any Influence Achievement. It’s a lost cause unless you’re ridiculously strong. And I’ve been stuck on advancing my Legendary-Grade Abilities to Mythical for a long time now. I’ve given up, which is why I have enough Achievement to sponsor new members of the Market like you. I managed to eke out an okay existence as a local power in that lifetime, but it was… humbling.
Sel’thub: Anyway. The strength of a totally normal citizen usually doesn’t change too much from dimension to dimension, but how much people can achieve at their best can change drastically, especially based on how many types of Essence are available and the quantity of each essence the world generates. A world where Absorption essence is so thick it literally forms rainclouds and falls out of the sky is very different from a world where absorption essence is only formed in small quantities inside people’s bodies, for example.
Selthub: So don’t feel too bad that you got kicked around in a Tier 7 world. It’s normal to struggle a bit with higher tier worlds when you’re young, or if you can’t find a way to keep advancing your Abilities. Even I still occasionally get stomped by whatever world I land in. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the way of the universe.
Edwin: You also mentioned something about mana quantity. How does that tie into world Tier?
Sel’thub: Well, that goes into how dimensions are created.
Sel’thub: You see, at the heart of the multiverse, as far as anyone can tell, there’s an absolutely massive glob of mana. It’s probably the size of several million dimensions stitched together. Most people call it the Heart of the Multiverse, since it seems to have infinite mana and keeps creating more and more dimensions every second. It has been doing so since the dawn of time, and while nobody is quite sure how the Heart of the Universe actually works, everyone who’s old enough and strong enough seems to agree that it’s there, even if getting close enough to directly observe it is impossible.
Sel’thub: Every second, several smaller globs of mana flake off from the center of the multiverse. These dimensions are initially too unstable to sustain life, and will usually destroy anything they touch. Even for someone like Eluxia who has multiple Abilities at Grade Law-9, she would die on contact with a freshly created dimension. However, as time passes, these dimensions start to stabilize, becoming proper dimensions, instead of just embryos. Of course, for every one dimension that successfully stabilizes, another thousand or so simply melt down into globs of volatile mana and unstable laws of reality. Powerhouses of the Multiverse sometimes use those as crafting materials, although that’s not the pointright now. As I was saying, the dimensional embryos that don’t explode eventually become proper, life supporting dimensions. But not all of them have the same amount of mana, just like no two dimensions have exactly the same laws of physics or systems of magic available. The ones with more mana tend to have stronger magic systems. In addition, the inhabitants of dimensions with more mana have higher maximum potential, since their bodies are built to handle more essence, and thus, by extension, more mana.
Sel’thub: Luckily, dimensional embryos with more mana are also more volatile and prone to self-destructing before they stabilize. This makes higher Tier dimensions much more rare than low tier dimensions. Which is why most Transmigrator’s don’t see Tier 20 worlds very often. In higher tier worlds, most transmigrators get kicked around like they’re random nobodies from small villages. Being part of the Market is an incredible blessing, since it frees us from the fears and losses others experience upon death. But we also lose a fair bit of our natural potential within a single lifetime as a cost. It’s why we can never be born with more than 130 Stats in a single body without adding in Stats from our souls, and also why our Abilities can only be upgraded after our deaths, while non-Transmigrators sort of… accidentally upgrade their Abilities in the process of existing. Though, they use Skills, without using Abilities, which is why they lose everything from life to life. And also why natives don’t need to deal with Glut Penalty. Being part of the Market is definitely worth it, since we don’t lose everything after death, but it does mean we take a lot longer to get strong.
Sel’thub: Of course, we also get to keep our potential and strength even in much lower tier worlds, as a benefit to being part of the Market. There’s nothing more fun than strolling around with Grade 30 Stats and Legendary-Grade Abilities in a Tier 1 world where even finding someone with Expert-Grade Skills is incredibly hard. Definitely a good way to relieve stress if you get a particularly bad reincarnation. At that point, you can pretty easily pass yourself off as a god and have some fun with the locals.
Edwin: I see. Why do higher Tier worlds give more Achievement for doing the same thing?
Sel’thub: Well, Achievement is, more or less, the ‘stuff’ all souls collect whenever they interact with the mana of their dimension. Of course, the Market helps us process this Achievement into a slightly more usable form, and the ‘Achievement’ refined by the Market can be traded without harming the soul, but all souls collect a slightly different form of Achievement in much the same way we do. And since Achievement is essentially dimensional gloop earned by interacting with the local dimensional laws and mana, worlds that had more mana at the time of their creation will naturally have more mana cycling in and out of existence for Transmigrators to snatch up. This means higher Tier worlds are more dangerous, but have better rewards as well.
Sel’thub: Anyway, I think that’s enough of a tangent for now. The point is, I wanted to know why your income had dropped recently. Getting unlucky and running into worlds that were too high Tier for you is a decent reason to have low income. Don’t worry about it. If you check your bank account, I’ve deposited an extra 500 Achievement for you to use as you see fit. Maybe throw a party and cheer yourself up. Find a nice girl or guy that fits your taste and take a few days off to relax, maybe. Or buy a few Stats or something. It’s important to keep up morale after getting a bad run. I’ll keep in touch with you if anything goes wrong, but I know you can succeed in the Market. You have the potential, you just need to keep pushing forward. I look forward to the day you advance your Keyword Abilities to Heroic Grade.
That was the end of the messages.
After reading the message log, I had a single thought.
We had a long road ahead of us. I tried to remember the System messages I had seen when we first reincarnated on the islands. It had been a long time ago, but… I seemed to recall a System message letting me know that we had reincarnated on a Tier 2 World? I had to wonder if our world was… typical of a Tier 2 world. I did get the feeling that the ocean our island had been in was… rather unique, so it might have been a bit higher Tier than the rest of the world. But even so, I couldn’t help but think about what I had learned.
There were, apparently, Tier 20 Worlds somewhere out there. I hoped that we didn’t end up on one of them for a long while, if Sel’thub’s messages about their power level were to be believed. But ultimately, I didn’t have any control over where we reincarnated, so I decided not to think about it. There wasn’t much I could do either way right now except hope for the best. And hope that our next world was weak enough that we could still succeed there.
As Felix and I read through the chat log, Sallia finished getting her Fortitude up to 10, meaning she would never have Grade 3 Fortitude again. Which meant we were done with this shop.
It was time for our final stop before reincarnating.
We had some items to find.
Author’s Note: For final release schedule, I MIGHT be sticking with three chapters a week. Very sad :(.
While I was super short on time when I was forced to drop to three chapters a week, I had also been unsure if I could keep up five chapters a week consistently even when I was considering it more seriously. I’ve also come to realize that having a ‘planning day’ on Monday where I can just plan out where I want the chapters for the rest of the week to go is… honestly quite helpful for me. Which means that I might be able to hit four chapters a week semi-consistently, but five is probably unlikely. I’m going to say 3 chapters will remain my ‘minimum chapters’ for MaM, and then on a good week we’ll go to four. That’s my current plan, anyway.
Anyway, that concludes the initial introduction to the Multiverse and how it works. Woo! Did any of you forget the message box about the world Tier at the beginning of the Islands world? It didn’t get brought up a single time after being mentioned, until now. I think it showed up in like chapter 11 or 12? But there was a lot happening at the time. I do hope the bits about average stat variance from chapter... I think it was around 40? 45? Where they talk about average stat variance isn't too confusing. I was trying not to introduce too many Systems at once, and there's also no way they would have been able to infer much about world tiers at the time. Idk.
I wanted to introduce a little bit more about some other components of the bigger meta-setting in this chapter as well, but the chapter is already kind of long. I try to make sure MaM chapters are at least 2,000 words long, and they’re usually more like 2.7 or 2.8K words. This one was around 3.8K, so it’s almost double my ‘minimum’ word length for the story. I strongly debated splitting it in two, but I just couldn’t find a good place for it. So I guess I sort of wrote four MaM chapters this week? Two of them are just clumped together in this chapter. Anyway.
Comments
Bryan D
After chapters like this I’m always wanting an index. Could you make another filter for World-Info Chapters? Costs of stats, definitions, and the glut chapter would be nice to review again when other world-building information is released.
ShotoGun
“ although that’s not the pointright now.” Need a space there.
acaswell
No worries. I don't always read comments (It depends a lot on my mood), but seeing people have fun in comments and theorizing about the world honestly makes me really happy. :D
acaswell
For the first part: The fact that Miria and co. reincarnate as humans is actually tied to how souls work. The first time a soul is formed (we haven't gotten to that yet) it is 'shaped' a certain way, based on whatever it first reincarnates as. For example, Miria's first life, long ago and completely unremembered, was as a human-ish shape. Souls are naturally drawn to things that fit the same 'template' as their first shape. So Miria and company are all highly statistically likely to be reincarnate as humanoids, even if the exact shape and biology may differ a fair bit from life to life. However, they're generally going to have two arms, two legs, and a head, if that makes sense. Anything else COULD go, but their souls are most drawn towards that kind of body. As for society statistics, I have actually thought about this a fair bit. It was one of the bigger changes made between the second draft and the final draft of the story, even though it doesn't show up as directly on the Islands world. I figure that on average, most civilizations wipe themselves out before reaching interstellar era, often in some catastrophic war. Nuclear bombs on earth are a good example of what COULD go wrong, and I figure that while some societies obviously make the leap past the age where one catastrophic war could end the human(oid) race, most don't. Meaning that civilizations have a high chance of accelerating their odds of having a reincarnator born on them... until they go boom. Of course, the fact that the majority of worlds are magic-using does make that a little weirder, but we'll get into more specifics on THAT sometime in the future, if I can find a good spot for that discussion. I also figure that dimensions stuck around the middle-ages are where a lot of civilizations sort of 'end' their technological progression. There are a lot of interesting tidbits about European and Japanese history (Those are the two historical subjects I'm most versed in, so I tend to draw from them) that point to scenarios where, theoretically, tech could have just... never advanced to where it is today. The fall of Rome, for example, set technology BACKWARDS a fair bit in most respects, right? I figure that a lot of the time, in most dimensions, catastrophes set back human civilization about as fast as it progresses forward, more or less. Just because of how many chances human society seems to have had in the past where it could have advanced, but didn't, and then some sort of historical event, or change in climate, or plague, or whatever caused a huge number of deaths, and set society backwards (though some plagues did the exact opposite, interestingly enough...). From there, I assumed that statistically, Miria and Co. are about as likely to reincarnate in one level of technology as the next. If I'm being honest, based on my assumptions, middle-ages and industrial societies should probably make up the majority of the multiverse, as well as societies that progressed down more magic-oriented tech trees, but I figured having each tech level be about as likely as another tech level was ultimately better for the story as a whole. Mostly because if I know that something is statistically likely enough to happen, I feel obligated to put it into the story by sheer weight of numbers, but I didn't want to write like five galactic tech civs in a row followed by maybe three industrial worlds and two middle ages worlds. That would be a bit boring, no? So civs are likely to wipe themselves out a little after our era, never making it to the interstellar level, and plenty of civs get caught in an endless loop of ancient era -> Middle Ages -> catastrophe -> Ancient era -> Middle Ages -> Catastrophe.
acaswell
A few things you might find interesting: Keep in mind most shops are at least relatively specialized in what they sell. I won't get too much into it yet, but targeted reincarnation is possible, though Miria and co. haven't found a shop related to it yet, much the same way they haven't found a shop specialized in producing Market-bodies yet. All worlds, no matter what, have Mana. However, without an ESSENCE present to manipulate it, there's no way to actually use mana or observe its existence. Canonically, Earth would be one such example: No Essence to confirm or manipulate mana, so nobody knows it exists (except for any Transmigrators passing through with the right abilities, of course). A world's tier also refers to average individual strength for powerhouses; therefore, a planet like Earth would be considered Tier 1, even though in an actual conflict we would almost certainly win against the civilizations of a world like the islands world, because technically we're relying on tools to strengthen any fighters from Earth, rather than using supernatural abilities. However, in practice, a couple atomic bombs would be enough to clear away the Megailian empire, even if it probably wouldn't kill the giant ocean monster. (This does get a bit wonky with some more crafting-related magic systems, but as a rough estimate for how much one individual can do in a world, it holds up fairly well). Any world without the ability to manipulate mana (one of the four essences), but with enough mana to support intelligent life, is Tier 1. Even if the strength of civilizations as a whole might be very different from 1 Tier 1 world to the next.
acaswell
You actually got most of the skill scaling, yes. The two you were missing were Mythical -> Primordial -> Law 0. I'm surprised you got it this early in the story. I was planning on introducing the whole list later XD, but I figured adding too much of it here would be overwhelming. There are also a few 'big bottlenecks' in skill progression, such as the difficulty of going from Master to Heroic and how that represents a few specific things in-story, but we haven't really gotten to that yet.
Treviisolion
Also sorry for the spam of comments, I just love worldbuilding and this chapter added a bunch of information for me to speculate on.
Treviisolion
I am also curious as to what the technological makeup of the multiverse is. Presumably there are a number of dimensions that are incapable of supporting life, perhaps even most of them, or which could support life but not develop life and thus must be seeded with life from extra-dimensional colonizers to be reincarnated into. Transmigrators couldn't ever reincarnate into a dimensions without intelligent life, presumably, though it would be interesting to be born into a society of chimps with the gang being the only fully sapient entities on the planet. So far it also seems that the residents are either largely or strictly human/humanoid in form and psychology as no examples so far have deviated from that. That is interesting given that the Patreon tier list indicates that interstellar and even inter-dimensional civilization are a thing, and unless mana does some specific stuff to force intelligence to evolve within humanoid forms and supress non-humanoid forms of intelligence, you would presume a much more diverse society were its citizens uniformly distributed amongst all intelligent species, so the Market seems to have a bias towards humanoid intelligent people. If we then assume that most humanoid societies could be broken up into Tribal, Agricultural, Industrial, and Post-Development (a point where technological developments have significantly slowed down because most useful technology has been developed and all or most fundamental questions have been answered, most space-age civilizations would fall into here). According to some online sources there are an estimated ~8 billion humans that lived between 200,000 BCE and 50,000 BCE. Were we to say that Homo Erectus was similar enough to Homo Sapiens to be transmigratable, then we could add maybe another 96 billion humans to that list. Or in other words 114 billion humans that have lived in the Paleolithic. Meanwhile an estimated 90 billion people were born between 50,000 BCE and 1750 CE, which roughly corresponds to Agricultural societies. Since 1750 there's been another 20 billion that have lived which corresponds roughly to the Industrial period. It is difficult to estimate how many humans will live in the Industrial period of our civilization given that it could end quite quickly, birth rates are expected to fall dramatically over the next century but how much they fall is very dependent upon what policies our societies enact, future technological or societal trends could change that trend, and we don't know whether most technologically will have been developed by the end of this century, in the next few centuries, or if we'll grow exponentially as we have been doing for the last 3 centuries for the next few millennia. I could make the assumption that we're near the halfway point for Industrial civilizations and that by 2100 we'll reach a mostly stable population of around 10 billion that slowly grows over the next few centuries, giving us 30 billion additional people that must be born over the next 3 centuries assuming birth rates don't dramatically fall either keeping us at 10 billion people or growing us to 30 billion people if life-extensions tech means most people become capable of living for a few centuries by the end of this century. So 50 billion people in the Industrial period in total. Post-development civilizations gets even weirder because interstellar civilizations should be extremely long-lived, because even if any insterstellar organizations collapse, there would be so many people in so many corners of the galaxy or galaxies that completely wiping out all their knowledge would be nigh impossible, and the average person should have access to data storage banks easily capable of holding all the knowlege needed to rebuild their civilization from scratch so without active intervention, post-development civilizations should fix themselves up fairly easily should something happen to them (something like what's happening to the Market where some kind of enemy forces seem to be preventing any surviving transmigrators from rebuilding by making the communal area incredibly deadly to transmigrators of all strengths, would generally be needed). As such even low estimates tend to give ridiculous numbers with dozens of digits given how many planets there are out there in our galaxy alone and how long said civilizations could theoretically last with fairly mundane tech. One estimate gave about 6 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way around sun-like stars. Assuming we decided to keep population sizes small at around 1 billion per planet, ignored all other options like non-earth-like planets, and non-sun like stars, space habitats, virtual spaces, etc. and we had biological immortality so once the billion threshold was reached, people just largely stopped having kids, that's still 6 quadrillion people, and that's a very low estimate and assumes most people live for millennia or even millions of years without ever having kids. Whether transmigrators are randomly put on planets based on population numbers or on time, transmigrators should overwhelmingly find themselves on Interstellar civilizations unless Interstellar civilizations are exceptionally rare or short-lived, rarely colonizing more than a few star systems before being wiped out in some form or fashion, or there is an inherent bias in where transmigrators part of the Market reincarnate. In terms of rarity at the lower end of population estimates, in order to put the other tech periods more on par with post-development period, a humanoid species that colonized their local galaxy or beyond would need to be limited to only one in every billion dimensions to put the odds back into balance. On higher ends it could be closer to 1 in octillions given how easy it is to inflate numbers when talking about galactic spanning civilizations that last for millions of years. Given that Industrial worlds are apparently common enough that Sel'thub thought to warn about them, and two of our three protagonists come from a post-Industrial Revolution world, this either implies that Industrial period worlds rarely go on to colonize their galaxy, and potentially even rarely last for more than a few centuries before going extinct, as even if humanity restricted itself to having it's main population center on Earth, kept population levels down to 1 billion, and lasted for a mere 1000 years before blowing ourselves up or dying to some other threat, that's still 1 trillion people in a post-development civilization (albeit one far more limited in scope than a galactic-spanning civilization), and any time humanity could crawl itself back up to that standard would add another trillion or so people to weight the scales towards being born in said society whereas Agricultural worlds would take hundreds of thousands of years to match and Tribal worlds tens of millions, while Industrial worlds should either exponentially grow into Post-Development worlds or collapse under their weight. Or post-development civilizations are rarely transmigrated for some other reason. Perhaps because they are powerful enough to be aware of the Market and to prevent transmigrators from being reincarnated into their societies, given that the average parent probably doesn't want to raise a millennia old man as their first child, and transmigrators which seek achievement which strongly encourages them to make waves, would be antithetical to any post-development civilizations which would be opposed to any such waves being made as they could be threatening to their long-term survival as they likely would have found an optimum existence state for their particular flavor of civilization and would oppose suffering chaos to move to a less optimum state. I am curious as to what assumptions are held in relationship to this story and how that'll affect Miria and gang going forward.
Treviisolion
On the topic of dimensional strength, knowing that achievement gained is proportional to local mana and essence is certainly interesting and raises questions about how to cheese the system if you get lucky. For example according to Chapter 7, 1 in every 16 worlds is effectively magicless. There are two possibilities there, either the likelihood of a world having magic is largely independent of how much mana there is (though as mentioned it sounds like there does need to be some mana or else magic has no fuel to function), in which case theoretically 1 in every 16 Tier 20 worlds would be magicless and just have superhuman people inhabiting them, but no magic, in which case if you got extremely lucky (multiplying the probabilities gives a 50% chance of encountering one every 1,888 worlds and thus Miria and gang could encounter one sometime in the next 40-80 thousand years if they continue to burn through worlds and live a mere two decades on average) be able to farm a lot of achievement by using your magic to give you an even edge with the local superhuman rulers. Alternatively, if even a Tier 20 world still has Grade 5 as its average stat block for the ordinary peasantry, and given that a world full of superhumans is probably a bit less likely to start an Industrial Revolution, using knowledge gained from a highly advanced civilization to allow ordinary peasants to live a standard of living similar to the medium-powers of their local dimensions could be a relatively assured way to farm achievement, assuming you have practice with that sort of thing and knowledge of how to make tools capable of significantly shrinking the gap between a Grade 5 and Grade 80 person. Most said superhumans would probably be specialized towards fighting other superhumans and have their skills tailored towards small duels and fights and generally using their overwhelming might to wash away any untrained armies, but if you managed to bring up the average peasant up enough in strength that the average superhuman couldn't wash away an army using raw strength and force them to rely on their strengths to take down an army one person at a time, a supported army could potentially take down some decently-powerful powerhouses and so long as you didn't pick a fight with the top dogs, gain immense influence. The fact that so far there hasn't been any item other than the Friendship bracelet mentioned that affects where people reincarnate suggests to me that they are either so difficult to produce that most transmigrators realistically give up on owning them until they are so old and powerful that they don't need them other than to keep themselves out of lower tier worlds where achievement farming is pitiful, or are fundamentally impossible, because the ability to even influence the Tier or tech level of the world you reincarnate to would be immensely powerful for long-term growth. I am curious as to why Tier 0 worlds are typically on the verge of intelligence-extinction. Does a world reaching that point make it a Tier 0 world, and thus theoretically a Tier 20 world could be rebranded as a Tier 0 world if in the process of its lifetime the local intelligent inhabitants never develop agriculture or industrial civilization and are driven to the verge of extinction once their star's life is up and the oceans slowly boil away over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and thus while Tier roughly indicates the difficulty of the world, a Tier 0 world could have more mana and thus provide more achievement than higher Tier worlds simply by the fact that it has more mana even if other factors like a dire lack of breathable air and the existence of water limit how much the local superhumans are able to be a threat. Alternatively does being a world with pitiful amounts of mana mean that civilization struggles to get off the ground before natural causes wipe everyone out, and thus my previous example would still be a Tier 20 world, just one without as many threats other than lack of resources.
Treviisolion
Based on the information gained in this chapter would I be correct in assuming that there are 20 tiers of skills and that they go from: Basic -> Intermediate -> Advanced -> Expert -> Master -> Heroic -> Epic -> Legendary -> Mythical -> Unknown (probably Demi-god or something like that) -> Unknown (probably God or Divine or something like that) -> Law-1 -> Law-2 -> Law-3 -> Law-4 -> Law-5 -> Law-6 -> Law-7 -> Law-8 -> Law-9 Either way this indicates that there is a lot of room for growth for Miria and gang given that Sel'thub has lived somewhere between twelve centuries and twelve millennium depending on if he only lives about a decade or a century in each life on average or somewhere in-between and apparently is still on Legendary, though I'm guessing that without the existential risk in the Market he probably wasn't power-leveling to the same extent Miria and gang are likely to.
Treviisolion
When you mentioned Tiers again, I had to go back to see what Tier the previous world was. I had a bit of a similar reaction to Miria upon realizing that it was a mere Tier 2 world, and that levels apparently go up to Tier 20.
The Lost Pages
Thanks for the chapter. Siggestion for the release schedule: Plan 3 bonus the rest. Go so far as to mark any extra chapters with [Bonus] in the title. I for one love consistency. And I love extra chapters like the one yesterday. This method gives us the best of both worlds.
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
