am-books Chapter 477: Forgotten
Chapter 477: Forgotten
The clan was on edge for the next several hours, as our beasts continued to run. Two village-bearing beasts had fallen already. Our clan’s population had also dropped by about a third. As I recuperated and healed the injured, I couldn’t help but sigh at the ridiculous losses we had faced.So many of the people of the village had died during the battle. A third of the remaining people had fallen. In less than an hour, nearly two thousand fresh corpses had disappeared. People who had once had loved ones, families, and friends, would never laugh again. All of the fallen had returned to the ocean of souls already. One in twenty people would likely turn into seawater within the ocean of souls, while the others would go on to be reincarnated, their memories lost to the void as they started anew…
I glanced at the two missing packs of village-bearing beasts in our usual running formation, and felt lost. I had fought to keep the people of our clan alive. I had hoped for a battle where we emerged victorious, a battle where few or no people died.
I had failed.
I couldn’t help but feel like this was becoming a pattern. In every single world, we fought, bled, and lost loved ones. In the end, what was it all for? In our first life, we had fought to keep our home village safe against human invaders from across the ocean, and died luring that giant sea monster to attack their ships. I still didn’t know whether the village survived or not, but I couldn’t imagine that the village had survived unscathed, whether they won or lost in the end.
In our second life, we lost our home to the Orukthyri, and fled to another city. There, we grew up, until we became adults. Then, we left to search the surface for a way to save that dying world, only to get killed off by a living universe nearly instantly. In our third life, we fought on one side of a war between the refugees of another dimension and the natives of the dimension we were born into. I had been so full of hate at the time - the strange, manta-ray like void creatures had taken Sallia from me, and even if I had known that she was still sapient and capable of communicating with us, they had still forced my friend to exist in a disembodied, dead state for decades. The only mercy I had managed to drag out of myself was the willingness to spare civilians and only fight soldiers. In the end, an entire continent had been utterly ravaged by the magic of that world, leaving the entire continent shattered and uninhabitable.
Our fourth world hadn’t been involved in a fight between sapient beings - at least, not on the surface. Instead, we had saved a dying world from the horrors created by the Market itself, in what was originally meant to be a farm for various kinds of Skills, Abilities, and Achievement. However, every single tragedy, every single monster in that dying world, had originally been engineered by the Market to make it a perfect place for the people of the Market to farm Achievement, skills, and abilities. In a twisted way, we had essentially been fighting the old remnants of the Market at the time.
In this world, most of what I had seen were either people fighting the local monsters, or people being crushed under the weight of interdimensional war.
Part of this was because the four of us weren’t strong enough to avert each tragedy. I certainly tried to leave each world better than it had been before our arrival. I wanted to make things better for people - less bloodshed, less violence, more happiness. But even though my strength was lacking, I felt like that wasn’t the only thing missing from the equation.
I looked around the hastily set up infirmary. There, dozens of warriors from the village were laid in stretchers and beds. Many of them were moaning in pain - I hadn’t had enough essence to heal every injury, and I also hadn’t healed most injuries completely yet. Thus, there were still plenty of wounded here, although there were no people in the infirmary with life-threatening injuries anymore. People with life-threatening injuries had either been healed by me already, or had passed away.
My eyes settled on a little girl. She must have been six or seven years old, at most. She had dull, hollow eyes, and her gaze never left one of the empty stretchers nearby. I didn’t even remember the little girl’s name. It had started with a D, but that was all I knew. Perhaps it had been Diana? Dwayna? I couldn’t remember. Even so, I knew why she was staring at the stretcher.
An hour ago, her mother had been on that stretcher. I hadn’t had enough essence to heal her, and the apothecaries hadn’t had enough potions to heal her. I had tried to heal the woman with more mundane medicine, but it hadn’t proved to be enough. Before my essence could recover, the woman had returned to the ocean of souls. The little girl didn’t seem to have a father to look after her, either - I wasn’t sure whether he had died on one of the other stretchers, or if he had died in some other, completely unrelated accident.
I sighed. My heart felt heavy, and I felt like there was an emptiness in my stomach that I couldn’t fill. I was so tired of seeing tragedies happen and being powerless to stop them. Finally, I channeled my thoughts in to my communication bracelet. I didn’t know what was missing, but I hoped my friends could tell me why it felt like every single world was just a bundle of tragedies that we were helpless to stop.
My friends fell silent at my question. For nearly a full minute, we simply sat there, as if my friends were also processing my thoughts. Finally, Felix sent a mental sight into the communication bracelet. It was a sigh mixed with a little bit of sadness, and a little bit of fondness.
said Felix.
I hesitated. Sallia’s words weren’t wrong. So many other transmigrators had come to the Market, but the Market was still a monster-infested wasteland. If another group of transmigrators had succeeded in conquering part of the Market, and driving the monsters back, surely things would have changed for the better? At the very least, I felt that the monster infestation wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as it was. Simple survival had taken nearly every drop of our tactics, strength, and focus in each life.
Even so, I wanted to think that there was more to the multiverse than endless warfare and bloodshed.
I didn’t even respond to Felix’s words - it sounded exactly like something the Market would do, so I just nodded, even though my friends weren’t nearby and couldn’t see me nodding. I thought about Felix’s words, and then I smiled. The four of us fell into silence as we thought about our conversation - the kind of comfortable silence born from years of friendship, and a small, budding hope for the future.