Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

Chapter 518: Evolution

As we walked back towards the settlement, I started looking over my System notifications. I felt like I had heard a pretty loud ding from it, and I was hoping that I would see something exciting.The first notification I saw was a regular Achievement notification - although it had made a pretty large boost to my Achievement total.

Influence: Make a major contribution to the future of (Unnamed Settlement)

Achievement +20,000

The boost in Achievement brought me from 296,024 to 316,024 Achievement. It was still nowhere near as much as we had gotten from saving an entire civilization last world, but I was starting to really appreciate how much Influence Achievement ramped up as we operated in higher-level dimensions that had more essence in them. Saving an entire civilization in a lower tier world had been worth several hundred thousand Achievement - but in this Tier 9 world, saving a small settlement of 1,000 or so people was worth 20,000. We hadn’t even permanently secured the future for the settlement, or anything like that. We had just found an effective way to combat the biggest local threat and carved out a potential path for survival, and it was worth a huge chunk of Achievement.

It made me wonder whether we should try to prioritize finding portals that led us to higher difficulty worlds, in the future. Even if the locals were much stronger, the Achievement rewards clearly scaled to match that difficulty - at least, as long as we could still make a real impact on the world.

I smiled at the noticeable update to my Achievement total. However, my smile grew several times larger when I saw the next System notifications. The Achievement boost was nice, but there was something much more important waiting for me.

You have accomplished something exceptional with {Echoes of the Deep}.

Echoes of the Deep is able to be evolved.

I cackled in glee, which earned me several confused looks from the other members of the settlement who were travelling with us. Felix, however, gave me a knowing grin.

He asked.

I said.

he said.

I nodded, and turned my attention back to the upgrade option.

Echoes of the Deep is able to be evolved. You have (2) options for upgrades. If you would like to unlock other options, it is recommended that you use this ability in new and interesting ways before you die. 

Note: Ability evolutions must be purchased within 72 hours of returning to the Market after death. If you fail to purchase any available ability evolution within this time period, you will forfeit this chance for evolution, and will need to earn an Ability evolution in another life.

The current text of {Echoes of the Deep} is written below.

Keywords: Alteration, Ocean, Eldritch (3 Keywords.)

Glut Penalty: 15

So long as you are dimensionally adjacent to the ocean of souls, or in contact with any body of water, your body will generate Alteration Essence. Furthermore, any brain and body you are inhabiting will support alteration-type spellcasting the moment your soul takes over the body.

You retain access to your previous world’s shaping magic system in its entirety.

This Ability will make you fundamentally closer to an ‘Eldritch Creature’ than a regular one.

First, your existence will take a drastic step away from ‘humanity.’ Instead of a being of the physical world, you will become something closer to a half-physical, half-conceptual creature. In practice, you will be able to ‘link’ yourself to a certain concept, and then begin constantly growing your connection to that concept by doing things related to it. (For example, if you link yourself to the concept of ‘hope,’ you will grow your conceptual half by promoting and increasing hope.) This link will require a small amount of alteration essence to maintain, since your ‘innate biology’ is that of a being of flesh. (If you undergo soul surgery to change your innate species, this alteration maintenance cost may be removed.)

The stronger your conceptual half becomes, the stronger you will become. The extra Skills and stats you can gain will vary wildly based on what concept you choose to embody, but this cycle of growth will have no theoretical upper limit - only a softcap based on the grade of this Ability.

Whenever you die, the conceptual half of your existence will grow much weaker, and then you will be revived within an hour after death. The state of your previous body does not matter - you do not need to worry about keeping your corpse intact, or anything of the sort. This is more a form of ‘regeneration’ than anything else. (This weakening of your conceptual half is PERMANENT, although you CAN regrow any conceptual power that you lose through the same method you originally acquired your conceptual half).

This Conceptual half will be linked directly to your soul, and will also strengthen and empower your soul and allow you to interact with other souls in a variety of ways.

Possible Evolution routes: 2

I took a moment to observe the ability I already had. I had been expecting the ability to be a lot weaker than it had proven to be. This life, at least, I hadn’t gotten any extra stats from my Eldritch half - but my ability to manipulate and manifest ‘hope’ was so incredibly powerful that it made up for any stat-related disappointment. My ability to tap into hope was, in a very weird sense, sort of like the ability to manifest people’s wishes. If enough people wanted something to happen, and I had a strong enough Eldritch half and enough essence to toss around, I could essentially just manifest people’s desires in reality, no matter how much we should run into hurdles and fail. This ability had been the single reason we were able to flee from the Universal Tree before it scoured our previous plane of life - people’s hopes that their children would be safe, and my ability to manifest those hopes as reality, had allowed me to create a miracle. Even if it had fried my mana pool for a week afterwards, it had been something we would never have succeeded in without my hope-related conceptual boost. We just didn’t know enough about dimensionalism, or have good enough excerpts, to force our flight back to our original dimensional cluster without that kind of help.

I just hoped that this ability would be as helpful when the four of us pushed for more lives, after this world.

I shook my head, and then focused on the evolutions. I had unlocked two paths. It was time to see what they were.

Available evolution paths: 2

(Note: All currently available evolution paths will change your ability from [Intermediate] Grade to [Advanced] Grade unless they state otherwise.

Direction 1: Embodiment of Hope and Death

Cost: 15,000 Achievement

Glut penalty: 15 -> 35

You have often used the effects of {Echoes of the Deep} to kill, and you have also used it to bring hope to your chosen people… at the exact same time. This evolution is a reflection of your focus on extinguish, as well as its potential as a weapon for both hope and despair.

Effects:

Your conceptual half becomes permanently locked into being an embodiment of hope and death. from simply an embodiment of hope into an embodiment of hope and death. The stronger your conceptual half becomes, the stronger extinguish will become, and the stronger your healing and conceptual manipulation abilities will become. (This upgrade will also pull any hope or despair you have created in previous worlds you have visited, so long as there is still some trace of your deeds left behind in that world and you have not been forgotten. This is a one-time action).

Extinguish will become more conceptual. It will matter less and less what the local laws of physics and biology are, because your ability will now function entirely off of a fragmented conceptual framework, instead of a semi-conceptual, semi-physical framework. (This will still be inferior to the fully developed conceptual framework that all Heroic abilities operate off of!)

I whistled as I looked at the first ability. It did a lot of things I liked. Adding the text from that evolution direction to the original ability would make me much more scary. Extinguish would slowly ramp up as I travelled from world to world, even without any other input from me. I suspected there would be some kind of soft cap involved in how much it could grow… but I would also get access to conceptual manipulation of the concepts of hope and death. What if I supercharged my extinguish with the concept of death? What if I was in a situation where I could supercharge my extinguish with the concept of hope and death at the same time? How much more powerful would my extinguishes become? I really liked this evolution option. It was exactly what I wanted. It was a bit expensive, but I had plenty of room for some more Glut penalty, and 15,000 Achievement would barely make a dent in my current reserves. I smiled, and then checked the second evolution option.

Direction 2: Embodiment of Enchantments

Cost: 4,000 Achievement

Glut penalty: 15 -> 25

You have often used the effects of {Echoes of the Deep} to create a weapon which has expanded and enhanced the hope for the survival, not just of a few people, but of an entire settlement.

Effects:

Your conceptual half, relating to the embodiment of hope, becomes more capable of creating items and sustaining enchantments and item creation. You may use the concept of hope to create and empower items far beyond what they should be capable of, and even add on permanent new effects at a heavy cost.

I looked at the second evolution option and frowned. It was nowhere near as interesting as the first evolution direct, at least for what I was trying to be. I could actually see plenty of cases where it would be a powerful part of my tool kit… but it wouldn’t strengthen me for our fight for more lives, and it didn’t really fit the rest of my tool kit either. It was way more of Felix’s thing than my own. I shrugged, and decided I probably wasn’t going to be using the second evolution direction. In any case, I was quite happy that I had gotten an ability evolution. I wouldn't be able to exploit the snowballing evolution of extinguish until after I died and bought the ability, which was a shame, but I could still grow way stronger before the most important fight of five lifetimes. Then, in future worlds, I would still be able to grow stronger by giving people hope, which I absolutely loved, and I would also get greater offensive and debuff related abilities. It was an all-around good upgrade for me.

I still didn’t know what we would face when we fought for more lives, but with my new upgrade, I had far more confidence that we could survive whatever horrors the Market threw at us.