Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG) Chapter 162: Healing

The days of hunger and productivity continued. I spent a fair amount of ti working on building up my attunent and establishing my first rune. When I had ti, I also tested out my healing ability on my mother, to see if it was possible to cure her drug addiction. My deepest fear right now was that my attunent might not be able to heal sothing as complex as a drug addiction. Since my mother seed rather unaware of her surroundings anyti she ca ho blissed out, I simply waited a few minutes, before I gently splashed a bit of water on her and used that as a dium for the renewal spell. Even if I wasn’t sure that the healing spell would work, I dearly hoped it would help.

My first few tests were inconclusive.

I could clearly tell that my renewal spell was doing sothing to my mother. It felt just like when I healed sothing else, like a missing limb. However, I didn’t actually notice any changes in my mother when I applied the renewal spell to her, which was very frustrating. I had no idea whether it was just because I wasn’t healing very much, or whether I couldn’t heal my mother while she was high, or what.

I also tried adding a little bit of water to her hands while she was sleeping off one of her drug-induced hazes, and the next day I did notice that she seed a bit more lucid than usual. However, the blue discoloration around her eyes never faded, and I had a hard ti figuring out whether she was just having a particularly lucid day or whether my healing was actually doing sothing, because the day afterwards, she seed about as out-of-it as usual.

When I talked about it with my friends, Sallia’s theory was that my healing was working, but the efficiency was abysmal. At basic grade attunent, with spending about half of my alteration essence each day and reserving half for ergencies, I was probably undoing whatever damage Fizz was doing to my mother’s mind and body, but perhaps I wasn’t actually outpacing the damage she did to herself. After all, my mother continued to take bliss almost every day - that kind of extensive drug usage had to be doing damage to my mother. And considering how many tiny little alterations to the chemistry of my mother’s brain a drug like bliss made, it was probably hard for my healing spell to fix everything. In a strange way, healing a drug addiction might literally be several tis harder than regenerating a limb. Which was very strange to think about.

Although my first healing efforts weren’t really going anywhere, and I was still feeling very hungry, I successfully set up my first rune by the end of the fourth day after regaining consciousness.

Just as Sallia and I had discussed, I felt that it was best to set up two abilities in this world first - one to ss with bullets, and one to sohow improve my senses of the area around . However, being able to sense the area around was useful for more than just teleporting bullets around - it would also give potential information about people sneaking up on , and also give the information needed to dodge things like knives and blunt weapons. Even if guns seed to be the primary weapon wars were fought with in this world, they weren’t used everywhere, especially in the back alleys of the city. After all, smuggling weapons wasn’t easy, and while street gangs and gunshots seed to be a big part of life in the section of the city Sallia lived in, it was still impossible for every gangster to own a gun. Most used whatever weapons they could scrounge together, or even their fists if they couldn’t find sothing to swing around.

Being able to sense people sneaking up on with a knife or a pipe would give plenty of ti to debilitate or kill them with an extinguish, and I felt that was a higher priority ability than forming so kind of object teleportation ability.

So, when I was setting up my first rune, I pictured all of the world around as a giant, endless undercurrent of rippling, distorting space - and I pictured my own body as sothing like a giant eye, continuously scanning the area around in a neverending vigil. As I tried to form my ability, I realized that sothing was missing - before I winced.

Even though my ability had evolved towards spatial manipulation, it wasn’t actually a spatial ability. At least, not completely. I pulled up the ability’s description again, just to double check what was missing.

Keywords: Ocean, Madness (2 Keywords.) (Interdiate Grade)

Glut Penalty: 40

While you are subrged in water, your body will generate absorption essence, regardless of whether the local dinsional laws support the existence of absorption essence. Furthermore, contact with water will naturally remodel your body and brain to support absorption-essence spellcasting.

Absorption essence may be spent to create runes, which have the following effects:

The first three runes will grant you 20 to your ntal stats AND an ability. This ability MUST be related to space, and use the ocean or water as a dium. You will have significantly enhanced control over what ability is ford here.

The fourth through sixth runes will now fundantally alter one sensory organ, providing 10 Perception per level, and also giving you improved vision when trying to see space. Additionally, each rune will provide you with a significantly increased ability to resist external spatial manipulation targeted towards you or the area directly around you.

The seventh through ninth runes will now grant 10 to each physical Stat and begin attuning your body to the power of space, allowing your body to innately interact with the idea of space, regardless of which dinsion you are in. This will replace the standard fusion and condensing boosts that runes 10 through 12 would give you, and give benefits such as decreased wind resistance, the ability to teleport without reliance upon rune abilities at all, and increased ability to sense space using your skin.

In addition, every keyword activated within the past week and every rune you have condensed will also give you a moderately increased ability to control madness, as well as madness-adjacent magic such as illusions and ntal attacks.

Whenever you use water-related abilities to drive sothing insane, you will collect Achievent as if you had killed it. Madness-related keyword Abilities will be slightly easier to form and upgrade in the future, up to [Master] grade.

Killing an enemy with a water-related ability or with water for the first ti in each body will allow you to form a skill related to that creature. You may absorb this skill into your current body in order to permanently enhance yourself.

Note: Only Achievent-granting creatures can form abilities. Only three abilities from this effect may be ‘held’ at once. You may delete a copied Skill from this ability at any ti to replace it with a new one.

Held Abilities:

1.

2.

3.

After rereading my ability description, I sighed. I needed to use water or the ocean as a dium to fuel whatever I wanted to do using spatial manipulation. I had been wondering how hard of a rule that was, but after trying to form an ability without using water as a dium, the ability simply failed to form at all. I had been hoping I could dodge that sohow.

I hesitated. How was I supposed to combine space and water into a proper sensory ability? And was it really ideal to create a weird sensory ability using my first rune? I suspected I would also get so odd sensory abilities once I pushed into my fourth and above rune, but I also wasn’t sure what this would look like. After all, I hadn’t ford a fourth or higher rune since evolving the ability. It was also distinctly possible that the upgrades to my sensory organs would enhance my ability to sense space, but not physical objects within space, and if I had no sensory abilities in this world, I would still be very vulnerable to guns.

At the end of my thinking session, I still felt it was prudent to create an ability for sensing bullets before they hit , even if I would end up forming a rather weird version of what I had originally envisioned. Just in case the ‘sensory organ upgrades’ worked differently than I thought they would, it was best to be prepared. After all, I couldn’t go back and change my runes once I ford them, and unfortunately, the sensory organ upgrades took place after I had ford my abilities. This made experinting with that component of my evolved ability very difficult.

After tossing ideas back and forth with Sallia, Anise, and Felix for a while, eventually, I decided to focus on water vapor as a dium for my sensory ability. According to so comnts Felix had overheard in the lab he lived in, there was a great deal of evaporated water floating around in the air all around us, much like there had been in our previous worlds. It was only a small part of the air, but it was still present. And since there was a very small amount of water in the air around us, I decided that I could probably use that water vapor as a radar to sense the space in the air around - and more specifically, I would use it to detect physical objects.

I also adjusted my vision of what my ability should be quite a bit. My new ntal image was of every single droplet of water in the air around transforming in an eye. These eyes would also be, at their heart, partially comprised of spatial manipulation - the ultimate idea of this ability was that I was transforming each droplet of air into an illusory eye connected to my own, peering at the world around through the cracks in space and reality. I wasn’t sure if my image would work perfectly, but it was worth a shot.

This image worked, and a few hours of concentration later, I was the proud owner of my first rune, which I had stuck to the bottom of my feet, just like in my second life.

Power: Form your first rune (Note: this dinsion does not have the laws to support runes, although it does sowhat support absorption spellcasting. moderate Achievent penalty).

Achievent 70

This little bit of Achievent brought my total up to 662.08 Achievent. Not an amazing amount, but I was still happy to earn a bit of Achievent here and there.

More importantly, I now had a proper sensory ability, and I had my attunent so that I could defend myself if needed.

I poured a bunch of absorption essence into my new rune to give it a proper test, and felt my vision start to expand.

Every single bit of water in the air around for several ters in every direction seed to beco part of my eyes. For a mont, I could see everything around . Space, the physical world, the souls, the air itself… it was as if I could see every single aspect of the world at once. It was beautiful.

And it was also overwhelming.

I felt an intense headache start to build up behind my eyes, and frowned, shutting off the ability.

My brain did not have the ability to process all of the information my ability had been feeding it at once. I had been looking through hundreds of thousands of little droplets of water at once, and the information was several orders of magnitude beyond what my mind could handle. I winced.

I had put too much absorption essence into the ability. I felt that increasing my ntal stats would probably help - Intelligence, in particular, would help actually process the information I had been trying and failing to absorb from my ability. And Perception also seed to assist the brain in processing all of the information one got from enhancing their senses. My first rune had also bumped up my ntal stats by 1 grade each, so I was now working with Grade 6 Intelligence and Grade 8 Perception. I could definitely tell that those stat increases were helping . But at least for now, I probably needed to keep the ability operating a rather low level. I couldn’t handle the full ability.

I tried activating my new rune ability again, but this ti, I drastically reduced the essence I put into it, and I also focused on ‘combining’ larger clumps of water vapor into single eyes instead of hundreds of thousands of smaller eyes. This helped a great deal, and I was able to get a proper view of the world around from multiple angles - as well as the ability to see through walls, so long as they weren’t more than a few ters away from . My ability also let sense disturbances in air or space around , rather like a radar - which would, hopefully, be enough to alert to a bullet before it hit . I intended to make my next rune ability able to teleport bullets around, which would let teleport any bullet near to another location, and potentially even return it to its sender. I grinned. It wasn’t perfect - I would still need quick reflexes to respond to people shooting at .

However, for now, I was satisfied.

And I was also very hungry.

I took one last look at my mother, who was twitching in the corner again, and sighed.

“I’m going out, mother,” I said, before I walked over to the door and opened it.

I had spent several days confined inside of this tiny little house, trying to save my mother and feed myself. but there were no easy solutions here, there wasn’t enough food, and I was running out of patience for the gnawing emptiness in my belly. If I wanted to actually solve the food problem, I needed to investigate this world, even if this was the first ti I had done this at the age of four.

It was ti to step out of the house and explore the outside world.