It took nearly an hour for Anise’s surgery to finish.  I spent most of that time worriedly hovering over her shoulder, but I didn’t see anything sinister happen during that time. 

During the surgery, I saw a large amount of manifestation essence constantly swarm over Anise’s body. It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what was happening, but eventually, I noticed that every few seconds, a small cluster of manifestation essence would position itself over part of Anise’s body, before imprinting itself into her flesh - kind of like a stamp. This seemed to gradually create a sort of… secondary set of veins in her body, except that they were built to conduct essence instead of blood.

As the surgery progressed, I was slowly able to sense trace small amounts of manifestation essence circulating throughout her body, and I could feel that Anise’s body was more compatible with manifestation essence than before.

Anise remained conscious during the entire operation, and I received constant updates from her through our friendship bracelets during the process. According to her, the process felt uncomfortably tingly, almost as if her body was unbearably itchy. But it didn’t hurt, and she didn’t report any other problematic sensations.

Meanwhile, Sallia and Felix kept picking the hologram’s brain for any information they thought might be useful. I didn’t have the ability to focus on their conversation all of the time, since I was so focused on Anise, but I did hear a few snippets of their conversation as time passed. The hologram didn’t know as much as I had been hoping it would - a lot of information that wasn’t related to its purpose just wasn’t in its memory bank. It seemed more like the soul fragment had very patchy memories about things that weren’t related to its purpose of farming more Achievement.

However, even though its knowledge was very patchy, it still had some rather useful tidbits of information. Since I was only half-listening, I would need to pick Sallia and Felix’s brain later to get caught up. But it sounded like the hologram knew a bit about the innate nature of mana and Achievement, as well as the statistics for what kinds of worlds were most common in the Multiverse. And it also remembered with absolute certainty that there were other massive, super-civilizations in the Multiverse beyond just the Market - although the Market had apparently been the most impressive of them all, at least as far as the soul fragment remembered.

Finally, after an hour of straining my eyes and essence-senses to detect even the slightest hint of malice in Anise’s surgery, the table shut itself off. Anise kept laying down and staying as still as possible, as if waiting for anything else to happen - but nothing did. The table had already finished its work.

Anise sat up, nearly rolling off of the table, and I caught her before she could topple over.

“Anise, are you feeling all right?” I asked.

“I feel fine,” she said, after a moment. “My legs feel a little different, but it’s not bad. It’s like… you know how our joints, muscles, and bones all feel subtly different when we return to the Market? It’s kind of like that. I can feel like my balance is different from before. But it’s not a bad thing, I think I just need a few minutes to adjust.”

“Several of the muscles in your body were slightly adjusted, specifically to make room for the mana circuits,” said the hologram. “It’s normal to feel a bit unsteady for an hour or two after the process. It should clear up if you just walk it off.”

Anise nodded, and then eyed the orb in the center of the table. She hesitated for a moment, and then reached out and grabbed it. And then, Anise started grinning.

“It feels different!” She said. “I don’t feel too different when I’m on my own, but… when I hold the orb, I can feel my body gathering manifestation essence a lot faster than it did, even during our previous life.”

“You can sense that?” The hologram nodded to itself. “Your senses for manifestation essence must be quite acute. Were you four added to the Market naturally, instead of being given a ticket to the Market?”

“There are tickets to the Market?” asked Felix.

“Of course. Most users are added when someone else pays their way. You can buy a ticket for about a hundred thousand Achievement and give it to pretty much anyone you feel like adding to the Market. You also get a 20% cut of whatever they make for the rest of eternity, so plenty of people scour the multiverse looking for talents to add to the system. But people who are innately talented in an essence don’t need a ticket - the Market just manually adds them in.” The hologram shrugged. “I believe naturally talented people make up around 0.5% of the Market’s population? I don’t remember the exact statistic, but I think it was somewhere around there. Not rare, but nowhere near the majority of people.”

Felix and the hologram started discussing the intricacies of Market tickets, and while this topic normally would have been of critical interest to me, right now I was more focused on Anise.

Anise wobbled a few more times, before she turned towards the wall, held up her orb, and fired a magic missile. The manifestation essence flowed through her entire body, instead of just her arm - and the power of her magic missile was also notably increased. Her magic missile slammed into the wall with nearly double the force it had previously had, much to Ansie’s delight.

The hologram critically eyed Anise, before nodding to itself. 

“The surgery went well,” it said. “She should now be able to use manifestation essence spellcasting, much like one of the ancient Zelyr. Biologically, she’s now pretty similar to them.” The hologram paused. “It IS worth noting that she will need to use their spellcasting system. Regardless of whatever other manifestation essence magic systems you’ve encountered in the past, your surgery is intended to make you a proper manifestation essence user from the Zelyrian magic system. If you want to maximize the benefits, you should focus on that.”

“Do you have any instruction manuals or lessons to give Anise about ancient Zelyr spellcasting?” I asked.

The hologram actually looked offended. “Of course I do. What do think the point of this whole setup would be if I couldn’t provide that much?” The hologram gestured towards one of the bookshelves to the side of the room. “Those are books on Zelyrian spellcasting. If you don’t understand some of the words in the books, ask me for help, or any scholar of the ancient Zelyr language. But in all honesty, it’s not that hard to translate Ancient Zelyr to modern languages. These people conquered most of the continent back in their day, after all, and they weren’t shy about enforcing their language and culture on this dimension’s natives after conquest.” the hologram said. “Most modern languages on this continent are some derivative of Ancient Zelyrian.”

I nodded. Learning a new language was going to be annoying, but I had an Intelligence stat of Grade 8 after all of my runes and Sallia’s ramen bowl were factored together. It would reach Grade 9 when I finally maxed out the stats from the ramen. Learning a new language, especially one that closely resembled my current language, should prove much easier for me than for a regular person. I turned towards Anise, who was still experimentally taking steps, wobbling around, and grinning as she felt the manifestation essence coursing through her body.

Anise turned to look at me, and seemed to see what I was thinking. She shook her head.

“I’ll do it, Miria. This should be my journey.”

“Are you sure? It’ll be easier for me to learn a new language, and I don’t mind doing all of the translating work for you. It might be faster if I do it.”

Anise shook her head, and then gave me a quick hug.

“I want to do it myself,” she said. “I don’t mind accepting help when it’s something I can’t do at all, or when I want to catch up - but I think that these steps should be taken by me. If I always rely on you three for help, I won’t ever be able to stand on my own. I should put in the time and effort to make my own path forward. Besides, maybe doing all of the translating work on my own might make forming a keyword ability easier,” said Anise.

The hologram actually nodded at Anise’s words. “Her doing all of the translating on her own will help her with a few forms of Achievement, depending on what she’s planning to do. And it’s definitely more important if she wants to get a keyword ability, which is where dumping all of the Achievement into one person can be the most important. If you just want to share Achievement with each other, it’s really easy, but there’s no way to share keyword abilities,” said the hologram. I nodded in response. We had already discovered just how easy it was to share Achievement with each other when Felix had lent me Achievement last time we were in the Market. Letting Anise go off completely on her own felt… strange to me. I wanted to help my friends any way I could, but doing nothing felt harder than doing something. 

At that thought, I sighed. Perhaps Anise was right. I really was trying to coddle her a bit too much.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

Anise grinned, and gave me a quick hug before she strode to the bookshelf, took one and cracked it open. A moment later, she blushed, and turned back towards me.

“Umm… I know I just said that I wanted to do things on my own, but you’re the only one with a dimensional storage. Could you…” 

I chuckled. “Of course.” I left Anise to scan the book she had chosen, and started stuffing the rest of the bookshelf into my dimensional backpack. I noticed that the moment I shoved the last book into my backpack, a hole in the wall appeared, and a few tentacles sprang out of the small holes in the wall. I saw a pair of eyes that seemed massive staring at me through the holes in the wall.

My eyes widened in shock, and I started preparing an extinguish, before the hologram interrupted me.

“That’s just Bessie. She’s… some sort of creature left behind by the Zelyr. Quite a bit more intelligent than most of their creations, though.” The hologram actually smiled fondly. “She’s quite a nice creature, if a bit hard to understand. My creator had a hard time communicating with her. She helps restock the books.”

I stared at the massive pair of eyes looking back at me through the hole in the wall, and noticed that the creature had made no moves to actually hurt me.

Anise looked at the hole in the wall with curiosity.

“I think that’s the creature I saw from the entrance,” Anise said.

“Oh? You noticed Old Bessie?” said the hologram. “You must have a rather unique and specific type of vision. Most of the more standard types of vision, and even the more esoteric ones, are largely shut off in this sub-dimension.”

Anise simply nodded and went back to looking at the book she had picked up.

I relaxed a bit, and the tentacles on the other side of the walls started shoving a few books back onto the shelves. They were exact copies of the books that we had taken.

“Well, I believe that’s everything,” said the hologram, after a few moments. “Please do your best to earn Achievement and change the world, I suppose? Not that I need to encourage you to do that. You’ll do it on your own if you want a keyword ability. Good luck, and please don’t die until you accomplish a lot. I’m hoping to send my next packet of Achievement to my real body sometime soon, and you dying would definitely get in the way of that.”

With that, the hologram disappeared.

After that, the four of us packed up our things and left the sub-dimension. We returned to our campsite, where we found Old Mo still waiting for our return.

Which reminded me that we still wanted to pretend that Anise had acquired her powers while on this expedition. Since our parents were still asleep, I confirmed that Anise still wanted to go with our previous plan. Then, I pulled Old Mo aside, and started talking with him about Anise and her powers.

It was time to put on a show for Anise’s parents.

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