Moments after I reached the outskirts of the city, the golden lasso that had pulled me to this place disappeared. I looked at the ruined buildings and broken flying islands, trying to process what had just happened. Was this city really my destination? 

Before I had further time to process my thoughts and emotions, a set of words unfolded in midair, right in front of me.

Welcome newly Deceased! Due to your extreme innate talent in one of the four essences, you have been automatically drawn to the Market and placed in one of the Nurseries! Please acquaint yourself with your surroundings and circumstances by asking the people around you for help.  Six lives have been automatically given to you as part of the city’s Provisions for New Transmigrators! Please buy more lives before you run out, or you will experience permanent death! Welcome to the Market!

You have been detected to be (dead), and your soul was no longer housed inside of a physical vessel. You have been returned to the Market, and one life has been deducted to grant you a (basic) physical vessel.  Five lives remain. Warning: Basic Physical vessels will begin to deteriorate within a few months. If you want a more permanent vessel, please buy or rent one. Otherwise, please enter a pool or river of reincarnation before deterioration occurs.

I frowned. Floating words? Why had a floating blue box with words suddenly popped up in front of me?

Before I had time to finish reading the list of notifications, two more boxes popped up in front of me. However, their contents were… very different from the first two boxes.

Need a Physical Vessel? Tired of needing to rent bodies over and over again after every death? Do you feel that the stats provided by Basic and Advanced Vessels simply can’t keep up with your needs inside of the Market? Do you want a few specific stats to be emphasized while making a new piece of equipment? Order a custom-made body from BodyCorp! Providing the best tailor-made bodies to suit the enterprising and advanced Transmigrator! Buy a better YOU today!

Below the new floating box filled with words, there was a second floating box that held a different, yet similar advertisement.

Need a few extra weeks in the Market to finish a research project? Do you want to take part in a tournament or take some time off in between worlds? Do you want to try making an item or Skill, and just don’t have enough time before deterioration sets in? Buy a suitable vessel at BodyBuilders! Providing economic and affordable bodies for the New Transmigrator!

Were the floating words in popup boxes… advertising to me? I suddenly realized that the afterlife looked… more capitalistic than I had expected.

After a few more moments of processing, I decided to ignore the advertisements for now. Whatever society had existed in the past, it was clearly gone now, so I doubted I could buy anything even if I wanted to. I waved my hand at the boxes, hoping I could clear away the ads, and all of them disappeared in a flash of light.

Then I realized I had just moved my hands.

I had hands again!

I looked at my hands, and then laughed out loud. The sound of my laughter rang through the desolate surroundings. When I heard the sound of my voice, I laughed even harder. Even though I was standing outside of a ruined city and had no clue what to do next, I couldn’t help but feel happy.

I had hands! A voice! 

I began touching my arms and legs, smiling as I remembered what it felt like to move. To have control over my actions. To have a body. I sucked in a great, greedy gulp of air, before exhaling and grinning. I was alive again!

Finally, I started to notice details I had missed in my first rush of excitement. My limbs felt… off. Not by much, but the way they moved felt weird to me. I looked at my hair, my arms, my legs – all of them looked right. However, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that my balance was wrong. I was also slightly taller than I remembered being. My height wasn’t off by more than a few centimeters, but it definitely threw me off. What had the first blue boxes said? A new physical vessel had been constructed for me?

Clearly, the body I was given wasn’t quite the same as my old one. Still, after some thinking I realized it wasn’t a big deal. Even if my balance and height weren’t perfect, I had a body again. That was enough to send me reeling with excitement, even if my new body wasn’t perfect.

I turned back towards the city, and I felt much more confident and energized this time. Having a physical body again meant I had control over my actions, instead of just floating along and hoping for the best. That alone made a huge difference in my perspective on this strange afterlife.

I gave the ruined buildings and cityscape a closer look. The looming skeletons of buildings lay across the landscape like the desiccated corpses of giants, testaments to what had once been, and was now lost forever. I stopped for a moment, thinking about what I should be doing to learn more about my situation.

I had five lives left, according to the blue box from earlier. After those five were gone, I would permanently die. I didn’t want to lose my new chance at having a body and living again, which meant my first priority was to find out how to restock lives. And if I could figure out more about what happened to this city, that would also boost my survival chances, so I decided my second priority was to gather more information.

Both of those goals required entering the city. I couldn’t see anywhere else likely to have information I needed. I took a deep breath to calm my nerves, before I turned to face the city.

With my mind made up, I took a cautious step forward.

The city was mostly quiet. However, I could hear very faint shuffling sounds in the background from time to time. Did this city have animals that took over the ruins once the people left? Or was it a threat, perhaps related to whatever destroyed the city? After some hesitation, I decided to turn away from the sound and move in a different direction. I didn’t want to come into contact with potential threats until I knew more.

Instead, I began looking for a library. I needed information, and my best guess for where to find it was either books or electronic records. I started scanning the houses on the side of the street, but couldn’t find anything that looked like a library. I decided to try invading a few houses and see if they had any written records, since I couldn’t find a better option. I started walking towards the house that looked like it came from the modern era, ignoring the two middle-ages huts and the space age skyscraper sitting right next to each other. Since I was most familiar with modern era houses, I would be able to navigate it more easily.

The door to the house was wide open. I took a few steps inside the house to find a floor riddled with scorch marks. It seemed like someone had lit the floor on fire for some reason.

I dialed up my caution again. I didn’t know whether the scorch marks came from some sort of trap, or Magic, or technology. Either way, scorch marks were a sign this area might be dangerous.

After stepping over the scorch marks, I found myself in a living room. Inside, there was a couch, which was riddled with holes and more scorch marks, and a flat screen with buttons on the side of it. The screen looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was called. A tele… tele… tele something?

There was even a bag of potato chips spilled over the floor. A few of them had been turned into charcoal, but the rest were intact.

I leaned down, before I picked one up. It was… dusty. And stale. I set it back down before wiping my finger on the couch.

The potato chips must have been here for several months, at least. Maybe years. The messy environment and scorch marks gave me the impression that the residents had been suddenly attacked while eating chips on the couch, and had used some sort of fire to defend themselves.

I moved further into the house. I found a kitchen, devoid of anything except stale junk food. Oddly enough, there were no actual ‘meal’ supplies. 100% of what I found was snack food and desserts such as melted ice cream, stale potato chips, and some sort of now-moldy cake. None of it seemed very edible anymore. Finally, in the back of the room there was another door that had been kicked down.

On the other side of the door, however, I found my biggest surprise.

There were four corpses in the room.

And each of them was exactly the same.

It wasn’t just at the level of identical twins.

Every single corpse was EXACTLY the same, down to the tiniest detail. Each of them was male, had curly brown hair and green eyes, and stood at a little under six feet tall.

The only thing that differed from corpse to corpse was the method of their death.

The first corpse had been beheaded. The second and third corpse had their jugular veins slashed open. The fourth one had a stab wound stretching through its left eye and out the other end of its skull. Each corpse had the same horrified expression, and each corpse had its hands extended towards the door.

A cone-shaped scorch mark extended along the floor from each of the corpses towards the kitchen doorway.

Luckily, there was nothing else in the room. If I had come face to face with whatever had killed these guys, I doubted I would have survived the encounter.

I took another step into the room, only to be surprised as more floating words appeared in front of me.

You have discovered an Unowned and uninhabited tether! Since nobody has legal ownership of it, you may claim it as your own! Would you like to set this room as your tether? (If not, you will continue to use a tether in a random communal zone in the nursery upon each death).

What the heck was a tether? And a Communal zone? None of these terms meant anything to me at all.

I looked at the four perfectly identical corpses, and a vague guess started to form in my thoughts.

Perhaps a tether was my ‘respawn point?’ After I died, this strange city had dragged my soul into it and created a new ‘physical vessel’ for me to inhabit. Maybe these four bodies weren’t actually four different people. 

What if these were four corpses of the same person? Maybe after each time he had ‘died,’ the ‘tether’ in this room pulled him back, and made a new body, only for him to get killed again? While it was just speculation on my part, if I was correct the possibilities were frightening.

If a tether acted as a ‘respawn point,’ getting killed near one might cause me to lose all five of my lives one after another. Being killed by an enemy over and over moments after being reborn would be a pretty ridiculous way to die permanently.

I shook my head, selected ‘no,’ and waved away the confirmation box. For now, I wanted to avoid the same fate as this guy. Having a semi-random ‘respawn’ point might be safer for now, if I was guessing what all of this meant correctly. 

I walked over to the guy’s corpses. Unlike the stale potato chips outside of the room, each corpse looked largely fresh, as if he had died moments ago. However, the corpse’s extremities had started to turn blue. I could see through some of the flesh and bone at the end of the corpse’s fingertips as well, as if the corpses were turning transparent as time passed. The room had no smell at all, which also struck me as odd. It was almost like I was looking at a plastic mannequin. I didn’t see any blood either, despite the gruesome way each of the four corpses had been attacked. This made the scene far more surreal than it already was.

I grimaced, before I began checking the corpses for useful items. This person being killed over and over again made me even more wary of this city. The stab wounds on the body, along with the scorch marks, made it seem likely the city had been invaded. Stab wounds weren’t caused by natural calamities or falling debris, after all. They were the deliberate work of someone with a weapon. In that case, I needed to be on the lookout for whoever had done this. 

I also needed some weapons. This guy had made a cone-shaped scorch mark on his floor while trying to defend himself. Maybe he had a weapon I could use? I searched his body, but I could only find half-melted chunks of steel on his wrist. Whatever useful items this guy might have had were now melted slag. There was nothing else worth looting on his corpse.

I sighed, before I left the ‘tether’ room and continued searching the house. Even if the body didn’t have anything on it, the rest of the house could have something useful in it, right?

The house had plenty more furniture and junk food. There was even a small room with comfortable chairs and a variety of books, all of which seemed to be entertainment novels with no useful information inside of them.

In the last room I finally found something interesting. This room appeared to be some sort of walk-in closet. The clothes were all made for a guy with a much bigger frame than me. However, I did find a single wooden bracelet.

Upon touching the small, seemingly unimportant wooden bracelet, yet another set of floating letters popped up in front of me.

You are currently in contact with an unowned Item! Would you like to claim ownership of it?

 

Item: Simple Friendship Bracelet Effects: Allows you to designate other people who have a FriendshipCorp bracelet as your ‘friend.’ Upon reincarnation, you will always be born in the same dimension as your friends, in fairly close geographical proximity to each other. This item is ‘regenerating,’ and will be reconstructed every time you return to the Market. Note that this process activates automatically whenever a life is spent, and only works if this item is equipped to an item slot. Maintenance cost - 1.3 Achievement per reconstruction.

I thought at the box of words, acknowledging that I wanted to equip the item. The bracelet suddenly vanished into thin air, and I felt a physical weight settle around my wrist. Unlike before, the now-invisible bracelet had a certain presence to it that hadn’t been there before. Even though I couldn’t see it, I was more conscious of its weight than I had ever been in the past. It was as if the item was making itself known to me.

Simple Friendship Bracelet Equipped

Item slots used: 1/5

I grinned, knowing that I had successfully equipped the bracelet.

After a few moments, I thought ‘unequip’ and the bracelet reappeared on my wrist.

Simple Friendship Bracelet Unequipped

Item slots used: 0/5

Simple enough. I re-equipped the Friendship Bracelet and began to think.

I had been seeing floating letters appear in front of my eyes over and over again since I had arrived in the Market. I hadn’t thought about it very much at first, but I couldn’t help but start to wonder. Where did these words come from? Why did they… remind me of something?

I looked into space for a moment, trying to figure out what memory I was missing. After a moment, a strange thought came to me. This looked a lot like an RPG game, with limited item slots and text-based notifications. Maybe there was more I could see?

“Status? Status Screen?” I tried calling out. Nothing happened.

“Profile! Uhhh… Personal Status? Something?” I tried calling out a few different words, but nothing happened.

I thought about myself. While speaking out loud hadn’t produced a single result, when I started concentrating on the feeling of me, finally, the result I was looking for appeared.

Current Vessel: Basic Physical Body (Default Market Model – Mass Produced Model 417-T), Mana Brain (Default Market Model – Mass Produced Model 62-B)

Basic Physical body: + 5 grades (100 points) to all stats while you are inhabiting this physical vessel. Body will begin to deteriorate in a few months. Body has some leaks and cannot perfectly house a Transmigrator’s soul. It is advised you find a replacement or reincarnate before problems occur. Mana Brain: Allows you to think. As this is comprised entirely of mana, it is possible to house this mana-brain inside of a soul, rather than being reliant upon a physical body to function. Warning: It is strongly advised that you keep your brain safe, and always have at least one brain or brain-equivalent functioning at all times. If your brain is damaged or destroyed, possible ramifications include losing the ability to think until a new brain is acquired and linked to your soul. Please keep this in mind at all times.

 

Physical	Mental	Essence
Strength: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Intelligence: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Absorption: 0 (+100) Grade 5
Agility: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Willpower: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Manifestation: 0 (+100) Grade 5
Fortitude: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Perception: 0 (+100) Grade 5	Binding: 0 (+100) Grade 5
		Alteration: 0 (+100) Grade 5

 

Lives Remaining: 5

0/10 Keyword Slots used Glut Penalty: 0 Abilities: Birth Abilities: Body Control Achievement Abilities: Taxes

Remaining Achievement: 8.79

 

Items: 1/5

1: Simple Friendship Bracelet

 

Body Control – You gain the ability to control what sex you reincarnate as. 

Current Setting: Female (click to see more options)

Taxes – Whenever you gather Achievement, 20% of it will automatically be deducted and paid to the person who added you to the Market. (As you were added to the Market by an automated System, you pay taxes to the Ruler of the Market instead. Taxes are thus paid directly to Eluxia… Scanning…

Eluxia not found. Attempting to find tax recipient_Market’s owner… Error. There is no owner of the Market right now. For more information, please consult the legal code of the Market.)

The ‘Taxes’ Ability in my Status screen started to turn gray. Then, moments later, it disappeared entirely. The entire ‘Achievement Abilities’ category deleted itself in front of my eyes, and the ‘Taxes’ skill disappeared without a trace.

Huh?

I spent a few minutes parsing the information on my Status Screen, trying to figure out what just happened. However, I couldn’t find anything useful or easy to understand, until finally, something else popped up.

Newly Deceased sensed. Would you like to enable automatic information tooltips? This will allow you to view more details about certain Keywords, especially those on your Status Screen. This is recommended for new souls to familiarize themselves with the Market and the System! Available for the low price of 0.01 Achievement per hour! Can be disabled anytime.

Yes/No

I had enough Achievement to pay for it, and I desperately needed to know what I was looking at. I thought ‘yes’ at the notification. Suddenly, I felt chunks of information assemble themselves inside of my brain, allowing me to make sense of what I was looking at.

Suddenly, I understood what my stats meant.

A totally normal human being should have stats of 100 in every category. The Status Screen currently showed two things – my ‘permanent’ stats and my ‘temporary’ stats. All bodies had some differences in physical abilities and mental abilities, but those could be changed after I gained a new body. On the other hand, my soul also had Stats. These were permanent, and were added to the abilities and limitations of a body I inhabited. At that moment, my ‘soul’ had no Stats at all, and all of my Attributes were given by my current body.

Attributes were also divided into grades. To increase the grade of an attribute, one needed to add 20 points to that category. The difference in strength between someone with 100 and 119 Strength was noticeable, but mattered far less than the difference between 119 and 120 in an Attribute. Every 20 points increased a Stat’s grade by 1. Right now I had grade 5 in everything - I was a completely ordinary human being, with nothing special about me. Besides the fact that I was in the middle of a ruined city in the afterlife, at least.

Finally, I knew that ‘Achievement’ was currency. The only currency that mattered in the Market. It was also a crafting material of some sort. I couldn’t figure out what it was useful for, because the information the tooltip provided was too vague, and I had no idea how to earn more Achievement. 

More importantly, Achievement was what I needed to survive. It was like food, water, oxygen, and warmth, all combined into a single thing. As a soul, if I ever ran out of Achievement, I would stop existing. This wasn’t a kind of death that could be fixed by spending a life and getting a new body. It was the end. Being destitute here was equivalent to immediately dying.

I looked at other parts of the Status Screen, hoping that more tooltips would pop up. I only got the information that Abilities were permanent, much like Stats attached to my soul, and that keyword abilities could only be acquired through proper reincarnations. Whatever that meant. The tooltips had no explanation for it, leaving me pretty confused about what I actually needed to do.

After a few minutes of looking through my Status Screen, I couldn’t find out anything else. Since I had all the information the tooltip was likely to give me, I disabled it for now. Right before I closed my Status Screen, I saw something change.

My Achievement decreased by 0.02.

I felt an instinctive flinch reaction, deep in my soul. I realized that I might be on a much shorter timer than I had thought.

Every so often, my Soul needed to ‘eat’ some Achievement. The tooltips had already told me that Achievement was both food and money, but it was only now that I finally realized what that meant.

I needed to eat Achievement to live. And my Achievement was very low, almost on the verge of running out. I only had 8.77 left, and every single minute was a minute my Achievement was running out. I had to find a way to get Achievement or I would become another rotting pile of black water in the ocean of souls.

As I tried to brainstorm ways to get more Achievement, I heard something totally unexpected.

“Hello? Is anyone else here?”

In the distance, I heard a girl calling out to her surroundings.

Was someone else here?