Jason returned to the chair he had left by the broken window and sat down. The cool, clean air coming in as the rain continued to hammer down was a stark improvement over what had been sealed away in the old hospital. Before he made a move, he needed to go through the system messages that he had been ignoring. He pulled up the first one.
You have entered a region of magical desolation. The levels of magical density and magical saturation are extremely low, insufficient to produce spontaneous magical manifestations.
Stamina recovery reduced by 50%.
Health Recovery reduced by 75%.
Mana recovery reduced by 99%.
Consuming a spirit coin of your rank or ten spirit coins of one rank lower will restore your recovery rates to normal for eight hours. This duration is reduced by using active magic abilities.
Rituals and summoning abilities require spirit coins to enact, in addition to any spirit coin cost they already have. Rituals will be unable to function without artificially enhancing the density of local ambient magic.
Summoned familiars will need to consume a spirit coin of their rank or ten coins of one rank lower to sustain their vessels. Consumption of spirit coins will allow them to maintain their vessels outside of the summoner for one day before requiring additional coins. This duration is reduced by using active magic abilities.
Clive had long surmised that the dimensional membrane of Jason’s world was much more restrictive than that of Clive’s own. The reduced levels of magic it allowed to seep in from the astral space would account for the absence of magic that Jason had described. The analysis of Jason’s interface ability was completely consistent with that hypothesis, reflecting a level of magic so low as to be, for practical purposes, absent entirely.
The absence of magical manifestation meant no monsters, no essences, and no awakening stones. Unless someone already had magical tools and abilities, interacting with the world’s meagre level of magic would be impossible.
Fortunately, Jason was not short on spirit coins. Months of looting them from monsters with nowhere to spend them left Jason with silver coins numbering in the low thousands. There were enough bronze coins to use indefinitely, and if he emptied out his iron coins, he could swim through them like Scrooge McDuck.
“The Builder could learn a lot from Disney,” Jason muttered to himself, opening his inventory to take out a coin. Doing so, he noticed that his supply of monster cores now occupied currency counters like spirit coins, instead of taking up space in his inventory slots. He presumed this was one of the effects of his inventory power evolving and immediately noticed another difference.
The dimension bags he used to expand his inventory slots were no longer in the appropriate space in his inventory display. The spaces for them had been removed, replaced with a button to expand the slot count on his inventory. Whatever had changed about his power, capacity no longer appeared to be an issue.
Spirit coins and monster cores were only the beginning of the treasures that had left his inventory bursting at the seams, making the extra capacity very welcome. Between looting monsters and scavenging the astral space, Jason and his team had dumped all their iron-rank loot to make room for the good stuff. The treasure had been split between Jason, Humphrey, Clive, and Belinda, who each had their own storage spaces.
Even more had been piled up in the spare rooms of Jason’s cloud house. This was the lowest-priority loot, as it was inaccessible while the magical building was stored inside the cloud flask. Between his inventory and what was carried over in the house, Jason had essences and awakening stones enough to turn a dozen people into essence users, complete with full sets of abilities.
The essence users in question would be rather uniform, however, as the environment of the astral space produced a lot of duplicate essences. Half of them were plant essences, with most of the others spread between venom, might and a handful of animal essences. Those were all common-rarity essences, but he also had a few uncommon growth and life essences, plus a precious handful of more exotic ones.
The rest of the haul was filled out by various magic items they had picked up. Most had been kept for selling; the team had already claimed anything they wanted for themselves. There were even more items in the cloud house, which could serve as a large, if less convenient, dimensional space.
Fortunately, the cloud flask in his inventory was full, the cloud house having been returned to it before the final battle. That was where they had kept items that would occupy the most space in their storage abilities, along with things they had a lot of but knew they wouldn’t be using. Because Jason had the cloud house, he had brought with him the bulk of the team’s loot, even if it was the less valuable stuff.
He moved on to the next system window.
Title: [Indomitable]
Your repeated defiance in the face of more powerful enemies and willingness to sacrifice everything for a cause has marked your soul. Your resistance to aura suppression is further enhanced and ignores rank disparity.
Your aura signature has changed. Your unwavering resolve floods your aura and can be detected if your aura is closely examined or when strongly projected. Allies within your aura have increased resistance to aura suppression.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger was not always true, but anyone who could fully recover from soul trauma found themselves enhanced as a result. This was something Jason had experienced more than once and, for all the power it had given him, left him unsure if the gains were worth the price. There was no question that it had resulted in some of his most powerful capabilities, but his suffering had changed him in more ways than just boosting his power.
When recovery from soul trauma affected Jason’s abilities, his interface power used titles to translate the scars on his soul into game terms. He didn’t need the new scars on his chest to know that his soul had once again passed through the crucible. He had been told that soul scars were rare, yet his soul had been battered and beaten to the point that his entire torso was a landscape of ragged marks and lumpen scar tissue. Even though his body was brand new, the tribulations of his soul were made manifest upon it.