Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 14

The Blood Weaver turned around, dropped the intestines and scurried over to him. Wrapping her two front legs around his own right leg, Athela nuzzled up against him with her face. “WE DID IT! I WAS SO WORRIED WE’D DIE! Mother would have scolded me if I’d died right after my first summoning.”

Shaking his head at the injustice of being yanked back and forth through various realities, he sagged his shoulders and bent down to give Athela some petting—which she very obviously enjoyed before she went back to eating the corpse nearby. Then he walked over to the dead man to search his bag. He took the health potion from the dead man’s pack, an extra hatchet, the wooden caster’s staff, and the circular ivory necklace depicting the dragon with emerald eyes.

Elysium’s administrator gave him no information about the necklace when he tried to identify it, and he was still skeptical as to whether or not it really was the Minor Amulet of Protection. If it had been, it would have saved the man’s life there at the end to buy him some time…but it hadn’t done so. What was this necklace doing here, then? Had the man found it like Riven had found the blessing or the vase?

He tried to identify these items numerous times, both the vase and the ivory amulet, but attempting to do so simply didn’t work.

Why was that?

Was there some kind of stipulation on these particular items? Or were they just too high a quality to be identified by him?

Hopefully he’d be able to figure it out soon. He really wanted to know what they were and how they worked…but for the meantime, he’d just stuff the vase into his backpack and slip the amulet over his neck. Hopefully the amulet would give him some passive bonuses if the other items he had were anything to judge by—even if he wasn’t aware of them for the time being. Then, rearranging his supplies and making sure that strange vase was in a secure position inside the leather bag where it was least likely to get damaged, he nodded to himself in affirmation.

*WHUMPH*

Earth? Did he read that right? Was he back home?

Riven found himself standing in a sprawling meadow covered in wildflowers and rolling green hills under a cloudless midsummer sky. The chill breeze had become a very faint gust of radiating warmth. Far ahead of him in the distance was a snow-capped mountain range, a radiant green forest was far off to his left, a coastline that expanded into an ocean of shimmering blue waves was farther to his right, and immediately all around him were hundreds of other people in the nude.

The stark difference between him and the others drew a lot of attention when he arrived. He had a full set of gear, while the rest of the people here were utterly naked and thoroughly confused, just like he’d been when initially starting Chalgathi’s starter quest. That, and his Blood Weaver demon—Athela—was latched onto his back.

She looked around excitedly with rapidly transitioning orientations of her head, clicking her mandibles and eyeing the discouraged, frantic crowds of people around him with genuine curiosity. “So many meals to feed on! Can I eat them? Can I?”

He face-palmed as one of the women nearby shrank away with a scream at seeing the huge spider, and he muttered under his breath so that only Athela could hear, “No. Don’t ask again, and play nice.”

If the spider could have frowned, she would have. Instead she just smacked herself atop her own head with one of her front legs. “Ah, damn. Okay…if you insist.”

Although she was cute, Athela was truly a ravenous monster in every sense of the word. It hadn’t taken Riven long to figure that one out.

Riven frowned when he read the words and glanced around again. It looked like another introduction scenario, much like the one he’d already been through. Were these people really just getting into the multiverse now? He knew he’d been given a unique opportunity, but had it actually been a head start as well?

None of the others that’d been with him in Chalgathi’s trials were here now. None of the people around him had any sets of items or clothes at all. Had he been put inside Chalgathi’s Lineage Starter Quest early and ahead of schedule? The people he saw around him were agitated, confused, upset, or downright in awe of their surroundings. Sometimes a mixture of all those things. Some people were grouped together as families, while others appeared to be friends. Fewer people were like him, those who stood alone amid the mutterings and questions being thrown around while the people of Earth oriented themselves to this new area they occupied.

This… This was a repeat of the stuff he’d already learned. When he’d first been told about Identify, it’d been in the medusa’s lair playing a chess game. Nevertheless, Riven glanced down at his scythe. Then he turned his attention to the staff he’d taken off the self-proclaimed cultist, and then focused on his robes one after the other. He hadn’t really taken the time to evaluate them in much detail earlier, because he’d been rushed into a quick decision right before life-and-death combat.

“Identify.”

Riven nodded in appreciation as these particular items did indeed pull up status pages, and he leaned into the scythe to alleviate some of his weight. Should he have gone with the staff after all? That other warlock had been able to cast more spells than he’d been able to. Had it been the amulet? Or the staff?

Chances that the amulet also had magic regen properties were slim, so he had to guess that the staff was the reason why. If that was the case, and it probably was, he’d actually done himself a disfavor by going with the scythe after all. He’d only managed to get one real swing in during the duel with the sorcerer and could have definitely made better use of actual spells.

So from here on out he’d probably be going with the staff after all, or at least until he found something better. After he came to that decision, he then started checking out the people around him.

Interesting. Focusing on the words Status Page, he was rather surprised to see his available stat points had changed from zero to seven, with other class-based points already having been applied. One point had already been applied to Willpower, two to Intelligence, with five free points coming from his race and two free points being given from his class.

Seven free stat points to assign from leveling up, eh?

“Hey, Athela, just to clarify something—Intelligence is what we use for increasing magical damage, right?”

“That’s right! It also increases your mana pool, so you can cast more spells.”

He assigned all seven to Intelligence without a second thought, increasing his mana pool as well as his magic damage output and bringing it up to twenty-six. He might branch out more whenever he finally got ahold of some martial art abilities, if it suited his future build, but in the meantime he was a pure mage.

He glanced at a nearby man, who was angrily yelling at his nearby peer about needing to repent and how they’d reached purgatory or some other nonsense. He shook his head. His thoughts drifted back to Allie and Jose. Mostly Allie, actually. He was confident Jose would probably come out just fine given his aptitude for survival in the past, but Allie was another matter. His little sister was frail, weak, and he loved her more than anything. It sincerely worried him thinking that she might be undergoing similar events, but he hoped that Jose would keep her safe in Riven’s absence. Still, he couldn’t dwell on the matter. It’d only cloud his mind with worry and would cause him to lose focus of surviving himself. If what the system had said was true, he’d be reunited with her as long as they both survived. He had to believe that she would live, and he had to make it to her after this was all said and done.

He blinked to clear his head, then he sighed. While the rest of the people in the field were still panicking and trying to figure out what was going on, there were two more items in particular that Riven wanted to try and identify again. It wasn’t like he had any real clue about what the hell was happening, either, but he wasn’t going to get all worked up about it.

The first was the ivory amulet around his neck, and the other was the sealed vase he’d taken from the pyramid as a reward for finding that hidden room and picking the chest’s lock. Now that he was out of Chalgathi’s trials, perhaps restrictions on what they were had been lifted? After rummaging through the bag’s contents, he brought the vase out, and then scoffed in disbelief as both attempts for either item came up rather empty-handed.

The item descriptions were still locking him out.

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