Merchant Of Yliaster

Maxwell watched excitedly as the skill description was summoned. For some reason, this skill excited him a lot more than his other skills.

Skill Acquired: Soul Imbuement.

Soul Imbuement:

Use your soul energy to grant a rudimentary will to objects. Familiarity with the object greatly increases the effect of the skill. All creations have unshakable loyalty to the creator.

The familiarity part was good news for Maxwell, as he planned to use this skill for his own creations anyway. Even for other things, with his senses, he was confident that achieving an acceptable familiarity would be easy.

Now that he was done with the notifications, he checked his environment more relaxedly. This seemed to be a small backroom cluttered with various random items. Considering that he could see the things he sold to Gendor just yesterday, this was the backroom of the shop.

He got up and cracked his neck with a satisfying crunch. He felt refreshed after leveling up two times out of nowhere. He could feel that Blueberry was in the direction of the forest, and he could feel Felix with Gendor and Bob beyond the door. Feeling so much without turning on his prima sense was a weird experience, but he was getting used to it with a discernible speed. Having a high soul attribute was really handy.

With this new sense, which was more specialized in souls and minds, Maxwell could detect the souls of people much more clearly. At least that was the case when they were in his range. Right now, though, he could feel something strange.

He opened the door and entered the public part of the shop. Gendor and Bob were reading. At least that seemed to be what they were trying to do, as they were staring at the paper like they wanted to strangle it. They turned towards him, and Maxwell could detect something like curiosity in Bob's glance. He was probably the one who met Blueberry, he concluded. He could see that if the boy could fear, he would be concerned.

"Good morning," he said, sitting on a chair beside them. He glanced at the book and was surprised to see that it was a dictionary. He picked it up and skimmed through it with a speed that would make a human before initiation think that he was just showing off.

Surprisingly, this seemed like a dictionary between the language in the spaceship and Thresian, which was the local language. Ironically, while the other two couldn't read Thresian, Maxwell couldn't read the language they knew, as he was an alien to this universe. Now, though, he quickly memorized the dictionary under the questioning glances of his friends.

Linguistics Leveled Up 32→40

He was pulled to the real world by the notification as he reached the end of the dictionary. Having a high soul boosted all parameters, and having Maxwell's skills increased them even more. He could focus incredibly well due to the Window of the Soul, and learn languages pretty easily due to linguistics. Around five minutes seemed to have passed, and Maxwell felt that he had a good understanding of the new language.

"Don't tell me you learned all of that just now, or I might throw you out." Gender said, looking like he had seen a ghost. The man looked especially perplexed for some reason.

"I will leave myself soon, so please don't," Maxwell replied, smiling. He himself felt pretty ridiculous about his learning speed, but learning a new language was directly tied to the computational power of one's brain and its ability to retain information. Maxwell had droves of both, so it was expected that he would do well on this task.

Gendor threw him an exasperated glance, but suddenly turned serious. "Bob said you were behaving weird yesterday, are you okay now?" He asked, seemingly concerned. Maxwell was surprised as the concern felt like it was genuine. Is he starting to warm up to us? He asked himself. You didn't see assassins getting concerned about others' well-being every day.

"I'm fine now, though, the person Bob communicated with was not me," he said. Maxwell didn't plan to hide Blueberry's ability, as if the same thing happened in the future, he would need people to know about it anyway.

"I don't follow," Gender said, looking even more concerned. Does he think I'm going insane? He didn't know how Blueberry communicated before, but there was a good chance that the man's concern was rightful.

"Blueberry can possess living beings. I passed out in a bad place, so she brought me here," Maxwell said, as he watched the expressions on his friends' faces turn into disbelief.

"How did you pass out?" Bob asked from the side, looking excited to listen to an exciting story.

"An experiment went wrong," Maxwell replied, and amusedly watched his friend's face morph back into boredom. He even started to read the book in his hand with determination, as if he could find excitement in it if he tried hard enough.

"You should be more careful," Gendor said, but he seemed satisfied with the explanation. The man seemed not really surprised that the bird could control people; he probably observed the bird in their previous encounter, so he knew she had a strange race.

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"I seem to be unable to achieve that, but I will try," Maxwell replied. His attention was on something else, though. He could see that Felix was sleeping on the corner of the room, but that was obviously not the cause of his attention.

With his new soul sense, for lack of a better term, he could see something different. Prima sense could detect souls, but it did so in a simpler way, as it couldn't show anything beyond something like an aura. This new sense, though, showed the shape of the soul much more clearly.

He didn't realize this was the case immediately because everyone's souls overlapped their bodies almost perfectly. Felix's case made him realize he could see souls, as the soul of the dog was absolutely weird.

Maxwell could see that he soul of the dog was not shaped like a dog at all. It resembled the parasite Felix ingested before, much more, making Maxwell anxious for a second. If the parasite took over Felix completely, he would revive The Traveler and ask the being a couple of questions.

That, though, didn't seem to be the case, as the soul, while resembling the parasite more than Felix's outer form, still vaguely resembled the shape of the dog. Maxwell was pretty sure that The Traveller wouldn't casually kill his only child, so he assumed that this was the intended result.

He tried to observe the shape of the soul instead of Felix's outer form, and was surprised to see that it worked.

Felix - Soul Parasite - Level 12

What? Maxwell couldn't really understand what he was seeing. Was the parasite called Felix because it absorbed him, or was it called Felix because Felix's soul absorbed the parasite? It was a terrible question, as he simply didn't have a way to test this. Don't I? Suddenly, an idea came to his mind.

He summoned his trait and considered how he should go about this for a moment. After some moments of deliberation, he decided. "What is the price for reviving original Felix?" he asked the trait, and felt it activate, his attention focusing on the dog's body.

Trade Unapplicable.

Maxwell was happy seeing the prompt. Apart from finding a new use for his trait, this also meant that the original Felix was still alive. He asked another question. "What's the price for restoring Felix to a healthy state?" he asked.

Trade Unapplicable.

This being completely unapplicable was actually a bit surprising, as it meant that the dog was healthy to a degree that his trait couldn't find anything to fix. At least, it alleviated his worries. If he couldn't trust the trait, he could trust nothing.

He grabbed the dog from his neck and stared at his eyes thoughtfully. He just stared back innocently, whimpering like a usual dog. Maxwell couldn't understand why The Traveller would want Felix to follow a path like this. Yes, being a dog was a pretty low start, but considering Blueberry's evolution, Maxwell doubted that it would be limited.

He knew the creature left a trait with Felix, but he didn't know what it was. Without knowing what that trait was, he was lost. Don't I need to know, though? He questioned himself. Even if he didn't know, his trait probably knew, as it transferred to Felix. Maxwell wished he had a way to see past trades.

Specification needed.

Maxwell almost dropped Felix after hearing the notification. I can? He couldn't see why not, but this was uncharacteristically interactive of the system. However, the system always behaved weirdly when things concerned the Merchant of Yliaster. The Traveller, he thought, and a new window was summoned.

Trade Details:

The existence of The Traveller was taken as the price.

Curse of the Alien was removed from the heir of The Traveller.

The Traveller's Trait "The Traveller Who Remembers" transferred to the heir.

Maxwell focused on the trait's name to see if an explanation would appear. He was pleasantly surprised that it did.

The Traveller Who Remembers:

Others die, and their paths end. For you, it's just a new beginning. Whenever you die, a new reality awaits you with a new body for you to possess, your soul retaining what it gained in every life as you lose everything else.

The trait was inherited by the child of the original Traveller by the aid of The Merchant, marking the end of a being as old as time itself. Records of all the beings the Traveller once was are retained and are awaiting awakening.

Oh shit, Maxwell could immediately see how this trait would turn something into a god. The Traveller gave him a sense of eternity, and that seemed not far from the truth. How many lives did the being live through? It was simply incomprehensible. The fact that the being could do what they managed without any physical power was impressive enough, but Maxwell clearly remembered that The Traveller called themself an echo of what it once was.

This suggested that even the soul power of The Traveller was not intact when Maxwell encountered the being. Maxwell didn't know what could cause a soul injury to a being like this, but he wouldn't want to know in the foreseeable future.

He could also see The Traveller's intention now. Compared to a being older than the universe, it was surprisingly simple. This trait made one keep all soul power while losing everything else. In Felix's case, though, the Traveller caused the dog's leveling up to be centered around his soul.

Maxwell couldn't prove it, but he was almost sure that if he could see Felix's trait now, it would be changed slightly compared to the original trait. Felix wouldn't lose all his strength after death, as his strength was fused with his soul to a degree that anything apart from the soul wasn't even considered as the same being by the system.

When Felix started his new life, he would still be the same soul parasite he was now, as his real body was his soul. While the idea was simple, Maxwell couldn't begin to imagine how complicated it was to do something like this. Considering Felix's evolution happened after The Traveller's death, the being would need to predict how Felix would evolve after getting the parasite.

Maxwell, for example, couldn't see how a nature parasite and a puppy added together would cause a soul parasite to form. Despite being very rare according to the system, the nature parasite seemed pretty simple to Maxwell when he observed it. It was quite obvious at this point that this was not the case.

Maxwell sighed as he placed Felix back in his corner. This, at least, meant that he could be assured that the animal wouldn't be too weak to defend himself in the future. The fact that all records of the previous forms of the Travellers being retained in the trait painted a terrifying picture for the future, though.

It seemed like Maxwell would need to turn into a monster himself. Otherwise, his pet would eventually surpass him. For some reason, he found himself not really concerned.