It took another month and a half before Sallia and Anise finished their trials. Much like me, Anise wasn’t able to complete all three parts of her trial. She finished the first two parts, thankfully, but the last part of her trial had a massive difficulty spike. The first two parts of her trial had at least been manageable for her - each part of the trial was filled with stronger monsters than were ‘supposed’ to be there, but the gap in strength could at least mostly be bridged by setting up traps and preparing for each fight. 

However, the third part of the trial was filled with incredibly dangerous spatial storms that basically ripped parts of the trial to shreds every few hours. These spatial storms were at least semi-predictable, so at first, Anise thought that she could handle it - especially since she had access to a different type of ‘magic shield’ that was imagined in a different story. This magic shield was capable of blocking spatial magic, since the people writing the novels Anise used as fuel for her magic system had been pretty explicitly trying to stack the deck in her favor and give her the best toolkit they could.

Sadly, even that wasn’t enough. Anise could survive the spatial storms with the help of her shield, but the essence cost was nowhere near sustainable for her. While she could survive a few of them, each spatial storm left her in a worse state than before. Worse, the third part of her trial had added in a giant ‘library’ so that she could find the books she wanted. The monsters in that trial were also books. Giant swarms of spellcasting books constantly barraged Anise with attacks every step of the way, and unlike Anise, the books didn’t need to fear the spatial storms.

Anise lasted twenty hours before she lost an arm and fled from the trial. I spent several days helping her regrow the arm afterwards. Anise was heartbroken that she lost the chance to see a giant pile of books with new spells that she could have learned, so I had to spend a week cheering her up. I felt quite bad for her - the mutation to the final part of her trial was way too difficult for her to deal with.

Sallia, unlike Anise and I, finished her entire trial. Her trial didn’t seem to have any crazy alterations besides monster strength, and that was what Sallia was specialized in dealing with anyway. I was mostly built around supporting my friends - Extinguish was more often used as a ‘curse’ that debuffed monsters than an actual kill spell, and my healing was most useful when I had teammates to heal. Anise’s build was barely online, since she had only just gotten started on setting it up. Felix had reasonable ways to turn his craftsmanship into combat strength, but it was still rough around the edges and relied a lot on generating raw stats via prosthetics. Thus, Anise, Felix and I struggled a bit with fighting on our own.

Sallia, on the other hand, was a monster. Even with weaker stats and abilities, she could rely on her overwhelming strength as a swordsman to pull through her trial. As long as the monsters didn’t have an overwhelming stat or Ability advantage, Sallia could win.

Unlike Anise, Sallia returned with a huge grin on her face, so I ended up helping my parents make her a celebration cake. Anise ended up helping with that, which seemed to help pull her further out of her post-trial slump. It turned out to be a surprisingly fun family project, and since our parents were professional bakers, the resulting chocolate cake was exceptional.

Felix was the last of the four of us to finish his trial. During the time he was working on crafting the spatial pocket, Anise, Sallia and I helped out with various construction and healing projects around the sanctuary. The Astral tides hadn’t ended yet, so the Sanctuary was largely rebuilding and preparing for the next year. Apart from that, we summarized some of our gains with Elder Veridian, who seemed very excited that my essence pool had grown so much. We didn’t talk quite as much about our artificial sun project yet, mostly because Felix hadn’t returned. We did, however, hint that we had a big project we were preparing for, and that if things went well it could change everything.

Finally, a week after the Astral tides ended, Felix finished building the spatial pocket and triumphantly returned to the Sanctuary. We made another cake for him, and he showed off the first real Market item he had created.

To my surprise, just like in the Market, an item description appeared when I focused on it.

Item: Spatial Pocket

Effects: This is a dimensional storage device which can grow based on how much essence is added to it. Items placed inside of the pocket will not be exposed to the laws of reality which consume the rest of the dimension. Light can travel in and out of this spatial pocket without carrying any laws of reality with them.

Current size: 10 square meters.

Maintenance cost: N/A (Does not reconstruct or repair itself upon returning to the Market, and has little tolerance for travel from one dimension to another.)

Apparently, Felix ended up burning nearly a thousand Achievement creating this item - although, admittedly, most of that was spent trying to get the production technique right. If Felix hadn’t needed to experiment and learn the technique, he said he probably could have made the item with one hundred Achievement instead of a thousand.

Either way, it was a sign of just how far Felix had come. He had successfully created an item recognized by the Market - meaning that in the future, he could make another, if he had the right materials. I had high hopes for next world. If things went well, we could replace any weaker equipment with custom equipment made by Felix, which would give us a much higher level of combat power when we fought for more lives.

After that, we dragged Elder Veridian to a meeting so that we could discuss our artificial sun project.

Elder Veridian was getting on in the years now - her body was like a withered tree branch. As much as I didn’t like to think about it, I suspected we would be saying farewell to her any year now. It was unlikely she would live another decade.

“It’s nice to see all four of you again,” said Elder Veridian, as she gave us a warm smile. Her demeanor didn’t betray her aging joints and increasing mobility struggles. “Miria and Sallia already mentioned some of their trial rewards, but none of you have elaborated more. So what did you get from your trials?”

I smiled at her. “Something that will hopefully change the future of this city!”

She laughed, and tried to pinch my cheek. “Is that what you have? If you claim it will change the future of this city, it must be something quite impressive.”

“Do you remember the sunlight that I’ve been experimenting with for so long?” I asked. I saw Elder Veridian wince, before she nodded. Elder Veridian had been one of the people who were most hopeful about using sunlight to revitalize the sanctuary - and consequently, had been the most frustrated when none of our ideas so far had been very useful. Creating sunlight had proven useful for allowing Felix and I to transfer some essence to powerful combatants in the city, but not much else. At least, so far.

“I remember it,” she said. “But what does that have to do with the trial? I thought that you went into the trial in order to grow stronger. Miria even mentioned that her alteration essence is much higher than before. Based on my estimates, she might have than quadruple her previous essence pool. Sallia also got a boost to her essence pool - but Anise doesn’t seem to have grown much stronger.”

I grinned. “We did get stronger, but far more important than increasing our essence pools is a different reward. We got a few items that the city should find quite useful.”

My friends each pulled out the fragment of an artificial sun that they had gathered, while my grin widened.

“What are these?” asked Elder Veridian.

“Ways to keep an artificial sun supplied with essence and isolated from the rest of this dimension,” I said. After that, the four of us explained our plan to Elder Veridian. Our dream of creating an artificial sun that would constantly light up the entire city. Our thoughts about how this would revolutionize essence generation, meaning the sanctuary would suddenly have an abundance of essence to defend itself. Felix was especially keen on emphasizing the future potential of the sun as well. He discussed how the sun and the spatial pocket would both hopefully be able to expand as essence was fed into them - meaning that in time, the sun wouldn’t just preserve one sanctuary. With good planning and enough time, the sun would cover all nearby sanctuaries. If things went well enough, we hoped that there would even be enough essence left over to start growing the trees and soil for new sanctuaries within a century or two, thus permanently resolving the gradual extinction event looming over the people of this world.

The more we spoke, the more Elder Veridian’s eyes lit up.

“Those are amazing ideas!” She cackled. “How likely is it to work? Is there anything you need to make it happen?”

“We have most of what we need. I still need to actually build the star core itself, but we have every other material to keep the star stable. Apart from that… manpower and essence would definitely help. As we already mentioned, the sun will grow based on how much essence we feed it. So we just need to finish developing the core and then get the whole project past its early stages.”

Elder Veridian tapped her finger against her mouth.

“Hmm… the city is always short of essence. Your project needs a lot of it… but it also promises to generate a lot of it, if it works. I’ll talk it over with the council, but I think it’s likely to be approved. Everyone sees the writing on the wall - we know that in a few millennia, there will be nothing left. If this gamble fails, our sanctuary will probably collapse due to wasting too much essence - but it’s a chance.” Elder Veridian smiled at us. “I’ll see what I can do.” 

The five of us talked a bit more about plans, implementation, and needs, before Elder Veridian hobbled off towards the council.

The next day, she sent us a message. The council was willing to give our plan a shot. They weren’t willing to spend any essence on it until the next Astral tide, since they thought it made the most sense to make sure we had a few months of leeway before getting the project going. Once the next Astral tide started, they would give us all the resources and manpower they could spare.