As my death from old age grew closer, the four of us started to spend time touring the cities of the sanctuary in between research sessions and planning for the future. It was relaxing to tour the world we had put so much effort into saving - and it was also nice to see how our actions had changed the future of this place. 

Unfortunately, things weren’t all positive. The year we turned 460, Sallia’s parents died of old age. For the next month, the three of us spent most of our time with Sallia. She wasn’t a wreck - after all, Sallia had never gotten as firmly attached to any of her families as the rest of us. Even so, I wanted her to know that we were there for her if she needed it. Sallia seemed to appreciate it, even if she didn’t show it. After Sallia’s parents died, Anise, Felix and I started to spend more time with our own parents. We had devoted most of our lives in this dimension to research, the artificial sun, and growing stronger - but that wasn’t all there was to the world. I didn’t want to miss the moments with my parents in this world. I treasured and loved my current set of parents, and I wasn’t looking forward to the day we said goodbye - although I hoped that in their next lives, they would be just as happy as in this one. I hoped that they would fall in love again, and that they would have even more time together. I hoped that someday, in another life, I could see them again, even if I wouldn’t recognize them.

It was a foolish wish. I knew how low the odds were. There were more worlds in the multiverse than grains of sand on a beach. Still, I hoped.

Of course, that didn’t mean I slacked off. I wanted to spend time with my parents before they returned to the ocean of souls, but I also didn’t want to get my friends killed when we fought for more lives. I focused mostly on pushing my attunement higher. I had already pushed back into [Expert] grade during my time focused on researching my new spell - but inventing a new spell had done more for me than just push me back into [Expert] grade. During the twilight years of my life, with the insights and improvements I had gained in creating another spell of my own, I also managed to push it a step further, and reached Master Grade - the peak of all ability grades before the big push into Heroic.

Now that I had reached Master-Grade attunement, I knew that I would have a much easier time reaching it in subsequent lives - with any luck, I might even reach Heroic grade for this skill next life, if I found a good opportunity to push it to its limits.

Power: Form a [Master] Grade Attunement

Achievement +2,500

These two boosts to Achievement gave me a bump of 2,500 more Achievement, putting me from 326,630 to 331,130. Far more interesting was the result of forming a Master grade attunement.

Reaching {Master} grade in my attunement was something I had never done before, and for me, it symbolized real progress forward. Of course, a big part of the reason I finally managed to climb into Master grade was the sheer time frame I had to work with. The lifespan of the average person in this dimension was around 500 years - which was a huge amount of time to invest into improving a skill if I wanted to focus on something. I had spent over a century devoted to researching and expanding my understanding of my attunement, and the results of my effort showed.

It was also easier than usual to push into Master grade thanks to the environment of this dimension. This world had all four essences present, and advancing magic of all types felt easier here than it did in other worlds. Since we knew this dimension was artificially constructed to serve the needs of Market residents, I was pretty sure this was an intentional design choice. People would be more likely to buy tickets into this world if this world made it easy to advance abilities, after all - so there was really no reason not for the creators of this dimension to make easier to do so.

The final reason I managed to push into master grade was training resources. In light of our accomplishments, the council was more than willing to provide us with weird or bizarre training environments whenever we needed one - after all, we were the heroes who had created the artificial sun and saved the sanctuaries. The council was happy to give us a few rewards, and weird training environments weren’t really a strain on the Sanctuary’s resources anymore. For my advancement to master grade, I had a bunch of the dimensional terraforming magic users I had trained simulate constant manipulation of alteration magic in front of me so that I could observe big and small changes in peace. I also observed a variety of smaller pocket dimensions, some of which I created using {Space Capsule} and some of which my apprentices created. I even had some of my disciples directly use safe forms of dimensional terraforming in the area I was standing in - just to give myself as much exposure as possible to variations of alteration magic.

Achievement wasn’t the only reward I got for finally pushing into Master grade. I also got a new Ability evolution option for my shaping magic system. I didn’t think I would take it, but it was nice to know that I could get opportunities related to my magic system for pushing it to Master grade.

Direction 4: A Master of Shaping

Cost: 5,000 Achievement

Glut penalty: 32 - 35

You have reached the pinnacle of shaping magic that you can reach before the first great barrier - Heroic grade. This is a legendary feat that few humans accomplish, especially in worlds with lower population or lower mana quantities.

Effects:

Your shaping magic will grow back to [Master] Grade considerably more quickly than before, and it will become easier and more efficient for you to create new spells for all magic systems fueled by alteration essence.

All spells that you have created on your own will receive a boost of Ability grade to their power level, so long as the boost does not push them into Heroic Grade. (So a Basic grade attunement would be pseudo-Intermediate for spells such as Extinguish).

At Master Grade, they will receive an ability grade boost. At Heroic, this will drop to one quarter, and this boost will vanish completely upon reaching Primordial Grade.

It will become several times easier to reach {Master} grade in your attunement.

Personally, I found the ability boosts a bit too generic for my liking. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t stand out as a game-changer, either. It was basically the epitome of ‘it’s fine, I guess.’ The only real upside was that the evolution was cheap, in terms of glut, keyword slots, and Achievement. However, considering the massive pile of Achievement we had earned this life, I wasn’t that worried about saving Achievement or glut penalty. The moment we got access to the right stat-raising soul fragments, my stats were going to make a huge, qualitative leap when we returned to the Market. That also meant that the biggest upside of this ability evolution direction was meaningless for me.

Of course, even though I wasn’t interested in accepting this Ability evolution, I also got a separate ability that I could purchase related to Alteration Magic. This one was a non-keyword ability, which made me quite a bit more interested in it.

Since you have raised your understanding of your Attunement to Master grade for the first time, you have earned a new Skill! Upon your death, you will have the option to purchase [Master of Shaping] as an ability, for the cost of 10,000 Achievement. 

This Ability has the following effects:

Keywords: None

It becomes several times easier to reach {Basic}, {Intermediate}, and {Advanced} grade for your attunement. After that, this bonus will become weaker, until it completely disappears after Heroic grade.

Every single advancement in your attunement will increase your Alteration attribute by 10 points, and your mental stats will all receive a +5 bonus as well.

Alteration essence-fueled spells will receive a slight reduction in essence cost.

Glut Penalty: 15

This Ability was simple, but for a non-keyword ability, it was fantastic. It perfectly supplemented the strengths I already had as a combatant and a spellcaster, and didn’t take up any keyword slots. I had a lot of choices to make when we returned to the Market, but I looked quite favorably upon this particular ability. It was simple, powerful, and based on the wording, it would even help me a bit during my attempt to push from Master grade to Heroic grade. This was especially important, because if things went well, I planned to breach Heroic Grade next life. As long as I had the glut penalty for it, I didn’t see much reason not to pick this ability up.

Sadly, all good things come to an end. Shortly after I got my attunement to master grade, and the four of us threw a big celebration to mark my first step into Master grade, Anise and I had to prepare to send our first parent off as she returned to the ocean of souls. Our mother grew very sick, due to her advanced age, and my healing magic wasn’t good enough to make her better.