It took nearly a month for me to stop benefitting from eating the mushrooms. Every single mushroom I ate provided slightly less than the previous one, and every time I hit a new grade in one of my attributes, I also felt as if my body had become increasingly resistant to whatever the mushrooms were doing to boost me. Finally, when I had gained two grades in every stat the mushrooms improved, I found that eating more mushrooms gave me no benefit at all - it was just the same as eating a regular, highly filling food.

After that month of carefully sneaking in and out of the cave, my Attributes had gone through massive changes.

Physical

Mental (+40)

Essence

Strength: 160 (40+97+23) 

Grade 8

Intelligence: 205 (40+125)

Grade 10

Absorption: 186 (60+126)

Grade 8

Agility: 180 (40+111+29) 

Grade 9

Willpower: 150 (40+70)

Grade 7

Manifestation:130  (40+90)

Grade 6

Fortitude: 180 (40+107+33)

Grade 9

Perception: 200 (60+100)

Grade 10

Binding: 147 (40+107)

Grade 7

Alteration: 200 (60+112+28)

Grade 10

Every single one of my physical attributes, as well as my alteration essence pool, had increased by two grades. I had more than doubled my alteration essence pool, and my physical abilities had also more than doubled. My physical attributes were of less importance to me, of course. My strength did absolutely nothing to help me with my extinguishes, lightning bolts, or portals, and I would only resort to desperate physical attacks as a last-ditch attempt to kill monsters I couldn’t handle the normal way. Still, having my attributes improve was still relieving. If I got into another desperate situation, like the one where I fought the first outer centipede, I might get less badly hurt with the extra physical boosts I now had available. Physical attributes might not drastically improve my fighting abilities, but they never hurt to have. Besides, Agility would make it easier to dodge incoming attacks, and Fortitude would also make it easier to survive getting hurt. Overall, I already felt much stronger than when I had entered the trial.

On top of my attribute boosts, I had gotten some Achievement rewards from the System, due to some fights with outer centipedes and consuming more mushrooms.

Slaughter: Kill an Outer Centipede (baby) for the tenth time

Achievement +2,000

Power: Consume several Essence Mushrooms, increasing the capabilities of your body on a permanent basis (note: this permanent boost affects THIS BODY, not your soul. This will still be lost upon returning to the Market).

Achievement +280

In total, I had received 2,280 Achievement from eating a bunch of mushrooms and killing several baby outer centipedes. I had gotten 40 Achievement every time one of my attributes increased by another grade, and I had also killed my tenth outer centipede during my final mushroom-finding trip.

This brought me from 53,071 Achievement to 55,351 Achievement. My rewards for this world were looking incredible - when I got back to the Market, the first thing I planned to do was push all of my Attributes to at least Grade 3. If we could find a place selling higher tier soul shards, I would also love to push them all to Grade 4 - I probably had enough Achievement to do that, and even think about some Grade 5 Attributes, if my Abilities didn’t end up costing too much.

I wasn’t the only one that had found new opportunities in my trial, of course.

My friends had found their own opportunities in their trials. During the first week of his trial, Felix had reported that the feeling of being watched was growing greater and greater, leading him to feel more and more nervous. However, Felix wasn’t happy to just let some unspeakable monster stalk him. As something watched him, he started designing a series of traps, designed to kill whatever was stalking him. At the end of the second week, Felix finally managed to string together a series of traps, which caught… something. None of us had any good way to identify the creature he ended up killing with the traps - it looked kind of like a worm, except for the fact that it was as large as a dog and had eight limbs attached to it, almost like an octopus. The strange creature had been nearly translucent, which explained why Felix had kept failing to find it when he searched for it directly - as long as the creature stayed near him and didn’t move around too much, its strange, jelly-like flesh would be hard to pick out from its surroundings. Adding to the difficulty of finding it, the creature had apparently been fond of hovering in the air, although it didn’t seem to move very quickly.

Felix had gotten nearly three thousand Achievement for killing it, which spoke to how dangerous the thing had been. It hadn’t shown much physical resilience, and it hadn’t moved very quickly, so all four of us suspected it had some kind of incredibly dangerous magical attack - perhaps one that it had simply opted not to use against Felix, for whatever reason. Perhaps it took a lot of resources to activate? Or perhaps it simply hadn’t felt the need to eat Felix yet - after all, as far as ‘prey’ went, he was quite thin compared to the other monsters in the trial. Either way, after finally dealing with his stalker, Felix passed the regular parts of his trial with ease, before the second part of his trial started. This part of his trial was essentially to learn how to assemble basic Market items, which was something Felix was eager to do anyway. 

From there, Felix spent two weeks learning the ‘correct’ way to create weaker Market items. Apparently, the technique of creating a Market-recognized item required three things - Essence, Achievement, and materials. According to Felix’s rough explanation, he had told us that some items were attuned to certain concepts, meaning they could hold a proper Market-based enchantment. From there, he needed to spend a bunch of Achievement to imbue a more specific concept into that material. The process of imbuing this Achievement into a material usually required some type of magic system that could already handle ‘inscribing’ instructions, as well as some way to actually inject Achievement into the material. 

Felix had all three things, thanks to his purchases during our previous time in the Market and the alchemy magic system he now specialized in. Even if Felix hadn’t found any special resources to boost his stats, he had found exactly what he had wanted to find. I was happy that despite the changes to the trial, the instruction manual was still intact - it would benefit Felix’s growth a lot, and would also benefit our group as a whole if Felix learned how to create basic Market items.

Sallia had been having the easiest time of all of us - she had already breezed through the first two phases of her trial, and decided to set the third phase of her trial as a general ‘absorption essence’ boost. She had gotten a huge amount of Achievement from the monsters present in her trial as well, and seemed to be enjoying the endless fighting in her trial. The monsters in her trial had probably been stronger than they were ‘supposed’ to be - but Sallia had still managed to handle them, thanks to her ridiculous talent and training with her sword. By now, Sallia had spent decades honing her craft with the blade - while she was still far from the pinnacle of the multiverse, she was no slouch.

While Sallia didn’t find anything to boost her stats either, she did find an unusual resource. This one was a type of tree bark that the Market mentioned was capable of absorbing Achievement - in other words, prime material for Felix to practice his item creation with. Sallia had no personal use for it, but she promised to grab as much of it as she could carry for Felix. Hopefully, before we returned to the Market, Felix would create his first ever Market items, and with any luck, one of us might even get to swap out a few items before we returned.

Anise’s trial had been going about the way mine had - both of us were stuck trying to fight enemies that vastly outmatched us, although Anise had the added difficulty of trying to wade through a trap-infested workshop. She hadn’t progressed past the first stage of her trial, although she suspected she was close. Luckily, while Anise hadn’t found a way to fight against the monsters directly, she had started to find creative ways to use her two magic systems together. Especially after Felix recommended his own trap-based strategy, Anise had taken inspiration from him to develop her own way of progressing through her trial. After Anise had discovered the correct path for her new magic system, the council of the Sanctuary had started encouraging people to create fiction, meaning Anise had plenty of material to draw on. This was originally meant to help other manifestation users actually benefit from the magic System Anise had rebuilt, but it also gave Anise a huge repertoire of tricks to draw on.

She had started relying pretty heavily on a type of trap related magic from a fictional work, where the user could basically set up a spell on a timer before it activated. Spells that used this magic system would also track down any enemies that were close enough for the spell to sense them. With that, Anise had basically set up trap areas with timers of a day or two, layered huge walls of traps together, and then lured groups of enemies into the trap right as their timers expired. This meant that she was stuck setting up new trap areas most of the time, but she was still making progress. On the bright side, even though Ansie’s progress was slow, her Achievement rewards were incredible, because the enemies in her trial were disproportionately strong.

As for me, I had finished ingesting the mushrooms. I could no longer get any benefit from eating more of them. It was unfortunate, since I had been greatly enjoying the easy attribute boosts, but it was time to move on. The giant ball of life force in the center of the centipede’s lair had been my original objective, and it was time for me to focus on it again. Over the past month, I had grown much stronger. I was much more confident that I could delve into the centipede lair and survive whatever awaited me inside. It was time to steal the greatest prize of all from the centipede lair, and see what I could do with it.