The Path of Ascension

Chapter 113

They got out of the rift and were debriefed by Luna while Melinda healed them, and the three of them received quite the shock.

That wasn't a sub-boss. It was just a stronger variant of the normal monster. If you weren't delving the rift at full mana, I don't think they would appear. Their trainer sounded smug as she finished.

For a second, Matt wondered if he could get away with not charging the rift to full before they delved, but didn't want to waste the experience. The rift was pushing them to grow.

Liz flexed her new arm and used it to pull Melinda into a quick hug before saying, So where are the sub-bosses? I assume they should have been close.

Luna pondered her answer for a minute, but then said, One is in the city, yes, but you weren't that close. She seemed to debate saying more for a second before adding, Anything else you'll have to figure out for yourself.

Matt did want to know one thing, though. You said these rifts are bigger. How far did we make it into this one?

His instructor grinned. About twenty percent.

Matt wanted to curse at that, but he didn't have the energy.

Aster did, though, and started yipping and yowling in protest. Just getting that far had taken them hours, and they hadnt even reached the one-quarter mark.

Matt had wanted to avoid using his flying sword to map out the labyrinth of a city, but he started planning on how to take advantage of their vertical capabilities. He would just need to plan for dealing with any flying monster they might encounter.

After that revelation, they doubled down on their training.

Liz and Sam pestered Erwin into giving them alchemy lessons. His only condition was that they buy the herbs themselves, instead of letting Matt create new rifts with the herbs they needed.

He was adamant that they were too far from that goal with their current setup, and didn't want to skip any steps. As they were mostly focusing on Tier 6 and Tier 7 potions, the cost was negligible.

He and Liz also got everyone to agree that they needed better armor, and after arguing their point, Luna and Kurt jumped to the central planet and it's larger cities. There they found a married armorer and enchanter who were happy to work on a large order of Tier 8 equipment.

Matt decided to change up his setup, and ditched his lighter armor in favor of something a little heavier and tougher. The armor slowed him down a fraction, but it didn't impact his flexibility in the slightest, since he requested the joints to prioritize flexibility rather than defense. After all, he had [Cracked Phantom Armor] and its second layer to protect his joints.

The purpose of this armor was more to protect his limbs and chest from the Tier 9 monsters than anything else. From this rift alone, he had already experienced a variety of weapons, spells, and abilities breaking through his armor. His body and spirit werent strong enough to keep up with where he was and where he wished to go.

At least, not yet.

The armor being two Tiers higher than himself meant that it was heavy on both his physical body and spirit. The physical weight was the lesser of the two problems, but the spiritual weight meant that he could only use the armors enchantment for a few seconds. Otherwise, it started to hurt badly enough to force him to drop the power.

His growth sword was also upgraded to Tier 9, and he hoped that it wouldn't get so damaged in his subsequent fights.

Finding the item that the sword required to Tier up led them on a chase across every auction house the planet had. Eventually, Matt took a recommendation from Liz, and they visited the local noble house.

Count Petros was a cheerful enough man, and hosted the nine of them while taking Matt into his personal vault to find the item that resonated with his sword.

Eventually, they found it.

His sword wanted to go against the grain for a change. Instead of a metal or other monster part, it desired Tier 9 Tears of a Weeping Willow. They were an extremely rare ingredient that were the secondary byproduct of the natural treasure Weeping Willows of Watery Widows. They grew as a grove of trees, and had the nasty habit of killing anyone that was below their Tier who entered their domain. When cut down and harvested, the actual trees were incredibly valuable for mages staves, as they could channel far more mana than most other woods without degradation. Their capacity for enchantments was nothing more than average, but a mage wouldn't need to get their items reenchanted if they used them for a long time.

Oddly enough, women were completely unaffected. The story that the trees got their names from told of widows safely grieving under the trees, and their tears creating a pool where even the most grievous wounds could be healed.

More than a few unwarranted, and probably avoidable deaths proved that the legend wasn't true, but the name stuck.

The trees actually pulled water from deep underground and secreted it from its branches, only for it to return to the soil and rejuvenate the area that the trees grew in.

The tears were rare and mostly useless, which is why Matt had such trouble finding what his sword wanted. Not to mention that growth objects made of metal typically wanted harder materials, which ended up leading him astray. While it was interesting to see that even metal could take water into itself to grow, Matt found himself wondering if there was more to the byproduct than met the eye.

Was there something else that it could be used with? He noted his thoughts down in case they ran into any other obstinate growth items.

Still, once it was Tiered up, Matt was disappointed. With the sword needing such an odd item for the upgrade, he expected some type of improvement in his weapons functions. But the Tier-up only increased the swords weight and slightly increased its capacity for enchantments.

As he was still unable to self cast [Mana Slash] and [Mana Charge], with his maximum mana of 80, he was forced to reinscribe them onto the weapon until he could afford the 100 mana initial cost. It wasn't a huge problem, as he only put the Tier 7 variants on the Tier 9 blade, which left plenty of room for passive enchantments. It didn't strain his spirit as when he used a Tier 5 enchantment at Tier 4, so the same logic should apply.

He was much stronger then when he was back on the training world, after all.

For the rune setup, Matt didn't just stick to his standard repair, durability, and sharpness runes. He doubled up on all of them. It wasnt some revolutionary new tactic; the effects of the dual sets of runes werent just additive, but multiplicative. The problem that usually stopped normal warriors from doing the same was mana cost.

Kurts blade mage training had given him the idea. It was apparently common with fighters who used wooden weapons for their higher enchantment capacity and mana throughput.

It took Matt four attempts to enchant the blade, during which he had to dump mana and metals into his blade to repair the damage his missteps.

With the new enchantments, Matt was confident that he could cut through the defenses of the heavily armored orcs in the Tier 9 rifts. Not to mention the more defensive monsters that they encountered in the variety of random Tier 8 rifts they delved.

Everyone else upgraded their growth items as well, and were all equipped with new weapons and armor.

Aster even took the initiative to get armor that came with a blade for her tail. It wasnt as effective as she mightve liked, but she now had a less magical option for dealing damage. Matt couldn't really argue against it.

His gentle suggestion she get a claw or tooth attachment was shrugged off.

He used a sword, so why couldn't she?

Matt had no counterpoint, so he just gave up.

Liz, on the other hand, leaned into a much heavier armor set that was built to fuse with her upgraded Blood Iron and [Blood Crystal Armor]. It actually had room for Liz to cycle a layer of blood inside the heavy metal plates. It allowed her to control the armor with [Blood Manipulation], as the armor was built more for defense than movement. When she flooded the armor with Blood Iron, she was able to reinforce it to an insane degree. It was only compounded when she used [Blood Crystal Armor]; she was nearly unkillable when she used both of them in conjunction. The only downside was that the Blood Iron, once used for either purpose, was gone forever.

With Matt to keep her mana full, she didnt need to worry about the high mana cost for using the skills she needed to move gracefully.

When Liz used [Blood Manipulation] to supplement her movements, she was actually more agile than she was when using her old armor. She even managed to lift herself up and levitate for a short period of time, which let her use the weight of her armor in a devastating downward attack.

Her spear was also built with the newly Tiered up Blood Iron in mind. It could attract part of the Blood Iron, and use that to extend the spear or change the shape of the blade. The iron used was consumed by the spear, just as with the armor. However, Lizs natural treasure would continue to be replenished by the naturally occurring iron in her blood. Since Lizs growth glove let her store a swimming pool's worth of blood, she would always have enough iron to sustain her new equipment.

While they were waiting for their armor and weapons to be crafted, everyone took time to relax and decompress for a change. They were able to breathe for a bit without Luna and Kurt hounding them with lessons constantly.

Matt and Liz even took the time to go on a proper date to one of the newly constructed amusement parks. Everyone else came as well, but they split into smaller groups. Aster joined Sam and Tara, who wanted to ride in all of the biggest roller coasters.

They spent the entire day just goofing off and playing various games of chance. They even took their getting banned from the Tier 6 and 7 games as a badge of pride. Their training was so effective, they could easily beat games of skill meant to swindle people out of their money.

As the day settled down into evening, they all stood at the edge of the waterfall as the blue-tinged sunset painted a cascade of colors, creating a dazzling rainbow for them to enjoy.

To splurge a bit, and repay Matt for treating them to such a nice feast back in the war, Melindas team took them to the best restaurant in the city.

Reading the tasting menu that listed out the meals they would be served immediately caused Aster's tail to start swooshing back and forth, and Matt had to repress a chuckle as he saw why.

There was savory ice cream on the menu for the entree.

Seeing Kyle open his mouth while looking worriedly at Aster, Matt kicked him under the table.

Matt wanted to see Aster's natural reaction to ice cream that wasn't a snack.

When the dish came out, Asters eyes locked onto the orb of white, and she stretched to get a better look as the waiter brought out the tray.

When the dish was set before her, Aster started to quiver in anticipation as the waiter introduced the plate and the origins and preparation of each ingredient.

Matt was honestly impressed that Aster had remembered the lessons in table etiquette well enough to wait for the waiter to finish.

As soon as the waiter stopped speaking, Aster attacked the ice cream and swallowed it up in a single bite.

Everyone waited as Asters energetic movements slowed, then ground to a halt as the flavors she was expecting werent what she tasted.

Slowly, Aster started to lap the air. Through his bond, all Matt felt was a sense of deep confusion.

As Aster came back to life, her disappointment grew until she let out a mournful yowl while her tail and ears drooped.

That was too much, and everyone started to laugh. Aster just sat in confusion as her friends guffawed.

Sam lost it to the point that she snorted out the wine she had taken a sip of.

That just reset everyone else's humor, and even got Aster to laugh.

When they finally started to calm down, Matt picked up his bond and hugged her while asking her if she had understood what savory ice cream was when it was on the menu.

She had distinctly not, and pouted about no one explaining it to her, until Liz said there was sherbet on the dessert menu. Liz assured the fox that she would probably like it.

The rest of the meal was delicious, despite Aster eating Matts steak in retribution for not warning her. He took his punishment with grace, having had a bite of it from Lizs plate to taste it.

As it turned out, Aster did enjoy the sherbet.

While she rated it as lower than ice cream, she enjoyed the denser and fruity flavors that she was able to sample.

They ended the night by strolling through a light garden as the three moons rose in a dancing orbit.

The next day, they picked up their armor and weapons from the couple, and thanked them before jumping planets back to their continent.

They found Erwin watering a garden in a floating glass orb that had seemingly drained a good portion of the lake, as the waterline was at least a foot lower than it had been when they left.

Erwin gave them no downtime before pulling Matt into more rift crafting experiments.

They actually went to a new continent, where they met a Tier 5 team who was going to delve into the Tier 5 rifts that they created. They were contracted by Erwin from one of the local guilds that were in good standing with The Empire. He had only said that Matt was his apprentice, and that he was trying to create specialized rifts with growth items.

Having seen more of the records, Matt understood that it wasn't unheard of, though most guilds didnt bother with trying for specific elemental mana rifts. They usually just delved randomly generated ones. If it gave out a half-decent number of growth items when fully charged, that was good enough for them.

Erwin was apparently known as an eccentric enough scientist that no one questioned his being willing to waste millions of mana, even though it could be better spent on other endeavors.

That was the real reason that no one tried to create rifts.

Matt had suspected it before, but after having tested it himself, he understood why no one bothered. No guild would be willing to throw away hundreds of millions of otherwise valuable mana. Even the most delving-oriented guilds had crafting divisions, which consumed buckets of mana to craft the most simple of weapons.

Then, the guild had to afford the spatial expansion that they used. Guilds, unlike apartment complexes and other spatially expanded mass housing, had to cover all of the mana cost for their building, or pay double the price for drawing in ambient mana.

That was why the guild was happy to agree to Erwins request of providing teams to delve the rifts, as long as they reported everything they received from the delves.

The guild was Madeleine's Marauders, named after the guild's founder, a Tier 26 melee fighter. It was actually a feeder guild to the stronger Darknorth Delvers, a Tier 35 guild that wanted to get a foothold in a new region of space to find promising youths.

She was actually quite nice. When they first arrived, she met them personally to introduce herself and discuss the location where they wanted the rifts created. The location was in a secure area, situated deep inside the guilds compounds and hidden under layers of restrictions, both magical and mundane.

Matt and Erwin intended to create a few hundred rifts to test out the potential growth items and how they changed with mana types. On the other hand, the guild only needed and wanted the best five. They intended to keep those rifts fully charged and restricted to Tier 5, which wouldnt be cheap. Only the fact that they were getting growth items worth Tier 14 prices made the investment worth it.

That, and they weren't going to reimburse Erwin for the mana he used at all. If Matt wasn't able to produce millions of mana a day, the deal would have been incredibly unfair, but neither of them cared about the cost as much as the guild would. The official story was that the Empire was funding the research at Erwin's request, and would be buying any growth items the guild didnt keep for themselves.

The first thing they did was set up privacy formations that could keep spiritual senses out of the area. If someone stronger than the formation poked their nose inside, it would set off alarms and warn them.

Matt got the feeling that either Luna or Kurt was watching over them, making sure no one spied on them. For all her grumblings about wanting them off The Path, Luna gave her all to training them, and he was sure that she cared about their well being. She had said so on their train rides. She kept her own spiritual sense wrapped around them to prevent others from spying, more so than to watch them herself.

They started with creating random rifts with no elemental mana or essence restrictions. As expected, it only yielded normal rifts. Even when fully charged, they had no chance to produce a growth item.

Their next tests turned into making rifts with the simplest of single element mana allocations. These rifts were a little more of a challenge to Tier up successfully, but none of them created growth items regularly.

Another result in line with their predictions.

In the next round of testing, they tried to craft rifts with at least three variations of elements, to a slightly higher success rate. One in fifteen of the rifts they created produced a single growth item drop out of one hundred delves.

Not even close to the numbers of a good growth item producing rift, but it was a start.

The delving groups were ecstatic, and when Matt spent time in their lounge, he got to listen to them wax poetic about how much money they were pulling in from delving full rifts five or six times a day.

The guild was paying to have their mana topped up, while also letting them keep all of the non-growth items that they found. The guilders also had first claim on any growth items that they found while delving, up to one item per person.

As the days ticked by, and the amount of rifts he and Erwin created increased, it became almost amusing how many of the guilds Tier 5s were tasked with delving their rifts. Even with the guild providing mana, the teams were becoming overworked and sloppy, leading to injuries mounting.

That was in stark contrast to Lunas training, with them delving a dozen or more rifts at higher Tiers than themselves in a day.

Erwin and Matt were eventually asked to slow down their testing, so that the teams wouldnt be in danger of being overwhelmed.

During the downtime, Matt met some of the teams, and had to stifle a snicker when they asked what it was like apprenticing under such a rich high Tier master. Especially who was willing to throw mana around for testing rifts. A portion of him wanted to see how their heads would explode if they knew it was him producing all of the mana that they were using.

One of the women was a tailor on the side, and repeatedly sighed at the flagrant use of mana. She had said wasted once, only to get dogpiled on by her team. After that, made a point to say used, instead of wasted.

They couldnt complain about getting good items and mana stones from even the failed rifts.

Her complaining actually inspired him to order a set of casual clothes with enchantments embedded in the fabric. They were more for comfort than combat, but they would self clean and repair small holes. After wearing them for a few days, he knew they were worth every mana crystal.

Some of the guilders even took Matt to tour the less secretive areas of the guild when he said that he almost joined a guild himself. He gave them the short version of his awakening, and how Erwin picked him up during one of the times the man was off getting supplies.

A small, but necessary lie to keep their cover.

It was an eye-opening tour.

The guild was reminiscent of the PlayPen in some ways, but vastly different in others.

They both had spatially expanded apartments, but the guilds were significantly better, with more creature comforts. The dining hall was staffed by people who actually knew monster cooking. He spent an hour chatting with the cooks after the dinner service.

Even the head chef, a Tier 19 man, was happy to hear Matt out and answer his questions. Especially after he name-dropped Aunt Helen, and how he had a signed cookbook from her.

After that, he was invited back anytime he wanted during his time working with the guild.

The real areas where the guild outshone the PlayPen were their rifts and the crafting sector. They had half a dozen Tier 1 through Tier 6 rifts, all being kept from Tiering up, and with instructors who knew each rift inside and out. They would follow the younger fighters through during their first few delves in their assigned rift, to ensure their safety.

That was in stark contrast to the PlayPen letting anyone rated as combat-ready into the rifts with no watchers or guardians.

Personally, Matt thought the PlayPen could do with such a method as well, but he wasn't in a position to tell The Empire something that they already knew. He just felt that some help early on would prevent the unnecessary loss of many. He still remembered how the PlayPen lost more than one of the non-sponsored teams a year, due to more lax rules.

It just seemed like such a waste of life.

The guild also had lessons from higher Tier members of the guild who were on break from delving duties, or had simply wanted to get out of delving for a while and raise a family.

While the instructors were good, Matt felt that their individual skill was lesser than the cultivators at the PlayPen. But they were adequate for the safer style of delving that the guild subscribed to.

It was a fascinating glimpse into what could have been. In the lounge, there was a sense of comradery and shared purpose that he could only gaze at from afar.

Still, it didn't last long; Erwin soon returned, and the rift creating process continued.

They started creating rifts with more complex mana types, then proceeded to charge them up to Tier 5. The odds were horrendous because of their complexity, but they saw a marginal improvement in the success rate of the growth items pulled.

It still wasn't good enough for either of them.

They wanted to figure out the underlying mechanic that produced growth items in rifts.

Through test after test, they were able to get the rate of growth item pulls from a complex rift with at least four elemental mana types to about two percent. Unfortunately, they were unable to increase the yield any further, despite their constant tinkering with the variables.

Once they hit that wall, they moved onto phase two of the testing creating Tier 5 rifts with mundane items at the base of the construction.

They didn't use growth items as the seeds of the rifts. That was their third and final phase, which they hoped to avoid resorting to. Rifts still unaspected far too often for their liking to risk growth items being sucked into the rifts during an unsuccessful Tier up.

They spent two weeks testing these phase two rifts and having the delver teams report their findings. Despite all their attempts to isolate a single variable that would produce growth items, they were completely unable to do so.

One of their baseline rifts was nearly perfect when fully charged with mana, it had an unheard of ten percent chance to produce a random growth item. That tidbit of news made the guild leader Madeleine ecstatic, as she now had a way to print money, simply by charging the rift. If her wife and second in command wasn't there to receive the exuberant kiss, Matt was afraid that he and Erwin would have been on the business end of her affections instead.

Matt and Erwin were far less ecstatic with the results. The rift had been a simple rift with a dagger as the base. Half the mana used was unaspected earth mana, along with an even split of fire, water, wind, and pure mana. They hadn't even used an essence filter to ensure that the rift was scrubbed of rogue essence types.

They recreated the rift half a dozen times, to no success.

Finally, they started testing their other theories.

The item used to seed the rift didnt seem to have much of an influence on the reward, if the reward was a growth item. Normal items usually mirrored the item used to seed the rift, but growth items seemed to be random in nature.

They also confirmed that growth items could come from any Tier 5 rift, if it was fully charged and delved enough. They hypothesized that there was something intrinsic in all Tier 5 rifts that made them different from other Tier rifts, but they were still unable to isolate the contributing factor.

Rifts also seemed to deaspect at a higher rate if they had more than five mana types used in their creation. But the success rate in getting growth items equally increased with the number of mana types used.

Before they moved on to seeding rifts with growth items, they tried less combat-oriented items such as furniture, art, books, and even building a rift around a plate of dinner.

Matt insisted on testing the last idea, if only to see whether they could actually make an ice cream rabbit rift for Aster or not. But they predictably had no success.

The rifts made from furniture had a tendency towards creating mimic monsters, but the theme always leaned more to urban environments. It vaguely reminded him of the drain monster rift he delved at Tier 4.

The rifts made from books usually were set in libraries and chock full of mimics, and oddly enough, mummies.

Neither of them understood why the book rifts produced those specific types of monsters so frequently, but the books inside were always gibberish. Erwin said that it was normal, but they still cleaned out two dozen instances of the libraries so they could run the books through their AIs later.

When they gave up on cracking the secret of why Tier 5 rifts created growth items on their own, they moved on to the final phase of their testing.

Using other growth items to seed rifts.

It actually worked enough to be the solution to their problems almost.

Creating a rift with a growth item increased the chance of the Tier 5 rift producing one to a decent rate. The problem was, the rifts were incredibly hard to stabilize, and frequently deaspected or absorbed the seed item when Tiering up.

It was only because of the insane number of delves that the guilder teams had been undergoing that they had a decent supply of growth items to use as test subjects.

As a part of the agreement between Erwin and the guild, any growth item that didnt appear useful to any guilder was kept for their seeding of rifts.

With a little more than fifty unclaimed growth items, they had ample supplies to test some of their theories, just not as extensively as they would have liked.

A rift seeded with a growth item, if charged to Tier 5, had a better than twenty percent chance to create a growth item when it was delved at full mana. If it wasn't fully charged at Tier 5, that percentage dropped like a rock, but that was in line with all Tier 5 rifts.

It was just getting the rift to Tier up without de-aspecting that they had issues with.

If the rift was diametrically opposed on mana aspects to the growth item, they learned that there was a near-zero chance for the rift to successfully Tier up without deaspecting. After learning that, they expected rifts that mirrored the mana types of the item would always Tier up. But they actually had a harder time Tiering those up than the rifts with growth items and mana types were adjacently aligned.

With that knowledge, they started creating rifts by the hundreds. As long as a rift didn't absorb the seed item, it could be used seemingly endlessly, which made no sense to either of them. The seed item should have been doing something to influence the rift, and they expected it had to do with the essence of the item, but they were unable to prove it. Eventually, all of the items got absorbed.

They just couldn't prove if something in the item's spirit was being used, leading to the seed item being eaten by the rift, or some other underlying method. Even with their precautions, the items rarely lasted more than half a dozen rift creations before they were absorbed. Even Erwin and his higher Tier senses were unable to find any degradation in the items before the rift absorbed them on Tier up.

They were still able to produce four other rifts that created growth items at a success rate of over fifteen percent, despite an approach that was more artistic than Erwin, ever the scientist, preferred. They called it a success and packed their bags, receiving more thanks from the guild as they removed the rest of their testing rifts.

As they drove off in Erwin's flying car, Luna appeared next to Matt,curled up in seat.

The instant she appeared, she asked, So what did you learn?

Matt knew that she had been watching, but answered anyway. It would help cement the knowledge in his own brain.

Creating a rift can be controlled, but it's more akin to an art than a science right now. We know that there are variables, but we havent identified enough to make any true headway. That only leads us to frustration and dead ends. Matt checked his AI while ignoring Lunas dangerous squint. Were at phase one of scientific discovery of Riftology.

Seeing Luna smirk at the name and Matt grinned back. No one else seems to have named the field before, so I made one up.

Luna burst his bubble. While Erwin might not have remembered to tell you, and the EmpireNet might not have the knowledge, the field is called Aperology. Aper as in Aperture, an opening, hole, or gap.

Matt frowned at that. It was far too pretentious, but he didn't argue. His idea wasn't any better if he was being honest.

In phase one of the process of scientific change and study of a field, it is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories. We have no existing framework that explains even a fraction of the phenomenon we see in our testing. We are touching upon the second phase, but we are only at the beginning, where normal science has begun. Where puzzles are being solved within the context of the dominant paradigm, which is spotty at best. We aren't even close to the point of refining our framework and creating more precise methodologies, which is the basis of phase three.

Luna, seeing Matt had stopped, snarked, That would have been much more impressive if you weren't reading off your AI.

Matt returned her attitude with his own. I'm not going to memorize obscure facts about the philosophy of scientific discovery. Channeling Aster and adding a smirk, he said, AI good.

Seeing the woman get a dangerous look in her eyes, Matt swiftly continued, What we learned was, we can get the results we want with massive costs. If we're willing to throw millions of mana at the project, and an equal number of material resources, we can eventually get a rift close enough to our desires. Honestly, I think with a better and more robust mana-type catalog, we could solve a lot of these issues. My gut tells me that its not the actual answer, but I think its a large portion of the answer. Im pretty confident that I can create rifts as payment, if that was your tactic to get me the items I need.

Luna sighed. Are you not willing to leave The Path? Even with the math shown to you?

Matt shook his head. He and Liz had decided on that already. After the tournament, we'll reconsider.

Pausing, he added, I do recognize the issue of currency that I will encounter.

Luna settled back and nodded for him to continue.

Personal mana is sold at a loss after Tier 25. Though, I couldn't find a hard reason for that. I only have speculation. He looked at her for an actual answer.

His trainer raised an eyebrow, not about to let him get an answer that easily. So, he said, I assume it has to do with mana stone sizes, but at my Tier that's not really an issue. Personal mana stones aren't our limiting factor yet, with 200 mana per stone. I don't even have 100 mana yet.

Luna shook her head slightly. Correct. It really depends on mana concentration and the aspect of your mana. The easier it is to convert into neutral, the more its worth for general applications. It also is about the size of mana stones. A rift mana stone is the same size from Tier 1 to Tier 50. To hold a million mana, you need a personal mana stone bigger than my house. You can't draw mana out of the stone while it's in a storage ring, so the size is the most valuable part of a rift mana stone during a fight, not how much mana it holds. That's why most people just use the less efficient rapid converters to drain a rift mana stone in the middle of a fight.

She sighed. So yes, trying to jump Tiers will require converting your mana into someone elses, who has a closer mana concentration to the Tier you want to buy at. Otherwise, the mana will be worth a lot less unit per unit, so it will take you more time to create enough mana to equal the standard concentration expected at Tier 20. It will only increase as whatever Tier you want to buy at advances, which leads us back to the original problem. You need to get every drop of concentration out of the potions while you can. Each Tier matters.

Matt nodded at the confirmation of his theory. And that will only make it harder to hide what Im doing. That, as I see it, is the real issue. Even with the best we can do, I assume it's hard to hide that much mana. I just want to help Liz as much as I can. She means more to me than a few years of easier resource gain. I know she won't let me run into any true issues, but I want to support her dreams until I can't stay on The Path anymore. It was always a means to an end anyway.

Luna gave Matt an odd look that he couldnt decipher, but changed the subject. Have you decided what cover you want to use during the tournament yet?

Cover? Like a mask?

His manager shook her head. Not just that, but a combat style that doesn't give away your trump cards.

What? Matt was loud enough that Erwin looked back to where the two were sitting.

Luna rolled her eyes like he was foolish. Matt, do you really think that The Empire lets the truly powerful delvers show off their actual abilities in the tournament? Not a chance. There will be more spies there than you can shake a stick at. No, the best fighters are given handicaps that will allow them to fly under the radar, while still displaying their prowess.

Matt shook his head. That doesn't make any sense. Light and Shadow still won their tournament.

Luna spun the ring on her finger. I will bet you everything I own that those two won despite the restrictions placed upon them. I can't see their actual abilities, but I guarantee that theyre hiding their true skills. We'll do the same with you. I expect you to win if youre going to be foolish enough to actually participate.

She let out a sigh that contained more frustration than Matt could understand. Though, I don't think The Emperor will allow you two to sit on the sidelines if you choose to remain on The Path. I believe he's trying to curry favor with the more neutral Great Powers by showing them that we're creating Ascenders at a prodigious rate. Combine that with a few concessions and territorial treaties, and he probably hopes to keep them out of the upcoming wars, if not pull them under our own banner as more permanent allies.

That seems risky. If we're too strong, won't it invite the Great Powers to gang up on us? Matt felt a kernel of fear settle into his stomach.

Luna nodded. It's a possibility. No doubt about that. But I do agree that it's a risk that we should be willing to take. When Light and Shadow reach Tier 25, there will be a war. But no one expects it to be a war that breaks the rules. As long as we aren't outright crushed, we will at worst lose some territory, and have to make some concessions. But if we have promising ascenders in the later generations, we can ensure that we will rise again. And there are at least two other teams who seem like they can make it. Or are least close to being powerful enough. Not quite on a Light and Shadow level, where they're able to easily fight up three or four Tiers, but able to fight up three with some preparation.

Luna shook her head. If you don't fuck up in the Tier 9 rift, we will talk about this after the tournament. What else did you learn?

The guild was nice. Like a large extended family. At least on the surface, everyone was friendly and helpful to each other. It was nice to see. I think I want that for myself one day. Set up a crafting guild where I don't need to hide my Talent, and create wondrous rifts and items. Create without the normal constraints of mana. I saw how the crafters were limited in their ability to make items and improve their skills. I could remove all of that. One crafter cried when he completed an item two Tiers higher than himself. Matt didnt think that was what Luna was quite looking for, but he felt that it was important to say.

Luna just gestured for him to continue, and they talked about what Matt learned until they reached their normal base.

He was surprised to find out that Luna believed The Empire would step in to buy the excess growth items. It was to prevent the local prices and economy from crashing more than anything else. She said that it was a fair price to prevent the guild from being attacked from all sides. It was a reminder of what his Talent actually meant. A target on his back.

Matt spent time with his friends, who he hadn't seen in over two months. While they chatted with AI, there was no substitute to being there with them in the flesh.

The next day, he and Erwin started on their own project seeing what would happen if a growth item was used to create a Tier 6 rift. It was commonly accepted that rifts past Tier 5 didnt produce growth items at an appreciable rate, but that was for normal, natural rifts. Rifts in nature didn't have growth items used to influence their makeup.

They discovered whatever special property that made the rifts create growth items disappeared at Tier 6, even when they used a growth item as a seed for the rift.

It was disappointing, but not unexpected.

While they tested their rifts, Matt, Liz, and Aster prepared to delve into the Tier 9 rift once again. They wanted to prove once and for all they had what it took.

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