The Path of Ascension Chapter 216

Chapter 216

April arrived back in the Minkalla system with a sigh.

It wasn’t that she disliked the place. No, she rather liked the atmosphere that permeated the carved out section of space, populated with all of the entrants of Minkalla that returned. Mostly old Tier 14s who had just gotten their Concept and were now Tier 15 and immortal. There were also teams of Pathers who went in at Tier 12 and came out with more items, skills, and abilities than they knew what to do with. The members of the military who went in to hunt down enemy combatants and protect their own side’s people were also peppered in. And finally, the scions of the rich and famous who went into Minkalla for the thrill of adventure without their immortal minders watching over them made up the remainder of the gathering.

Anyone who came out contributed to the atmosphere of celebration and joy. Anyone who wasn’t so lucky was in no position to sour the mood.

All in all, the place was bustling and frenetic, two things April enjoyed.

She just wasn’t excited for her actual job.

Luna had saddled her with a rather hefty list of goods and items she wanted procured for the team. In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual, but the manager had also left a large amount of the items to April’s own discretion, which screamed test.

And passing Luna’s test was vital to April’s career as a liaison, trainer, and manager in her own right.

Luna was known in the Pather manager circles, and April already had three pending offers from other managers once she finished with Matt, Liz, and Aster, all as a fairly senior liaison or as a trainer’s assistant. Considering she was relatively new to the liaison position itself, that was an incredible step forward for her career.

But that all hinged on her successful completion of this assignment.

Which meant the free reign Luna had given her was just as much rope from which she could hang herself.

Many of the items were fairly standard. Skills of various stripes, a few natural treasures, some utility gear, maybe a backup weapon or two. She was instructed to get beneficial cracks when possible, and to keep an eye out for ‘anything which would be particularly impactful,’

It was that last part which really was the issue. There was a truly unlimited number of possible items which had the potential to help her team, and just as many which would look useful, but in truth would not suit them for some subtle reason.

Just about anything could help Matt, but at the same time, there was nothing that would be a perfect fit for the boy. Aster was a fairly typical ice mage, but was trying to branch out into some spatial and illusion capabilities for her planned evolution into an Aurora fox and beyond. Accordingly, treasures to help the girl develop her bloodline wouldn’t go amiss, but were nigh impossible to find. If there were ever a time to gain an aurora-aspect natural treasure, though, now was the time.

Liz, though, was the trickiest. She was a blood warrior and mage hybrid, boasting a 50/50 essence split thanks to Back to Basics, but wasn’t content as just that. Blood magic, at a minimum, was too distinctive for her to use in public, and that led to her utilizing water-colored blood, or even just fire whenever she was trying to hide her identity. Honestly, the girl was an utterly fantastic kineticist. Her fire magic as a secondary element, one which her mana aspect and Talent actively penalized, was better than many pyromancers fifty times her age. She’d also recently lost her primary source of kinesis material, with her spatial storage glove having been destroyed in Minkalla.

Fortunately, Minkalla served as one of the largest hubs of inter-Power trade in the entire Realm. Desperate Tier 14s spending all their wealth on gear to assist their delves into Minkalla, and successful delvers flush with treasure from the planet all had money and treasure to burn. Hearing that wealth begging to be spent, the Corporations answered.

Massive companies within the Great Power had dedicated their entire existence to catering to those entering and leaving Minkalla, with piles of skill shards and natural treasures being shipped in weekly alongside custom-ordered gear and even growth items. That drew even non-delvers that were in search of rare commodities to the Corporation’s moon, and they were, in turn, catered to with additional valuable goods from the traders’ wares.

It was a massive, mostly-peaceful, thriving hub of trade that drew people from even the furthest reaches of the Great Powers. Tariffs and import treaties prevented it from being outright overrun by guilds and internal companies, but for delvers and their managers, it was a functionally bottomless well of valuable resources.

April and Jeremiah stepped out of their ship onto the Empire’s moon, with the massive, clockwork planet hovering ominously in the sky. The eternal parties of newly-minted Tier 15s raged on in the background, with their choruses carried on distant winds over the din of the spaceport. Delvers jubilant and somber alike loaded onto the ship they’d just left, not wasting a single second in transporting as many as possible in and out of the mana-starved system.

Registering their presence was trivial, and from there, they loaded onto a Corporations shuttle branded with the MinKouriers logo, and flew to the other Great Power’s ‘moon.’

It wasn’t a proper moon in the truest sense. It was no planet drawn from a high-Tier rift, or even a coreless world from one of their systems. Instead, it was an utterly massive space station, artificial from its core to its surface, and held together through unimaginable amounts of engineering and artifice. The entire structure catered around it being made of Tier 0 materials, so it was never degraded by Minkalla’s habit of eating the essence out of its surroundings. The simple scope of it was difficult to properly visualize, but it held party venues, skill exchanges, auction houses, ship ports, and life habitats that a mortal could spend their entire life in and never see everything.

Their transport ship nestled into a massive missing chunk of the station facing away from the moon, and they joined a line of other visitors seeking much the same as them. The line moved swiftly, as the Corporations knew the value of even an immortal’s time all too keenly, and their procedures were simple and orderly. An AI-backed declaration of presence, affiliation, and intentions, a quick donning of the Empire’s insignia, and they were in. The guards, decked in shining power armor and wielding the glowing rifles that mages in the Corporations favored in place of staves, barely even gave them a glance as they passed, instead constantly vigilant for anyone foolish enough to try something, or missing their insignia.

Everyone was required to wear some form of signifier to their affiliation, be it a badge, medal, armband, coat, or as one dwarf in classic plate armor had chosen, full heraldry. Off to the side, an array of stalls and storefronts sold a number of premade items for all the Great Powers, all boasting low prices and quick custom work.

Both she and Jeremiah had known what was coming, of course, and donned their respective signifiers. April used a simple black and white armband with the Empire’s emblem emblazoned on it. Simple, effective, and not too flashy, but more than enough to meet the requirement.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, went with a half cape with the insignia on his back. She considered it a bit too much, but said nothing. The other liaison had been incredibly helpful during their short time together, so as much as she disagreed with his fashion choice, she kept it to herself.

They followed the hallway and the flow of people deep into the bowels of the station. Spatial expansion this close to Minkalla would be exorbitant to try and maintain, with the greedy planet constantly seeking to drain the mana from every last rune. Eventually, the expansive tunnel, lit as much by the gleaming, illusionary advertisements for vendors as by the overhead lights, gave way to a truly massive exchange floor. From above, it looked like a hive of so many ants, teeming with skill traders moving from station to station, buying and selling skills in a bid to earn consistent profit.

As an outside agent, April didn’t much care about all the endless deals and methods that traders used to try and leverage the simple exchange of goods into wealth. All she cared about was turning her rings full of Minkallan loot into Corporation Credits, and those credits into gear for her charges.

It was here that she and Jeremiah split off, melding into the human mixing pot of the Great Skill Exchange.

Nearly every skill in existence of Tier 32 or below could be bought and sold here, though April needed a constant stream of translations from her [AI] to understand what was going on. She was certain that [Channeled Projectile FI14-RN] and [Channeled Element OZ14-EL] were perfectly informative to those used to them, but they just weren’t memorable in the same way [Flamethrower] or [Mud Manipulation] were.

They sold just the same, though.

Most combat-relevant Tier 8 skills went for a few Corporation kilocredits, the Tier 14 skills about three to five times that, and the Tier 20 skills three to five times that.

For anything beyond that, prices tended to skyrocket, as various militaries tended to monopolize the majority of skill sales, but they could still be purchased. [Regeneration], or [Self Heal HE32-RG] may be on sale, but it would cost her 25.3401… megacredits to actually buy. The exact price kept fluctuating, but it was stable enough with its low volume.

The reverse was also true: there were high-Tier skills that were so obsolete, they were cheaper than even some Tier 8 skills. [Inventory] was one such skill, a Tier 20 skill which had been on par with [AI] for must-have skills until storage rings were invented, which allowed for nearly all the uses of the skill with none of the exorbitant reserved mana costs.

In contrast, [Bandage] commanded a price just shy of two megacredits, but the price history of the skill showed it was on a steady if slow decline. That told her more of the skills were leaking out of the Empire, but that was both inevitable as people resold for a profit and spies collected them. In the end, it wasn’t her job to stop Realm-wide trade of new and exclusive skills. She just noted that she had a way to earn some more money for the kids if she needed to with the few [Bandage] skill shards they still had.

No matter the odd Tier-agnostic pricing that was everywhere, it made selling off her mountain of skills easy and fairly lucrative. A trip to the nearest exchange broker, a long time next to a skill scanner, and all of her basic skills were translated into 39.65 megacredits.

Next on the list were the endless piles of non-skill gear that they’d found in Minkalla. Fifteen sets of armor with a water-resist enchantment, seven swords enchanted with [Fire Weapon], thirty-nine wands with spell accuracy arrays, nine hundred and forty-two swords enchanted with sharpness and durability runes… the list went on. Much of it was ruin-made and while not worthless, wouldn’t command a premium price. Others, like the boots imbued with the ability to walk on any surface, or the throwing knife that would teleport back to the thrower’s hand, were custom-made gear and were where most of the real money was to be made.

There were plenty of low-level auctions going on at all times for just that sort of thing, and plenty of auctioneers ready to take on her commission for a ‘small’ fee. She ended up finding a middleman who promised results with a refund guarantee that also possessed several prestigious certifications, and unloaded much of the bulk loot on her. The middleman would run around and sell her payload for a 5% fee. April knew she’d lose far more than that if she tried to navigate the treacherous floors herself, and this way, she could attend the auctions that actually showed promise as a buyer, not a seller.

After that, she stopped by a different middleman to offload most of the houses and spatial items the children had obtained. The houses would take a bit of time to get appraised and sold off at auction, but it would be a large source of credits to translate into more directly usable items. Fortunately, the more numerous spatial items had more static prices per unit of usable space, and it was very nearly painless to sell them to the half-metal spider behind the counter. Spatial rings usable by low Tiers were quite difficult to make, so the rings taken from fallen delvers formed a considerable portion of the final credit tally.

With a mostly-emptied spatial ring and no particularly promising auctions in the near future, April made her way to the skill exchange, now as a buyer. The price of individual skills may have been universal, but the fees associated with getting them weren’t. If she could find a vendor with a given skill in stock, there were far fewer transfer fees involved, and if she could find several of the skills she was looking for as part of a single transaction, so much the better. She may not have come with a massive set of skills that she was tasked to get, but every centi-credit she could save was that much more she’d have for the auctions that she had her eye on.

[Shadowstrike], or [Weapon Empowerment DK14-SE] was the first skill she found a good deal on. The vendor she’d tracked down had just gotten a couple from another delver, and so was willing to sell to her for nearly market rate. It created a semi-real illusion of a lengthened blade limned in darkness that could actually cut, and most importantly, carried the enchantments of the underlying blade. Granted, both the copying and the cutting power was lessened due to the quasi-real nature of the projection, but that could be taken care of with some modifications. And if April understood the nature of Matt’s Courtly Warfare boon correctly, he could probably leverage it into projecting the illusion at an angle from the ‘main’ blade, giving him extra flexibility with the skill.

Her next stop was getting medical skills for the team.

[Directed Heal] was technically on her list, but wasn’t actually something she needed to buy thankfully as the damn skill was far, far too expensive. The team had found three shards of it within Minkalla, and while one went to Susanne the other two were earmarked for Liz, one for her inner spirit and one for her outer spirit. She’d passed on them during their initial picking-over of loot, but Matt’s ‘abysmal’ mana control made him ill-suited to be a healer, whereas Liz’s blood magic would make her an excellent one. So, she was just keeping the two skill shards unsold, and would be presented to the girl along with a pair of other healing skills to get her started as the team’s dedicated healer. Luna was probably planning on literally beating sense into the girl if she kept refusing on principle, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

The first supplementary healing skill for the girl was [Rehydrate], with the hope it would convert to some kind of [Blood Transfusion]. [Medical Scan], meanwhile, was to be her ‘you will become a healer now’ skill, and would help Liz become a competent one in years rather than decades. Though by Luna’s standards, it would probably be centuries until she was ‘passable’. But April knew this would make things faster and easier, which justified its insane cost. Especially in the other Great Powers where healing wasn’t free, the skills were always in demand making them sell for a premium at the best of times.

She then got lucky and found a vendor specializing in ice-aspected skills. Why someone would specialize in a specific element for selling, let alone selling said skills for below-market rate, escaped her. But she intended to capitalize on her find. Thanks to the oddly-dressed person clad in full arctic gear that also had ice clinging to its edges, [Glacial Spear], [Meadows of Rime], [Floating Snow], [Polar Beam], [Glacial Strike] and [Sheer Cold] all came off her list. And though the last of those wasn’t strictly on Luna’s list for Aster, it was too perfect a skill to not get for Matt. If it was too perfect for Luna to allow him to use, well, she could live with that; it was a damn good skill not usually seen in the Empire.

Like [Breach], a skill she knew Matt had been eying, [Sheer Cold] was sometimes called a channeled-charge skill, where after an initial cast it could accept more and more mana to strengthen the eventual effect. In [Sheer Cold]’s case, the initial cast created a sphere of ice over the caster, and channeling mana into it caused it to get colder. Once released, it would snap-freeze a wide area, with the initial casting cost determining how large of an area it affected, and the amount of mana channeled in afterwards increasing just how cold it got.

[Glacial Spear] was largely a supersized [Ice Spear], and while its exceptionally long cast time made it impractical to utilize on anything but massive or especially tough targets, it would make an excellent finisher for Aster. Even unmodified, it summoned train-sized chunks of ice and slammed them onto its targets, crushing them and freezing them if its jagged tip didn’t impale them from the start.

[Meadows of Rime] was usually only found in the Clans, Federation, and Republic, but it was still for sale here. The skill wasn’t a terribly popular one due to its lack of protection for allies, but for as long as it was sustained, it would spread a creeping frost centered on the caster, slowing down anyone in the area and freezing the ground and air into razor-sharp points that would cut any inside of it. The slowing effect could be modified to exclude certain targets, but the cutting edges couldn’t. Its resulting lack of popularity mostly balanced out the premium inherent to any Clan-locked skill.

The same couldn’t be said for [Self Movement IC20-TX], also known as [Snowdash] or [Floating Snow On A Windy Frozen Night]. [Floating Snow], as the Empire had named it- which got the idea across just as well in far fewer words, in April’s opinion- was an excellent escape skill. It turned the caster into a flurry of snowflakes, allowing them to drift to a nearby spot before reconstituting back into themselves. The only real downside was the inability to cast any other skills during the five-second transformation, but it was still an invaluable protection against many physical attacks.

[Polar Beam], [Freeze Ray], or [Ranged Attack IC14-EB] was a favorite in both the Corporations and Guilds, with a price to match. The attack bore a few similarities with [Ice Spear], but it didn’t use a physical projectile. Instead, it was a freezing ray that froze a single target solid. Most conventional armor did nothing against the ray, and only those which specifically protected the wearer against cold could stop the attack.

[Glacial Strike] was the last ice skill on her list, an ice meta-skill that would coat the target of whatever skill it was cast alongside with a coat of ice, weighing and slowing them down substantially.

As she was wandering through the crowds, a notification pinged her AI that a set of fire-based natural treasures had sold at auction, helping her recoup some of her losses with the ice skills. She noticed a caped Guild man yelling at a bored-looking teen about skill exchange rates as she wove through an open spot in the crowd, but didn’t stay to watch the debacle, as a pair of armored guards were already on their way to break up the altercation.

Most likely, the brightly-clad man would get a fine and either a warning or an ejection from the trade hall that might last for a few weeks at minimum. The Corporations had very little tolerance for abuse of any sort from either side, especially when it made them look bad, as this current commotion did.

She made it to the first auction that held any promise just as a leaf-bladed growth dagger was sold to a Federation woman with silver lines tracing her cheekbones, and just before the bidding for a ring with a massive diamond set on it began. According to the itinerary and the announcer, the Tier 5 item could store a single spell from either the wearer or another person and release it later. She’d considered it for Liz, but her mild interest quickly fell off as the price rose beyond her discretionary budget for the moment.

That same discretionary budget rose as a notification informed her the kids’ Dew of the Last Dawn natural treasure sold at a separate auction room, but the ring still wasn’t worth the price tag as it swiftly rose through the megacredits. Two Empire shoppers were locked in a bidding war, and it didn’t look like either were about to back down as the price rose beyond anything reasonable.

Eventually, it sold for a truly ridiculous sum, and a pair of clawed gloves with an armor-piercing effect were up next. Again, it was potentially decent for Liz, but not worth joining the bidding war between a bearded sect man in their ridiculously baggy robes, and an anthropomorphic fox only wearing a kilt that confirmed their allegiance to the Monster’s Collective.

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As a void blackberry sold in the interim, April set out once again on her quest for new skills. The auctions were ongoing and she had the itinerary up on her [AI], so she could see if anything that might be useful for her team came up.

[Mist Manipulation] and [Steam Manipulation] were some of the final Tier 14 elemental manipulations that Matt didn’t have yet, and they were about as expensive as April had expected. Still, she was a bit annoyed that she’d gotten the former when she did, as the skill dropped a whole two kilocredits in price just a day after her purchase.

She did manage to intercept an ongoing trade between a Federation man with vividly green eyes and a skill vendor, after she overheard the former list [Weapon Empowerment NM14-ES] as one of the shards he was trying to sell. [Heart-Piercing Stab], as she knew it, was a slight improvement to a simple [Mana Thrust], in that it could be directed in other directions after it was cast. And as a skill without an innate mana aspect, it stood a decent chance of surviving the conversion to Liz’s inner spirit. In any case, she managed to buy the skill off the Federation man at market rate, making it a better deal for both of them.