The Path of Ascension Chapter 278

Chapter 278

 

Allister nodded as he watched the proceedings.

Another set of Ascenders from the Empire.

It was a good thing. Despite everything the other Tier 50s said, the Conglomerate of Guilds wasn’t just a pawn of the Empire to be absorbed down the line. He and Emmanuel had a dozen treaties to prevent such a thing, and while that didn’t mean their successors couldn’t change that, the weight those agreements carried made it harder.

And more than that, Allister trusted the Empire. Emmanuel first, of course, as the person he knew best, but the relationship had survived from previous generations. Notably, the Empire was instrumental in the expansion of the Guilds thanks to some rotten luck in the last few millennia. Planets over Tier 15 just hadn’t been appearing near their regions of space and it was only thanks to his predecessor combining their power with Georgios that they were able to pull a Tier 30 planet deep out of chaotic space and towards the Guilds.

As a Tier 50 himself, he knew just how monumental a task like that was. He could destroy a Tier 30 world easily enough, but moving one the required distance through chaotic space without pulverizing everything in the star system would be almost impossible. Extending chains of low Tier worlds out to capture the true jewels coming out of chaos space was almost always easier than moving the higher Tier worlds directly.

Tier 50s were usually too busy to be personally expanding the borders of their territory.

Which was why the fact that Georgios had helped in such an endeavor was a proof of allegiance. You didn’t go that far out of your way for a mere vassal.

That, and a dozen other acts had cemented that fact in Allister’s mind.

They just needed to win this war.

The momentum set in these early days would prove instrumental, he knew. And while there were no new Heroes upcoming to aid the war effort yet, Heroes always came out of nowhere, an unstoppable ball of force sending all other plots careening out of course. But even a Sidekick who reached Tier 18, 20, or even higher with the Caped Crusaders was an elite fighter in their own way.

None had been deployed quite yet, but they were an invaluable source of potential strength. It was simply a matter of choosing when and where to unleash them. Their lives were valuable, and he had no desire to send them to their deaths. But with a second set of Ascenders, the war would soon redouble, and if he didn’t act now, he surrendered the war’s momentum to their enemies.

And once that had started, it would be all but impossible to stop.

He had taken his own risks through getting involved in this war. If the opposing coalition managed to beat the Empire, they wouldn’t be satisfied stopping with a mere pound of flesh from their primary enemy. They’d take their reparations from the Empire’s allies as well, and the Guilds had enjoyed very little in the way of recent expansion to begin with. They’d been tremendously misfortunate as of late, and a massive blow to them now would be… catastrophic.

The ceremony concluded, and the chain of portals he’d been using to view it through snapped shut. Allister took to his feet, the spheres orbiting around him picking up a bit of momentum, but he stilled them with a thought as he paced about his office. He always thought better when moving.

The real oddity was the last message Emmanuel had sent to him.

It had hinted at jealousy and an invaluable treasure, with the implication that people would stop at nothing to get it. That he should be ready, because people would seek to take it, to tear them apart. That this war was almost a distraction from a true war that they were certain would take place, and if they needed to lose this war to be better-prepared for the future, they should.

It was a worrying message, and if he didn’t know Emmanuel so well, he would think it was either a threat or declaration of intent. But he did know Emmanuel, so he knew the man was perfectly content with the Empire’s current rate of expansion. He wasn’t the type to risk burning everything down for a few more twinges of power. So perhaps he was expecting something akin to the old Federation to happen to the Empire? It shouldn’t have been, while there were a dozen or so worlds between Tier 43 and 46 somewhere out in the depths of Chaotic Space, they were all unimaginably far away, with only his connection to the Realm itself telling him they were there.

His future sight shouldn’t be strong enough to predict a true war this far in advance, so what was going on? He couldn’t sense anything massive in motion, certainly nothing past the point where stopping it would be catastrophic, so why the man was so certain was a mystery.

Allister’s only clue was the half-dozen vials of Elder Dragon’s Blood attached to the message. Not that they even were Elder Dragon’s Blood. Eclavorn was an Elder Dragon, and this surpassed even him in rank. Allister had previously managed to secure a few vials, but they had never come cheap. To be simply granted six more was… surprising. Was it a buying of goodwill, or the Emperor saying the impossible prize everyone would want was connected to the Elder Dragon Blood?

Something to consider.

For now, he’d simply make use of the unexpected gift. While he had no bloodline himself, Mephistopheles, White Horse, and The Subterranean would certainly appreciate what it could provide them. One would go to the Cosmic Forge to see if they could make anything interesting with it, and the final two he would hold in reserve… for now. He didn’t wish to start all his avalanches too soon. Perhaps a new Hero would appear with a bloodline, or another beast would earn his trust. Emmanuel had really gone all out to ensure the Guilds were ready for the next war, and he didn’t intend to squander that generosity.

Real wars weren’t to be trifled with.

Even these more civilized wars weren’t to be underestimated, but at least a loss there wouldn’t mean the death of a Great Power.

No matter what, it wouldn’t be the Guilds burning.

Allister wouldn’t allow that.

***

Janet sighed as the video of Quill, Torch, and Scoop’s identity reveal was sent to her, and she waited with clenched fist as the information reports came streaming in about their histories.

Much of it was as she expected. The man was from some backwater planet of no importance, steeped in problems that just so happened to remove most records of his birth and early life. Ideal for hiding some sensitive experiments and inserting him right where he would need to be in order to minimize accountability. She could practically read Emmanuel like a book.

As she read, however, her anger grew. It wasn’t just that they had suspicious pasts and time on the Path, it was downright comical.

To start with, finding a bond egg as a Tier 1. Possible, certainly, but even at the very beginning of this preliminary report there were some flags being raised. The primary witness to the rift reward, executed on the spot? Convenient. Very convenient.

Next, the B-7112923 training planet, taunting her by bordering the Republic. Matthew just happens to stumble into Elizabeth, just as one often runs into the daughter of some of the most powerful people in the realm. Soon after, they register a growth item, and Janet nearly dropped her drink when her agents cross-referenced future videos to ascertain what they found: a pair of rings.

Mara could not have been more blatant in setting her daughter up with her future husband and getting them a pair of growth rings under the table. Naturally, the children could never know if the rings had come from some source other than the rift as presented, and it wouldn’t have pinged the relevant AI. But the signs were all there.

To cover up any evidence of the misdeeds, Mara then stole the planet shortly afterwards. Yet another convenience for them.

The reports were somewhat mixed for the middle of their time on the planet where the Empires vassals had fought for sport, but her spies had already picked up some irregularities. An auction house had flagged their group as selling far more materials than they should rightly have, and no one in their group had any indications of being a seeker. Most likely, they were being handed wealth in some deniable format, and had all the indiscretion to be expected of teenagers with more money than they knew what to do with.

And then their group somehow attracted the attention of Luna, who had nominally been retired. Luna, who had trained Mara and Leon, and could have been complicit in making sure that fewer future leaks could occur. Void magic was particularly good at erasing evidence, after all.

It wasn’t until their tournament that Janet had to pause again. Elizabeth seemingly had a second growth item, and from as best as her agents could tell, it was a blood growth item. No recording of having bought it. Did they expect Janet to believe that possibly the sole low Tier blood mage in the entire Empire happened to find a growth item that specifically fit their incredibly niche style? And yet again, a planet was sucked up into the void that was Mara’s collection, breaking numerous Empire laws in order to hide the “source” of the growth item before anyone could look into it.

The so-called Scribbling was suspicious, admittedly, but that was a known event with myriad speculation. From her position, it simply read as even more taunting from Mara and Leon, showing that they had some method of skirting the normal rules on resources afforded to Pathers.

It was Aster who showed the next discrepancy, the next slip up. She was registered as being born an Arctic Fox, a rare but standard breed. Somewhere between the tournament and their Minkalla run a few years later, Aster seemed to have transitioned to being a Winter Fox, as confirmed by her statements at the academy and some inferences of their sightings within Minkalla.

The question was how, and almost as importantly, why?

How would a lowly little Arctic Fox cultivate their bloodline enough to fully change it, at such a young age? The resources required to do so would be enormous, far more than could ever be allowed on The Path. Additionally, winter was a rare element, not one that could be found on any typical planet to refine a newly forged bloodline. It would be incredibly foolish to change bloodlines to something so rare, and potentially lock out any future advancement. Even the resources afforded to an Ascender couldn’t help, if those materials didn’t exist in the first place.

But Janet had a hunch there.

Helen.

JR had pursued Helen for millennia, purportedly for her cooking and great beauty, but that speculation had always felt shallow. If Helen had some undisclosed ability to help progress bloodlines, it would explain JR’s dogged pursuit and Aster’s incredibly strange advancement in one fell swoop. All under the noses of the Path guidelines, as Aster was only loosely bound by Path rules.

It was the mother hen running the foxhouse.

Janet would send agents to check what she could, but she didn’t expect much. The one other thread to pull was the incredibly strange timing of Frederic becoming a royal. Emmanuel had selected his royals a short few thousand years previously. Why add someone new, someone so misaligned with his previous ambitions, and after so little time?

The only conclusion Janet could reach was that Frederic had found something, something that Emmanuel couldn’t risk getting out, and had given him a position of incredible power in exchange for his silence. Was it related to Lilly, where Emmanuel had booted out the established nobles and installed a loyalist too inexperienced to ask the right questions?

Then came Minkalla, which she had frustratingly little information on. It was well known that Luna had taken great pains to prevent an unexpected Inspiration, but why? The question haunted her.

She came back around to the greater question of Minkalla, which possibly tied into this same plot. Aiden Waters, on his rise to greathood, had gone into Minkalla a monster and come out a thing of legends, with not just a great run, but a theoretically ideal sequence of floors. Seven Concept boosting floors in the optimal order for the greatest Domain specialist in recorded history. It defied explanation. All Gladiators and their ilk defied logic and faced the impossible in their own ways, but even still there were limits.

The only coherent answer anyone had was that Georgios, in the moments of his ascension, upgraded his Talents and saw the path to making a beast of nightmares, and sent that plan to his son. It was utter lunacy, better fit for the pages of a conspiracy tabloid than an actual discussion she’d had with her cabinet, yet when life was insane perhaps it was the insane themselves who were most sane.

For Elizabeth and her entourage, however, Minkalla was where the oddness ended, as if a line had been drawn. In the best of times it was strange, that a life so full of oddities and impossibilities would suddenly become normal, but there the records were. The increased scrutiny of Pathers past Tier 15 was what best explained it, but it was difficult to say.

Maybe they had simply gotten better at hiding their cheating.

There were only two possible explanations, overall. The first, most coherent one, was that this newest group of Ascenders was an incredibly sloppy operation led by the two most incompetent leaders in the Empire, Mara and Leon. It fit neatly, that the benefactors of unbridled nepotism failed the biggest undercover operation in history less than a tenth of the way into Emmanuel’s reign. It had holes, as did any explanation, but it fit the evidence.

The second possibility, that this was the masterwork plan of a man on his way to the higher realms, was daunting. Impossible to disprove, equally impossible to believe, but it explained the extreme oddities in recent millennia. Minkalla was the biggest point of evidence in its favor, as no known mechanism could influence its inner workings, but it had been coerced into making a demon anyways.

It begged the question, was all this sloppiness in crafting the newest Ascenders intentional? A necessary step in a grand plan ensuring a new group of peak fighters? If so, the future looked dim for her darling Republic.

She was almost impressed at how brazen Emmanuel was, but she couldn’t deny she might do the same if she did have a repeatable way to create powerhouses.

Seeing another Great Power grow so much in just three immortal generations was worrying in and of itself, but she felt she was in a nightmare being forced to watch her people’s slow and steady enslavement happen in front of her. All while unable to do anything to prevent it. It was unflattering, but the Great Powers were like crabs in a pot, unwilling to see any of their number step on their heads to get away from the boiling water.

She sneered as she thought of herself as a crab before snorting at the image of Emmanuel reduced to the same unflattering form. That visage would suit his smug, overly inflated self worth perfectly.

Amusing thoughts aside, the metaphor fell apart as she knew they weren’t fighting for control so much as their own freedom. If the Empire stepped on their heads and managed to keep up even a fraction of their growth for another two, possibly three immortal generations, even the collective might of the other seven Great Powers wouldn’t be able to resist the Empire’s.

That would mean a true war, where combatants over Tier 35 fought, like what happened when the Federation was split apart, it would mean planets would burn. Inhabited planets filled with the people who voted for her, believing that she would be the best person to protect them.

And Ascended damn it, she would defend them. As she would defend their children and grandchildren.

But to do so, she needed to ensure the Empire lost this war and they could restrict its growth and expansion.

Janet took a deep breath, the action still helping to clear her mind after all these years. She was growing irrational again, possibly even jumping at shadows. She needed a break. It did her and her citizens little good if she allowed herself to drift away from their actual concerns, growing out of touch and distant from the concerns of the ones she had sworn to protect. It happened too often with her peers, but she never wanted to forget her roots.

Forget what was at stake.

She sent a message to her cabinet, letting them know she was going for a walk and would be out for a month or two, but if they needed her input on something urgent she’d still be reachable. But they could handle themselves well enough. Unlike the Empire, they didn’t demand all of their upper-level cultivators be in a dozen places at once, stretched so thin that [Clone] and gear dedicated to making that specific spell cheaper was an outright requirement of office.

No, she was getting over-fixated again.

No more thinking about the Empire.

She left her office, striding down the long corridors but waving her guards to stay in their places.

She wouldn’t need them, where she was going.

Once she was at the entry hall, she passed into the Between.

The sensation was never not strange, but she infinitely preferred the shifting, confusing, but tamed semi-reality the Republic had established over the tumultuous chaos that the other Great Powers had been content to endure. Even if the pathways of Between were only this robust near their core worlds, the opportunities and security it provided was unmatched in the Realm.

Conveniently, there was a newly-incorporated Tier 2 world not far from the capital. Janet emerged from a wooded stretch of the Between in a shaded grove of trees, tucked away from common perception and just outside the heart of a major mortal city.

Her perceptions expanded almost involuntarily, but Janet forced herself to pull back, pushing down on her cultivation, suppressing her aura, and forcing it all to task. She refused to be a voyeur, spying upon the mortals simply going about their lives and peering in on their most intimate moments. She was better than that, even if it was technically illegal for her to be present. She just… couldn’t have been bothered to submit the proper paperwork, not when she was in such desperate need of clarity.

Besides, the paper to approve someone above Tier 45 visiting a sub-Tier 5 world would have landed on her desk in the end anyway, so she told herself it didn’t really matter. And it didn’t.

She picked a random direction and started walking.

All around her, people were just being… well, people. Children were laughing and playing, parents were yelling at their children to behave, adults were going about their daily lives. They went to work in the morning and came home in the early evenings, cheer filling the air as they simply lived. People were singing on street corners, colorful lights decorated buildings, and there was a sense of joy that permeated everything.

It was beautiful.

This was what she was fighting for, she reminded herself. For mortals to just be mortals, living their lives unaffected by the whims of nigh-omnipotent deities, powerful enough to hear their cells divide, mighty enough to rend their city in half with but a thought. If she had been so inclined, if any immortal were so inclined, they could have ended the lives of millions of people before any of them even knew what was happening. She’d seen what even minor scuffles between cultivators could do to a mortal world, and the results were never pretty.

It was why they stayed separate.

This close to the capital, the veil separating mortals and cultivators was practically airtight. There were a few Tier 5s living in seclusion across the planet, in the rare situation where a rift break could happen. A few Tier 1s and Tier 2s would cycle in every so often, keeping the rifts under control, and ideally the mortals would never even know they were here.

It was a good system, a stable system.

Unlike the Empire, which touted itself as being so great because they just chucked everyone into the rat race of cultivation, leaving most of their most vulnerable citizens subject to the whims of a guild to be bought and sold like a commodity-

Janet took a deep breath. No, she wasn’t going to think about them. She was just going to sit on her bench and watch the children playing on the frozen stream winding through the park.

Hmmm.

She wasn’t certain about that ice. It looked a bit too thin to support the half-dozen children clambering all over it. Fortunately, she could and did fix it with a thought, thickening the ice and ensuring the safety of those most vulnerable to the chilly waters beneath.

She tried to do what she could, after all. It wasn’t like she was blind to the benefits which high-Tier cultivators could bring to mortals, not with how often the Interventionists argued for it, but determining what was and wasn’t acceptable interference, to say nothing of what actual malicious actors could do, simply made the trade-off distinctly negative. Overall, worlds where the Veil separating them was stronger tended to be more populous, happier, and the people on them had a higher sense of self and life satisfaction.

She wouldn’t inflict that on people. There were always ways for the lucky, the driven, and the exceptional to find their way past the Veil. She’d done it, after all.

“Do your parents know you’re out on the ice?” she called out to the kids.

Her voice attracted a few glances, then the group scattered. Ah well, it was about what she expected. At least they weren’t scared of her, though one of them was wondering about what she was wearing.

Oops.

It was midwinter here, and her outfit was not only entirely too light for a mortal in this weather, but entirely incongruous with the styles worn by the people around her. She must have been too distracted by the Empire to have forgotten such basic precautions. Still, one of the first things just about any cultivator learned in the Republic was how to nudge the perceptions of mortals away from any unusual happenings around them with their Domain.

A subtle flex of her Concept ensured that none would notice her clothes being so radically different from the locals, but she still pulled a coat out of her Talent. Weather and temperature didn’t bother her any more unless another cultivator was responsible, so she barely noticed.

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It had been even longer since mere Tier 2 weather could bother her. Probably hadn’t since… well, before she was a cultivator. When she was just a kid on a distant Tier 3 world, with no real knowledge of cultivators. Oh sure, there were rumors about people who did impossible things, and she grew up on the stories of kids who stumbled upon a fantastical hidden realm and were whisked away on grand adventures, but she lived in a mortal neighborhood with mortal parents and with mortal friends.

It wasn’t until she managed to see through the Veil of a visiting cultivator, notice their odd clothes and tendency to vanish into a solid brick wall she later learned was hiding a rift, and confronted the man, that she learned the truth. From there, the rest of her life was practically out of one of her childhood storybooks, and while her parents had passed away untold ages ago, they had loved her and supported her through it all. Even if they didn’t know the full truth of their world, they were happy, and they were happier when they didn’t know the reality of their daughter fighting monsters from nightmares to grow stronger, into a Realm filled with ancient empires and massive conspiracies.

She was still reminiscing about her parents, now long dead, when the smell of coffee hit her.

It took control to walk at a mortal’s pace to the nearest diner who’s door had opened and not rush over.

She entered, and following the actions of the man before her,, stomped her boots to knock any snow off them. Not that snow could stick to these boots, but blending in was important.

It only took a moment for an elderly woman to return from where she sat the man down and said. “The bar is open if you‘d like, but I can seat you at a table as well.”

Janet smiled and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “A table, please.”

“Right this way honey. It’s blistering cold out there, let me get you something to warm you up.” Having said that, the woman was already turning around to grab the pot of coffee.

Janet smiled and thanked her as she took the proffered cup and pretended to look at the menu.

The smell of the coffee was delicious, but she knew that it would taste correspondingly awful. Still, it brought back thoughts of her childhood, and she let herself ponder the situation with the Empire in between memories of playing in booths similar to the one she sat in now growing up.

The Empire needed to be stopped, or planets like this would be lost in the shuffle. In the rat race that so many cultivators threw themselves into. Lost in the rift breaks that would claim lives. Lost in the progression as they were born behind the Tier of the planet and unable to take more than the first few steps.

If the Empire became hegemon, that is exactly what would happen.

The Republic wasn’t perfect, she knew that, but there was a reason they had been the second strongest Great Power for the last two million years until the Empire overtook them. They were strong because their system worked.

It had harmony. Balance. Mortals could live their lives free from greater concerns, while those who were more ambitious could, with some struggle, become cultivators and try to improve themselves.

Sure, it wasn’t easy, and many, many people who nominally wanted to become cultivators didn’t, but the paths were there. On higher-Tier worlds, Awakenings were pricey but affordable for the driven. On Veil worlds, people would leave… not gaps, but weak points. Places where the curious and dedicated could fall through in a safe and controlled manner. Lots of those people never even left the planet they were born on, but those who wanted to, could.

It was opt-in, and those who didn’t never needed to feel bad about it. They could live their lives however they pleased. It was that which the Empire tossed so merrily aside. Mandated Awakening of everyone ensured that nobody was immune to the perils of their first Talent. Those who wished for a quiet life but awakened an Exceptional talent had their lives ruined just as surely as those who awakened a Detrimental talent without a firm, usually higher-Tier, support network.

Even in the Republic, where they had never done anything so foolish as publicize Talent ratings, some abilities were just too obvious to not impact the lives of those Awoken. The requirements of Awakening meant that even those whose Talents were harmful still had some form of support from their Awakener. Those who bought awakening on higher-Tier worlds were well-off enough to afford support on their own, or cultivate ambient essence until no matter their Talent, they could work better than a corresponding mortal and so find employment that way.

It seemed to be a nuance the Empire had wholly ignored. So many of their people simply languished at a low Tier while the Empire spent fortunes to raise planets to Tier 5. That might be a laudable goal on paper, as the long term benefits were undeniable. But the expenses were mind-boggling, and that put the people of the Empire under a greater tax burden, which limited their economic freedoms.

Janet didn’t want to see her people put under such burdens.

Her people had enough burdens of their own.