The Path of Ascension Chapter 350

Chapter 350

From the latest reports, it would take Erwin another month or two before he and their first team members would be arriving, but Matt wanted to get started now. He had a perfectly good guild complex to play in, and he was damn well going to use it.

Back when he was Tier 6 and making aura rifts with Erwin, they had only been able to reliably make aura rifts from Tiers 6 through 9. After they had given the research to Manny, and he had put his own teams on the project, they had discovered a way to reliably make Tier 5, and more importantly, Tier 4 aura rifts.

By far the largest demographic in need of aura were Tier 4s. Giving them the ability to gather aura themselves would enable a new scale of production of aura, as lower Tier rifts were cheaper to run and more of them could be created. Some higher Tier worlds’ lords would undoubtedly create Tier 6 or 7 rifts to maximize the amount of monsters per instance, but Tier 4s would find it difficult to afford the costs associated with that aura until all people who had used one bottled Concept had gotten their hands on the higher Tier aura.

Matt had been given an information packet with the exact details of how they had managed that, but he wanted to figure that step out on his own.

Or his guild’s own.

This was most certainly going to be a team effort, which is why the few guild members they had recruited already were damn good at their jobs.

Tholly, as if reading Matt’s mind, interrupted him. “Sir, it would be prudent to fill the central mana stone sooner than later.”

Acknowledging that the spy was right, Matt went and charged the central spire of his guild’s entrance hall. It was a little ostentatious, but the massive rechargeable mana stone brimming with power made a statement to anyone who saw it.

Once he finished that and Tholly went to settle into his kitchen, Matt went back to the open area that was set aside for aperology.

Pulling out a blank Tier 25 formation plate, Matt paused as he really looked at the complicated premade formation plate.

It might look like iron, but it was an expensive alloy of metals further augmented by alchemical washing that ensured the plates were incredible conductors of magical energies, and also strong enough to handle hundreds of thousands of mana flowing through them without degradation.

This plate in particular was one he had grabbed from Camp Lightfoot, and was made to military standards which, while not the best, had a higher floor of acceptable quality than some of the civilian plates that were cheaper. The plate was perfect for a Tier 26 like Matt, who could afford the cost as it allowed for not just stronger enchantments, but ensured they lasted longer.

Which was exactly why Matt couldn’t use them.

His aura rift and all items coming out of his guild needed to be replicable for, if not low Tiers, then barons and lower Tier guilds who would be ruling the Tier 5 and under worlds the rifts would be most useful in.

That didn’t mean Matt couldn’t use the higher Tier plates and then work on making the formations work on lower Tiers after they figured something out that worked, and that might even be the correct play, but it felt wrong.

Aperology was technically a science, but to Matt, it was more like an art form. Instinct and vibes had always played a significant role in his aperology, and right now, he felt like he needed to use lower Tier formation plates.

To that end, he cast a quick [Portal] to the capital of Lilly while shifting his mask’s appearance so people wouldn’t identify him.

Once at the city, he went on a mini buying spree and bought out three different shops’ blank Tier 5 formation plates.

They were cheap and mass produced, which was exactly the type of plate that his poorest customers would be using. Although, if his plans for his guild are remotely successful, he was confident a standardized aperology design would hit the market, like so many other basic functions such as temperature control. Come to think of it, maybe he should have his guild work on said design at some point.

New plates in hand, Matt started sketching out the isolation formations, and he was immediately grateful he bought the cheaper plates. Their low Tier materials prevented him from using the more complex runes he knew thanks to their limited engraving space, and forced him to think outside the box.

Carefully laying out the formation plates to create the circle in the courtyard reserved for rifts, Matt used a combination of [Telekinesis], [Metal Manipulation], and [Wood Manipulation] to carve the runes he would need into each of the plates.

As testing proceeded, they’d need to use increasingly more-complex runes that nobody, with the probable exception of some Talented enchanter somewhere, could freehand. But he had tools for when that day came. Still, it was undeniably satisfying to simply wave his hand and create dozens of the same formation plates that, as a Tier 6, he’d spent hours dutifully carving.

Using his mana ring, he filled the enclosure with a freshly awakened Tier 1’s mana, which was as neutral as mana got besides rift mana stones. Even if that step probably wasn’t strictly necessary, it was a baseline that anyone could replicate. Which made it a good starting point for all of his next tests as regions on planets, let alone planets themselves, could have subtly different mana makeups.

With as good of a base as he could manage, Matt moved on to create a second identical set up.

Matt hadn’t done any serious aperology since he’d developed his Intent, and the new Domain stage brought with it a new sub-aspect, which they were calling ‘density’, to color his still neutral mana, alongside his more familiar endless sub-aspect.

While quite useful in combat, making his spells marginally more durable and difficult to dispel, they didn’t know if its presence might somehow interfere with the way his endless mana frequently made aura form.

But, that’s what the tests were for. It could just as easily make aura even more common, and there was only one way to find out.

With a flick of his fingers, he withdrew just shy of a hundred identical rift-made swords from spatial storage, and telekinetically maneuvered each blade to the center of its respective formation, satisfying the first condition for an aura rift.

Namely, a weapon. He and Erwin had speculated it was because it served as a focus of intent that was nonetheless entirely external to nearly all creatures. The fact it was specifically a channel of attacks might have been important, because it didn’t work with shields or armor, but they hadn’t had enough non-attack spellcasting foci to confirm that.

That particular test would come later. He would test it, but later.

In his first rift, he pumped in an old sample of his mana taken from before he created his Intent, and in the second circle, he directly channeled his mana into the formation along with the same fire mana with a hot sub-aspect that had worked so long ago.

He nearly fried the formation plates with even a paltry ten thousand mana a second, but he was able to lower the input before he did more than cause some residual light to bleed off.

A childish part of him wanted to pump his entire mana pool into the effort just to see what would happen, but he wasn’t willing to ruin this test.

As the mana reached its critical point, rifts formed, taking with them roughly two-thirds of the swords seeding the rifts. Matt winced slightly, but it didn’t ultimately matter.

While it was a bad first round, he had hundreds of thousands of that exact sword, and millions of identical weapons overall, spread across thousands of sets. It was simple enough to put bounties for low Tier rifts that regularly spat out identical weapons as rift rewards and pay thirty percent over market price for the weapons. He’d initially wanted to do double, but if he did so at his Tier, he’d have to not only pay the standard down-Tier purchase tax, but an additional extra tax for trying to corner the market so excessively.

Still, thirty percent served his purposes well enough. He might have spent the last two centuries of war fighting battles, the Empire had continued on. Rifts were still delved on cooldown, meaning he had a massive stockpile of weapons ready for rift testing.

Withdrawing and seeding a new set of swords, Matt continued to pump mana into the formation. When the rifts reached Tier 2, they let out a flood of monsters, and with his higher Tier perception he was able to watch as identical fire salamanders flooded out just to be shredded by the blades of wind and force that the formation plates cast.

That was exactly what he wanted to see, and he continued to Tier the rifts up until they reached Tier 4.

As less than five percent of the rifts de-aspected during that process, and he only needed to replace a dozen swords, Matt started to get excited. If he ignored the initial absorptions, it was an auspicious sign.

On account of nostalgia, he restrained his spiritual awareness and strode forth, entering the closest of the endless-only rifts to inspect it with his eyes. Inside, he found a fairly standard Tier 4 rift, a moderately wide canyon with a couple of streams of lava flowing down the sides.

What he didn’t expect was to feel the rift trembling at his presence.

He felt like an adult stuffed into his baby clothes, buttons straining and fabric one deep breath away from tearing. He was confident that if he moved too quickly, he would collapse not only the instance of the rift, but the rift itself.

Using his Intent he cloaked his presence, firming his own reality while trying to distance himself from the local space, using the same method higher Tiers used to prevent a rift from noticing their existence and lowering rewards for low Tier delvers.

The rift seemed to almost sigh as the fabric of reality seemed to return to normal, and Matt did exactly that while wiping the sweat from his forehead.

It was the first time he had ever really felt his Tier like that before.

No matter how strong he became, he wasn’t capable of destroying reality like Tier 36s and higher were able to in low Tier worlds, but a rifts instances weren’t as strong as real space.

With his cloak firmly in place, Matt moved at a mortal speed to the nearest lava flow.

Even having felt his Tier, the monster, filled with the rage of the rifts, launched itself out of the lava and tried to eat his face.

Matt grabbed it with his Concept, still careful to not use too much power, and held the monster aloft as he inspected every inch of the creature.

Once he was done, he went through the rift looking at every monster including the boss encounter, which was a larger salamander whose back was aflame.

Exiting the rift, he inspected a second rift, this one made with his current endless and dense mana.

Once again, it had produced a lava canyon filled with salamanders. There were a number of differences, but at least the monsters were similar enough to make this comparison comparatively easy. He brought a salamander within arm’s reach and inspected it, comparing it to the prior monster he’d looked at.

These salamanders were denser.

Their essence distribution was, on average, half a percent more skewed towards durability, and their skin, muscles, and bones all averaged at two-thirds of a percent heavier for the same size. It came with a bit of a penalty to their flexibility, but it was still noticeable. Which, considering the relative diversity the salamanders had within a single rift, was no mean feat.

Of course, that could have also just been entirely coincidental, and Matt was seeing things where they simply weren’t.

There was no sign of aura yet, but that wasn’t too much of an issue. He wondered if the increased density would be a consistent feature, but only time would tell there.

After dispatching the monster, Matt cleared the rift, looking for any other consistent differences between the rifts. Most of the grunt work was handled by his AI, of course, as it logged all of the ways in which the multitude of rifts were similar or different.

He then ducked back into the first rift for a minute to confirm a few observations he’d made, as there was still another ten minutes before the instance changed.

It was funny, back when he’d been a Tier 6, fifteen minutes seemed like nothing, but now it was practically an eternity. He could accomplish more in fifteen minutes now than he could have done in days back then, and it felt that long as well.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Still, his desire to do things by hand mostly fulfilled, Matt loosed his full spiritual perception, flooding into the freshly-opened instances and studying all of the rifts before him in concert.

Though not all of them had kept with their fire aspecting, Matt saw what was an ultimately standard set of rifts. He was able to confirm that his density sub-aspect did in fact influence monsters to have an overall increased focus on physical toughness, averaging about a one percent increase, but there was no aura to be seen.

That was annoying.

While he waited for his primary test set to reset their instances, making sure that he’d stepped into each of the rifts to start their instance timers, Matt relocated to a side courtyard for a bit of the more artistic side of aperology, creating rifts with variants of rune arrays, taking advantage of a lot of what he’d learned since he was Tier 6.

The first was just the same pattern without an offensive set up. From what little aperology he had learned over the years was that most guilds and planetary governments preferred to have their own separate defensive formations created in the rooms that housed the rift, which could then be activated by a guard who watched over the rift or deadman switches.

The separation made the formation plates simpler, which meant cheaper and easier to replace in the case of a malfunction. It also allowed them to change their security without impacting the rifts.

Matt knew it was his past whispering in his ear that meant he liked the idea of a built-in offensive function. Objectively, though, he knew the enchanting space was better spent on other functions.

The next iteration took advantage of the added space by adding in a secondary isolation function, typically used to isolate Seekers when they used their ability, that would hopefully help isolate the enclosed space from more outside variables than the simple mana barrier.

Each iteration built on the idea of taking advantage of the space the lack of offensive runes would have taken up, but by then, his original testbed of rifts had cycled and he spent a few seconds inspecting them all again.

There was nothing too out of the ordinary with the rifts, and still no sign of aura, so Matt went ahead and Tiered them up once again.

An annoying number of the rifts simply collapsed as he powered them above the planetary Tier, but enough stuck around that he just kept going with his tests. None of them had aura at Tier 5, and instead of waiting around for yet another cycle, he decided to just Tier them up to Tier 6 and see if he had any more luck there.

That turned out to be a bad idea. Attempting to create seventy-odd rifts two Tiers above Lilly’s own resulted in some interesting flows in the essence that wound up starving all but four of them, and the subsequent collapse of seventy-odd Tier 6 rifts somehow disrupted those four rifts as well, forcing him to start over.

He repeated the process again, and after three more failures, Matt just took it upon himself to make two rifts. One with his new mana, one with his old mana.

Annoyingly, even with just two rifts to work with, it still took a good dozen tries before he got both rifts at Tier 6 and not de-aspecting. But eventually, he got there, and he had to stop himself from automatically tearing the rifts apart as he caught sight of wispy, phantasmal red flames dancing across the backs of a salamander in his old, endless-only mana rifts.