The Path of Ascension Chapter 354

Chapter 354

 

Matt sat in his office as he tried not to look at the vast fields of rifts visible outside his window.

Things had been going far better than he could have ever hoped. Kees ran a tight ship and kept everything on task, and the things Matt needed to deal with on a weekly basis amounted to a few hours of work, but those hours were precious.

Now that the other aperologists were settled in and working, the guild was crunching through rifts and rift testing at an incredible speed, and they all felt they were close to the breakthrough of creating other types of aura rifts besides those of the basic elements. Team three had been on such a roll that Matt’s competitiveness was nagging him to beat them, and time spent in his office wasn’t conducive to winning.

This was, however, what he had signed up for when he decided to create a guild. And he couldn’t complain too much when Kees was handling ninety nine percent of the work.

And there were some interesting ideas coming out of the various departments.

A few years might not be a lot of time, but a year and a nearly unlimited budget was a recipe to create miracles.

Or at least the seeds of them.

The alchemy team had developed a prototype for a new Tier 10 durability potion that lasted a full four hours, which was a full thirty percent increase of the current potions on the market. Better yet, the only side effect was explosive diarrhea, which they were confident in fixing with some more tweaks to the formula. After that, it was just a process of simplifying the formula and standardizing the steps so Tier 10 or 12 alchemists could produce it.

He hoped they would then be able to downstep the potion to at least Tier 5, but for only having a year of time it was a great first step. Matt had publicly rewarded the team in question with their bonus.

That was exactly the type of innovations he wanted to see.

And innovate they did.

The runic teams had been hard at work, not trying to simplify runes themselves, but their self selected goal was to make enchanting easier to get into. Matt had been surprised at the idea when it was presented to him, but he loved it.

Low Tier professions were relatively expensive. Especially when someone was trying to learn at the same Tier.

After all, a Tier 5 could afford thousands of attempts by using Tier 1 materials, but for a Tier 1, those materials would be considered a substantial investment and risk.

There were three main ways to break into any profession.

The first and easiest method most knew of were post awakening classes. Those who could afford the upfront costs learned the basics at the school. After teaching the basics, they gave the students enough materials to test things. Ten or twenty attempts to learn a crafting method wasn’t a lot, but it was typically enough to give the newly awakened with a knack for the profession a chance to shine, even if they weren’t Talented. Combined with a Tier 5 or so established professional, that was enough for most people to at least get their foot into the door.

The second was to join a guild, corporation, business, or rarely a noble house who was willing to sponsor someone. Most of the time, they required someone to have a Talent for the profession or show considerable skill before they were willing to invest.

Finally, the last method was to do what Matt had done; buy the books and figure things out on your own.

But even he had started at Tier 4, and could afford the basic materials or source them from rifts, which let him brute force his way through the learning process.

Most people who took up crafting professions didn’t want to delve for themselves.

The team wanted to try to add a fourth method, and while Matt wasn’t sure it would work, he was willing to throw mana at the issue and see if they could figure something out.

The idea wasn’t necessarily new, but it was interesting.

They wanted to create nearly completed formations, as they were the easiest for beginners to create, or at least more so than talismans and weapons enchanting. The goal was to use incremental steps to teach one lesson at a time, while also giving the budding crafter in question something they could hopefully sell.

That last caveat had caused Matt to go into a tangent of research about just what non-delvers used formations for and who bought them. The answer was a lot, just not what Matt was used to thinking of as enchanting work.

They weren’t making protection arrays to defend from monsters attacking, alarm formations to wake you up when the monsters tried to slip into your camp, enchanting weapons or talismans to better kill said monsters, or any of the combat adjacent uses Matt used enchanting for.

No, the enchantments they typically created were things like essence gathering arrays to boost non-delving cultivation, arrays to light areas in a specific way that the typical store bought lights couldn’t do, hasten the growth of plants, or stop undesirable weeds from growing.

There were even entire formation set ups dedicated to outdoor gatherings. Temperature control disks which could be used outside, and surprisingly, the largest seller in most worlds, bug repellant formations.

With [Cracked Phantom Armor], Matt had never really bothered with those kinds of formations after they had reached Tier 5 and created their Concepts, as he could use them to keep bugs away.

Formations didn’t tend to last very long, as a general rule. Sure, it was possible to make a formation that could last basically forever, same as permanent enchantments, but it was debatable whether such things could truly be called ‘formations,’ as they needed to be custom-built for their one and only deployment location. And at that point, there was no reason to use a formation instead of a proper enchantment. Even the highest-quality formations tended to degrade after a couple of centuries at most, as wear and tear set in, but most lasted decades at best.

As a result, formations had been optimized to be fairly low-cost but temporary and essentially disposable enchantments on an immortal timescale.

The team wanted to create a series of almost completed, but commonly used formations that taught important lessons in enchanting to take a beginner from the academic stages to an acceptable level, while also providing them with a sellable product.

The last company who had tried this had licensed the idea to a number of guilds as training aids, but the idea hadn’t really caught on since guilds were usually able to offer hands-on training to their budding enchanters. They had tried to pivot to academies, but their fees caused the prices of the lessons to reach a level that anyone who could afford the lessons could afford to learn the traditional way, leaving the idea somewhat dead in the water.

Matt’s guild intended to get around the issue of price by just publicly releasing the half completed formation plates’ designs. Even if they didn’t replace the typical lessons academies taught, they could be a useful teaching aid. They weren’t even that complicated or hard to make, and if produced in batches by a Tier 5 enchanter, they could be stockpiled during slower times of the year, even by those same students once they progressed past the bigger phase.

Their main issue was the previous company had a patent on the method, and wasn’t interested in selling the patent for a lump sum. They instead wanted a royalty on every plate created.

Between the idea of a teaching aid being basically unpatentable, their patent being unused for so long, and how distinct Titan’s Torches implementation would be, using public and inhouse developed runes, any lawsuit would be a mostly cut and dry case in their favor if they dared to sue him according to the legal department. Still at Kees insistence, they were making preparations just in case anyway. Personally Matt doubted they would spend that much to try and fight them but it was always good to be ready.

Thankfully that wasn’t his job and he left the legal battle to the lawyers as he reviewed the progress made by the ambient cultivation division.

They had grand plans to make cultivation easier for non-delvers. Though, their efforts were still in the planning stages and it would be at least a decade before they had anything ready, according to Kees.

After finishing up his paperwork, Matt checked in with Kees before returning to the courtyard where Erwin, Aisha, and Theodore were working.

In the last year, they had made substantial progress and they thought they knew where the issue of creating more complex auras came from.

Aura was metaphysical and they were creating rifts in a fairly crude fashion. Nature didn’t need to throw a sword into the area– aura rifts were perfectly capable of appearing naturally, after all– but there were things they could do to try and get there.

First and most ambitious was flooding a mana-less planet with Matt’s endless mana to the point it started to create its own essence cycle. The other aperologists didn’t know the mana sample was Matt’s, but that idea was so out there that Matt couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe when he was a Tier 50 he might do something like that, but even small moons took unfathomable amounts of mana to produce essence, let alone an essence core.

To that end, Matt had five of the fifteen aperology teams working on trying to create specific rifts without items.

Like they learned with the rifts converting neutral mana to all six basic mana types, they suspected that by correctly controlling those mana types, their ratios, and the way they interacted, they could create all types of rifts and possibly reduce de-aspecting on Tier up.

One of the new aperology guild members, Alfonso, actually had some anecdotal evidence that shoving a rift right to the edge of Tiering up with mana, but deliberately keeping it from doing so, and keeping it in an isolation formation, could reduce the chance of de-aspecting on Tier up significantly.

Like most of the aperologist guild members, Alfonso had dabbled in the science after reaching immortality. But unlike others, he was never a delver. He was a bit of a statistical anomaly among immortals.

Alfonso was born on a Tier 28 world in Rusty’s kingdom during Agatha’s rebellion, and had been a typical young adult commoner who had been swept up among the first Sophron dynasties Empresses reforms. As he told the story, he hadn’t cared about the reforms as he never expected to do anything with his cultivation even after he was given the opportunity to awaken.

With a Talent that gave him a small boost to paperwork, he hadn’t expected anything to come out of awakening except a slightly longer and healthier life. If cultivating hadn’t been something of a fad at the time for those who had been denied the option their entire lives, he admitted he might have never bothered. But there are always anomalies, and Alfonso was lucky enough to create his Concept in just a year of work, which let him advance past the Tier 4 bottleneck even though Bottled Concepts hadn’t been available to commoners at the time.

Instead of throwing himself into cultivation and delving like many at the time did once they created their Concept, and paved their way to immortality, Alfonso was happy to plod along and never quit his job.

Living on a high Tier world meant he had been able to stay just ahead of the age curve to the point where he actually reached immortality.

With forever in front of him, he finally quit his desk job, and by his own admission, moved to one of the first formal pleasure planets.

Existing in various forms across all Great Powers, in the Empire their existence was historically a mostly informal affair having been set up by individual nobles to encourage the more indolent immortals to leave more valuable worlds. The fact this helped Tier up lower Tier planets was a mostly incidental side benefit until Agatha formalized and standardized the system.

Now they were Tier 1 or Tier 2 planets that the Empire had to incorporate to catch more valuable worlds as they drifted by in chaotic space to the greater Empire network but otherwise had little use for. Mortals could and did live there but few relished the idea of living on a world where even the most common rift was rare after all. Instead Immortals were incentivised to move there in exchange for vastly reduced taxes, with the only requirement being that they release at least 70% of their mana into the air per day, which boiled down to having a full mana pool most of the day as any excess generation leaked out naturally.

Statistically, most who went to such a world never really pulled themselves out of the rut, but Alfonso grew bored and eventually started dabbling into the various crafting professions. Eventually, he fell in love with aperology.

Used to a slow life, Alfonso was more than happy to make rifts and run a test for a few hundred years before moving onto the next one.

That long term testing allowed him to have evidence that given roughly a decade in isolation, a rift could stabilize enough that its chance of de-aspecting was drastically reduced.

They were actually testing that on the mainland away from all of the testing that happened on the island, but a decade was still a long time for a single test.

Instead, those five teams were trying to artificially recreate the conditions Alfonso saw in his personal testing, namely mana stability.

The going theory was that rifts converted neutral mana into the six basic elements for their internal working like a framework, and used neutral mana to fill in the gaps. As a rift was left alone, it would slowly start converting that neutral mana into elemental mana, which, for whatever reason, took much longer than the seemingly instant process when the rift was initially formed.

They hoped that by creating instances and forcing the rift to spend neutral mana, they could then feed the rift the perfect ratio of elemental mana, which would then be integrated in the place of neutral mana and have the same stabilizing effect. That all hinged on the hypothesis that the rifts didn’t just convert the elemental mana into neutral mana, which they had no way of knowing without first figuring out the perfect ratios and then running tests by Tiering up the rifts.

Matt and most of the Titan’s Torch aperologists believed that was the fundamental truth of rifts, and if they could learn how to manipulate rifts on that level, they could crack aperology as a whole.

Currently, his team was part of the race to create variable aura rifts, but they were closer to cracking the level two mana types more than anything.

The first question about level two mana types was fairly easy. What mana type did you want?

For his purposes, Matt had split the level two mana types into three categories: easy, tricky, and hard. Easy mana types were things like ice and lava, where even vague environmental associations were more than enough to spawn them in abundance. Tricky mana types were things like crystal and sound. They happened, for sure, but only in rare situations, and especially in crystal’s case, overwhelmingly not on the surface of a planet.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Then you had the hard elements. Healing, blackwater, and divination foremost among them.

There were, so far as anyone knew, no natural rifts of those elements anywhere in the Empire. Well, House Alkaza claimed to have a natural blackwater rift, but also refused to let anyone actually verify it, so it didn’t count.

Normally, that was only half an issue, as it was entirely possible to elementally aspect a rift just with sufficient mana of that type… But they’d found that aura was overwhelmingly more likely to spawn in rifts if they adjusted the isolation formations to more closely mimic its natural environment, rather than a blank void.

While Matt would love to produce aura rifts of those mana types he had no intention of starting with the hardest mana types.

So, he’d be starting off easy and going from there.

While elemental rifts were already somewhat in the minority, and most of the remainder were of level one types, level two mana type rifts still showed up with decent regularity. Ice could be found at mountaintops or near the poles, sand was found in deserts, mud in swamps, lava in volcanoes, wood in forests, and so on.

That was where Matt and the rest of the guild thought the answer was and what they were trying to replicate. At least partially.

Matt was, of course, starting with ice rifts.

It wasn’t just because of Aster, though the fact his bond was currently animatedly adding to the discussion going on in the Ascender chat was a factor, but more so that fewer people would complain when an ice rift exploded than when a lava rift did the same.

Even if low Tier lava wasn’t actually dangerous to anyone here, it was more annoying to deal with cooled lava than melted ice.

Cleaning out his dozen rift formations, Matt started filling all of them with ice mana without a sub-aspect.

When rifts formed, Matt waved his hand and dissipated nine of them which hadn’t taken to the mana type he wanted.

Making a note with his [AI] Matt kept filling the rifts until he had twelve Tier 1 ice rifts.

Then, he started to slowly add in air and water mana, the two mana types that created ice mana, into half of the rifts while simply adding ice mana into the remaining six.

The aperologists’ working theory was that the level two mana types seen in nature wasn’t just because the elements existed in nature, but that the constituent parts existed where they mixed as well.

The sample size was too small to really conclude anything, but three of his rifts Tiered up with air and water survived the Tier up without unaspecting, versus the two ice rifts that failed. After uploading his thoughts to the aperology section of the AI, Matt kept creating rifts until he had a full dozen ice Tier 6 rifts.

It was time to see if any of them had aura.

Popping into the rifts one after another Matt cursed, dissipating all of them.

He had felt good about the creation of rifts using air and water mana. So far, that method had been mildly successful, and the single common method that had been used when someone in the guild did create the odd level two aura rift.

Still, it was obvious that they were missing something. Some piece of the puzzle that would allow them to not only create level two aura rifts, but the more esoteric aura types like sharpness.

Not willing to give up, Matt ran through another dozen tests, raising a rift from Tier 1 to Tier 6, hoping for aura, before tossing in the metaphorical towel and going back to the drawing board.

Or just giving up for the day and paying more attention to the Ascender chat.

His mind went to the swords they were using as the rift seeds.

Back when he did these tests as a Tier 6, they had needed the swords to actualize aura, and all of the adamantly rare successes used a weapon. But the more they tried to break into level two mana types, Matt felt the sword seeds were only parity correct.

After running through a few ideas, Matt decided to challenge that initial assumption.

Their initial belief was that a weapon was needed for a way for the rifts monsters to actualize the aura and that seemed true. At least on the surface. Doing everything the same but not having a sword or some weapon, didn’t create aura rifts, so there was clearly something to the theory.