The Path of Ascension Chapter 356

Chapter 356

Matt listened as Tholly finished his report. “Discounting the application that Wraith’s friend sent in, we’ve intercepted sixty-three applications from likely spies, eleven attempted infiltration’s through false-identity applications, one spy who’s been undercover for some decades, nine attempts at embedding divination anchors within our premises, and six distinct sources for divination’s attempting to bypass our wards.”

Matt had made sure to call Aster to figure out what the story was there, but he supported the otter’s attempts to find a job based on her own merits. Fortunately, she was considered qualified for the position, and the certainty that she wasn’t just looking for a quick resume-boost made her an easy pick.

They did make sure to extend the offer to Cameron herself, rather than her false identity. While a part of Matt would be amused by the inevitable antics that would no doubt arise from Cameron trying to pretend to be someone else while working… it was easier to just make it clear from the start they knew what she was doing and not make her play out some two-bit comedy movie.

Shaking his head, Matt concentrated on the vast amount of spies trying to infest his guild. “Do we have an idea of why the other Great Powers would be so insistent on getting in here?”

There was a small pause between Matt’s question and the answer. “I apologize my lord, I hadn’t realized there was a misunderstanding. Most of these attempts, all but one false identity attempt in fact, have been traced to entities inside the Empire.”

Matt’s mind, which was mainly turning over aura rifts, refocused onto Tholly. “Wait, what? Really? I assumed it would be the other Great Powers trying to pry out our secrets.”

“And I’m sure they are my lord. Or at least they will. We have little in the way of defenses against true deep-cover spies, and that is but one way the other Great Powers may attempt to undermine our counterespionage efforts. While Titan’s Torch is performing cutting-edge research in many fields, most of our research fields are not ones which other Great Powers care about. Our impact will be much more local, and to that end, it is local entities who, even if they are incapable of outright stealing our discoveries, can better position themselves to take advantage of our discoveries if they know of them beforehand.”

Matt pursed his lips trying to not take that personally. He understood that profits made the realm spin, but spying on him? Risking the ire of an Ascender for profit?

There had to be more to it. “Do we have anyone pegged who is spying on us or examples of what they are going for?”

Tholly replied almost instantly. “The most obvious are the rifts, but I suspect you knew that my lord. The second largest project of interest is the travel engine.”

Hearing that, Matt set his jaw. If people were trying to steal his patents and then claim them as their own, they were going to find out he wasn’t beyond knocking some sense into them. And if they were too high Tier, he was sure Lila would be happy to chew on some people for him.

“Oh?”

Tholly didn’t seem to notice Matt’s tension as he said, “A few notable companies are already retooling their engine lines seemingly in preparation for the new design.”

“So they aren’t trying to steal and pass off the designs as their own?”

“No one that we have noticed has been trying to do that. I suspect few would. Few people wish to draw the ire of an Ascender, and while the reputation your team has for being easygoing does exist, it is not especially widespread. Ascender Worldwalker and Duke Waters have driven home the lesson that it is better to work around Ascenders rather than trying to get one over them.”

Pulling Cato into the conversation, Matt pinged him with a brief so he could get caught up. “Do you think it would be worth it to issue a statement that I don’t care if people spy so long as they keep their reasons to setting themselves up for future efforts?”

Matt got two instant responses. “That is an awful idea, my lord.”

Tholly’s response was almost pleading as he said, “Please don’t create that much work for us, my lord. Even on a very basic level, the more attempts there are, the more likely spies are likely to slip through and reach more valuable information.”

Matt sighed and rubbed his temples. He hated the political aspect of the guild and being a noble in general.

“Ok. I hear you two. Bad idea: I’ll keep it to myself. But what can we do here? Should I go and punch someone for spying? Frankly I don’t care if they are just trying to position themselves better for the information, so I’m not really feeling a beat down.”

“That would be ill advised.” Cato’s words were clipped, and Matt took them to heart.

“Ok but we should be doing something right?”

Tholly was the one to answer this time. “We are my lord. Anyone who we can find actionable evidence against will be charged with all appropriate charges. Alas, just maneuvering into a good position with information that seems stolen based on loose evidence isn’t actionable. They will claim they got the information through an unknown information broker or the like, and that might even be true. It’s even properly true in some cases. Information about new technologies that are going to be open for opportunity are going to be very valuable, and companies will pay a lot to not be caught flat footed.”

Matt nodded as he understood that. His issue was that he didn’t like people spying on him like this. It felt invasive and wrong.

“Should we do a press release or the like to try and stop people from reselling the information like this? If everyone finds out then they are on the same page.”

Cato’s response was too fast for Matt’s liking. “I would advise against that as well, my lord. At least in the case of the travel mana engine. We are not the only ones trying to corner that market, and announcing just how far along we are is asking for someone else to jump ahead and dispute our plans by releasing something half baked and making a mess of the patent process. Our current plans are historically the best, but if you desire, I can look at early announcements.”

Matt waved even though Cato couldn’t see him. “No, it’s fine. I just feel antsy knowing people are spying, and I can’t do anything about it. I feel like I have no control. Thank you, Cato.”

Turning his attention back to Tholly, Matt asked a few more questions about how their security was going before Matt felt reality warp as Liz stepped across Lily to hover over the guild.

Matt was going to fly up to her, but she dropped in next to him and flopped into a nearby chair.

He didn’t need to ask what was wrong and just gave her a few moments to collect herself.

“Kalfla has a new government.”

It took a moment for Matt’s mind to pick up on the country’s name and he was thoroughly confused. “Well, it’s about to anyway. I started putting pressure on the countries to start catching up with our goals. They decided the homeless issue was enough of an issue that they were going to… rebel isn’t the right word, but they decided that getting the homeless off the street was best accomplished by arresting the homeless. Annndddd, I took that personally.”

Matt fully understood that. Them flaunting her orders like that would have irritated anyone.

He just wondered if she had broken the veil in doing so. That would be less than ideal, but he wouldn’t mourn its loss for too long. The longer things went on, the more he felt they should have just revealed everything day one. But Cato’s words about keeping to what they chose being the best course of action rang in his mind.

However, Liz smiled, which surprised Matt. “I’m not the only one who took offense to that, thankfully. Kalfla wasn’t a great place to begin with, but their movement to arrest the homeless sparked off a sort of revolution. A revolution that was made easier by certain leaders… ‘vanishing.’ Apparently the parts of government that hadn’t taken leave of their senses thought disappearances would be better optics than knowing they were arrested by an external power so once they knew the gig was up they moved on their own to clean things up. Sadly the attempt was only half successful, their absence only further fanned the flame of revolution, and while there’s no new power yet, there’s officially a splinter government that’s pretty rapidly taking over from the previous one. Only so much I could do to make it completely nonviolent, but it’s been mostly bloodless.”

Liz rubbed her face, her smile vanishing. “I got the factional leaders read in, but I’m still angry at the situation. I know I said I’d help, but… could you take point on Soerilia? At least for a bit? I’m worried I might do something unwise if I have to keep arguing with those idiots for the next decade. Something, probably the arrests, set me off, and I want to make sure I figure out what’s up before I snap.”

Matt ran his fingers through her hair in the way he knew she liked and nodded. “Sure. I’m happy to do so. Want to hear about our latest efforts on making aura?”

Liz nodded. “That sounds wonderful.”

“You only love me for my distractions.”

“You are distracting.”

Matt went on to tell Liz about his most recent projects, which helped him sort his own ideas. So by the time she was ready to go back to work, he was reinvigorated and ready to crack down on it.

He had his own idea about sharpness aura. While they had discovered they needed a weapon to help condense elemental aura, Matt believed that crutch was part of what was limiting them from making non elemental aura.

Team two had managed to create a Tier 6 light aura rift with no seed just under six months ago, and while they’d been unable to replicate the feat, it was neat to see that it was possible. Hopefully, if their investigation bore any fruit, it would be useful in making sharpness aura.

After learning that weapons were the key to elemental mana types, Matt and the guild’s aperologists were split on the non-elemental mana auras. Half of the aperologist believed that they simply hadn’t found the right weapon seed mana type combinations for the non-elemental aura types, but the other half believed that non-elemental auras either didn’t need or outright couldn’t use weapons as seeds.

If the latter was true, that would explain why no one had been able to recreate things like sharpness aura, but it seemed to contradict what they did know about aura rifts.

Matt was, however, willing to try it.

With an ingot of perfectly pure Tier 6 iron, Matt used his Concept to splinter the block of metal into a handful of incredibly sharp metal shards.

Tossing half of the shards into the rift circle, Matt found the next open rift slot. They had needed to institute a rift Tiering up and creating schedule with so many of them on the island, and while it slowed them down, it prevented failed tests. Which would be more costly in the long run.

Once it was his turn, Matt created a rift with the seed of sharp metal shards and metal mana from a sword cultivator with a sharp sub-aspect.

His first fourteen attempts only yielded normal rifts and Matt dispersed them, looking for something different while slightly tweaking ratios as he went.

Matt knew that he wasn’t Talented at aperology, but like cooking, he felt like he had a knack for the art, and so he trusted his gut.

They had already seen that there was something strange with how rifts classified weapons, and so far, they had always needed a weapon to form the rift. But what if it wasn’t necessarily a weapon in and of itself?

What if it was only that a weapon had something that the rifts needed instead of it being the weapon itself, and there was something that had what the weapons had, but wasn’t necessarily a weapon?

It seemed like there must be something like that, but Matt didn’t know what that could be.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

So he started experimenting.

His first experiment was to take a sword and sharpen it to a razor’s edge. It would be worthless in a battle, the smallest sheer force would break the edge, but if someone wanted a really good shave, this was the blade for it.

It… didn’t do anything.

There were some basically cosmetic changes to the monsters, to be sure- some birds gained razor-sharp feathers, and the terrain was more likely to be spiky and jagged- but there was no meaningful difference in the mana and essence of the rift, not in the ways Matt was slowly beginning to associate with aura rifts.

After more experiments to make sure that he wasn’t just unlucky, Matt went back to the basics.

What did aura need?

Well, it needed normal aperology things. It needed his mana. It probably needed a weapon. And it needed… an appropriate environment. The appropriate environment wasn’t usually too much of a hurdle, as their formations could simulate some basic external conditions, enough for them to work with level 1 and 2 mana types at least.

They’d tried a bunch of seemingly-appropriate environments, mostly metal and earth based for sharpness, but none of it had worked.

Which now made little sense to him. After all, they weren’t trying to make elemental aura so why were they using elemental mana? Sharpness was non-elemental, and applied equally to glass, metal, and even chitin.

There was however, one mana type that they hadn’t experimented too much with, despite it being well within their capabilities. It was even a mana aspect they’d used regularly but only as support instead of as the main mana type.

Neutral mana.

Neutral mana was a bit odd, as far as mana went. It wasn’t really elemental in the end. It didn’t have a manipulation spell, it didn’t have any special associations, and skills that used it were as basic as they got, just standard mana constructs given marginal form. Some people went as far as to call it the element of magic itself, or said that neutral mana was mana-aspected, but arcane mana fit that description just as well as neutral.

It was sometimes called a level zero mana type due to its almost anti-complexity. If higher-level mana types were intricate paintings, neutral mana was the blank canvas upon which the art was created. Its effects were basic, but completely element-agnostic.

Just like sharpness aura.

Sharpness was basic but non-elemental, and as he’d worked with aura, Matt was getting familiar with the ways in which even basic elemental aura wasn’t really basic. Flame aura wasn’t heat aura, but both were fire aura. Wave aura wasn’t ocean aura, but both were water aura while neither was water, and so on.

The guild had tried dozens of different mana types to get sharpness aura to form but nothing had worked which led Matt to asking himself: What if sharpness worked the same way?

What if it wasn’t just a type of non-elemental aura, but rather a type of neutral aura in the same way that heat aura was still fire aura but fire aura wasn’t heat.

With a wave of his hand, Matt cleared his testing area and reassembled it.

Elemental injectors were primed with neutral mana sub-aspected with seemingly-relevant sub-aspects. Cutting, sharpness, severing, and anything else Matt thought might be useful.

Swords flew out into their respective arrays, and Matt changed the formations to simulate the sorts of environments where non-elemental rifts abounded. That was actually trickier than it sounded, as despite the fact that non-aspected rifts were the most common types of rift, there weren’t many environments that actively supported their formation.