The Path of Ascension Chapter 358

Chapter 358

Baron Haluk Avci watched as Ascender Titan walked the reporter through the third aura rift in a row.

The first had been a simple fire aura rift with fairly standard, Tier 4, oversized insect monsters that had fire aura clinging to their carapaces. The second had been a mist aura rift, Tier 4 as well. But the third was the crown jewel.

A Tier 4 sharpness rift.

The possibility of such a rift had been circulating amongst those who cared about such things, and Haluk had been waiting for confirmation of its existence before deciding anything.

Looking down at his daughter, he asked, “What do you think of the rifts?”

Fatma gestured and caused the projection to rewind to the oversized kobolds with metal shards sticking out of their flesh, the image hanging in the air before the assembled family. “The monsters look difficult. Ascender Titan said the monsters weren’t guaranteed, but likely, so it’s possible we can get easier rifts than this. But even I would be hesitant to throw myself into battle against these beasts.”

Haluk nodded and Fatma gestured to resume the interview and they watched as the Ascender went through a few rifts of various types.

The thing that caught Haluk’s attention was the method. Ascender Titan shared it freely. “To create a Tier 4 rift, you need an aura sample of the type you want. Fire aura to make a fire aura rift, and so on. If you are close to any of the regional capitals, the capital itself, or Lily, we have aura samples that you can have freely. The Emperor and the royals are also offering the same thing, along with the mana sample you need to use to make the aura rifts form. However, if you don’t wish to wait for that, the information on how to make a Tier 6 aura rift will be provided, so you can then use that as your source of aura.”

“Emir, are you confident in making the formation plates?”

Emir, Haluk’s oldest, spoke as Haluk’s attention turned to him as the interview started to repeat. “Not really father. I may be Tier 15, but those Tier 20 plates look complicated. I’m good, but not that good. Beyond that, the actual creation of the rifts will probably be difficult. Very difficult. I somehow doubt it’s quite so easy as he made it look for the reporters.”

Haluk could hear the unspoken question in his eldest’s voice. ‘Do we really need to leverage ourselves so heavily, father?’

His oldest son was born under a cautious star, and was always hesitant to take risks, which was exactly why Haluk was considering Fatma as his successor.

Haluk continued to stare at his son until Emir finally said, “So long as nothing is false, I believe I can manage the creation of the rifts, father.”

Looking at his wife, Isra, Haluk simply raised an eyebrow. She had been watching her contacts within the alchemy channels, waiting for news.

“The recipes were made available and they seem… possible. I hesitate to say they are correct, but my experience says they aren’t blatantly wrong. I doubt Sylvan Potions would risk publicly putting their names on formulas that wouldn’t work, but the formulas seem… unrefined. Sylvans said they had limited time to simplify the thousands of scattered formulas that existed around the naturally occurring rifts, but beside the basic four elements the formulas are… specific, and will require higher Tier alchemists to concoct. In fact, I’m not sure any but the best Tier 4 alchemists can produce even the basic four potions. I’d wager that we need at least a Tier 5 or 6 alchemist to consistently create the potions.”

The news wasn’t ideal, but nothing Isra said changed his mind. Everything was possible, so he was going to reach.

Standing Haluk made his decision. “Then let us begin. Queen Tur’stal already confirmed that she has access to the materials and will send them to anyone who is willing to invest heavily into the aura rifts first.”

Emir joined Haluk in standing. “Father, the terms may be generous, but there is still a risk in destroying so many of our world’s rifts. The backlash if this doesn’t turn out correctly will ruin us.”

Haluk nodded, acknowledging the point. “Yes, but this is our chance to level our position and our world’s Tier. We are only three jumps from East Flower. If we can supply the quadrillions who live there with aura potions in place of Concept potions, we can make fortunes we never could have considered before this opportunity. A risk, yes, but a risk worth taking.”

Having made his decision, Haluk started meeting with his planetary officials.

His family’s holdings were rare in that their star system naturally had two planets in the habitable zone that were similar Tiers. Tier 8 and Tier 7 respectively. In the grand scheme of the Empire, Tier 7 and Tier 8 worlds were nothing impressive, but those planetary Tiers were the perfect ones to create a plethora of Tier 4 rifts, which was why he had been following Ascender Titan’s announcements so fervently.

Few civilians ever bought a bottled Concept, but that statement was relative. There were no good estimates for how many people made it to Tier 5, let alone Tier 15, but it certainly wasn’t the 6% that Empire officials so often liked to quote. The study they used to get that value was quite dubious, and its conclusions could be best described as ‘excessively optimistic’. Not that he’d begrudge the Royals their fair share of propaganda, when it was undeniable that their reforms were effective. Padding the numbers was a time-honored tradition for anyone in power, and he’d do the same thing if he were in their place.

But such optimistic statements didn’t help him, and that was why he ensured he always kept tabs on his own demographics. Not that such a task was easy, of course. But even the most generous estimates he had for how many people Awakened on his pair of planets that subsequently made it to the mere peak of Tier 4 was around three percent. Give or take.

With an annual birth rate of about two percent and a population of 1.2 billion people, his population would need an absolute maximum of 720,000 aura potions per year to satisfy all reasonable demand. 24,000,000 new citizen’s born each year, and three percent of them eventually reaching Tier 4 came out to a best case scenario of 720,000 potential buyers.

Running a rift on cooldown had a maximum of 35,000 cycles annually, so even if they could only extract enough aura for a single potion per delve, instead of the two Ascender Titan had found in his testing, that meant he’d need less than twenty rifts to supply his entire population with aura.

Most lower Tier worlds didn’t even break a hundred million population, which meant their nobles could get away with far less rifts than he could. Probably two or three rifts depending on their exact situations and desires. That was assuming their civilians reached Tier 4 at a rate comparable to his own worlds’, which was… unlikely.

On the other side of the spectrum there were the higher Tier worlds. The Tier 20 and higher worlds. They were rare and were always centers of their respective regions.

East Flower, the Queendom’s capital, boasted a population in the quadrillions.

With ten trillion new births every year, East Flower needed, theoretically, six hundred billion aura potions every year to meet their demand. If not more, because the capital worlds probably had a higher rate of people reaching Tier 4 than even his own worlds.

That was, of course, entirely impossible for those worlds to actually sustain themselves. At their Tiers, it was incredibly expensive to create and maintain low-Tier rifts. And even then, accidental Tier-ups and subsequent recreations were common. No, if the capital worlds wanted a steady source of aura for their citizens, they would have to outsource the production. Either lower-Tier moons, or planets in the same planetary system, or bringing them in from the sort of world he hoped to forge his into.

To satisfy East Flower alone he calculated seventeen million rifts needed to be delved in, perfect order, per year. With proper planning, it wasn’t unheard of for a planet to have up to ten thousand ‘tamed’ rifts, the sorts of which guilds had in their training grounds or PlayPens ran. Rifts that had the proper infrastructure to maintain them even under heavy, heavy load, rather than the outlying rifts that were delved more sporadically. No one cared if those rifts fell apart and reformed.

He didn’t know of any worlds that had attempted to maximize every rift they had, not that anyone had enough mana to even power that many rifts, but if he were to ignore mana as a constraint… maybe twenty-five thousand rifts? With industrial rift harvesting on a scale never seen before, a single planet might be capable of producing a maximum of 875 million aura rift-runs per year. Then, say refinements regarding aura potion production paid massive dividends and resulted in an average of five potions per delve, that set an absolute maximum upper bound of 4.4 billion potions made per planet per year.

That meant even in this absolutely, absurdly unrealistic hypothetical scenario, East Flower would need at minimum a hundred and fifty planets wholly dedicated to the production of aura just to keep up with its demand.

In other words, his location near East Flower guaranteed that he would have access to a never-ending black hole consuming aura potions, and even if he converted every rift he controlled into an aura producing one, it wouldn’t matter. So long as aura potion creation was profitable- which there was practically no way it couldn’t be, if it was even half as easy as Titan was describing- he could create an industry with stability the likes of which was scarcely seen. His people would prosper, his barony would prosper, and he would prosper.

It would be quite the undertaking, to be sure. He would need to kick-start what amounted to multiple entire industries, from rift-makers and rift maintenance to the alchemists actually tasked with creating the potions, exporters and delvers… and that was just the first-order requirements.

Some of it could be done by high-Tiers, yes. But relying on Tier alone was elitist and impractical. Far better to set up institutions, or rather the fertile ground for their growth, so that when one died another would be already prepared to take its place ensuring a seamless production of aura.

Thankfully the Emperor had decided to extend some very generous tax breaks to everyone involved in producing the formation plates which brought the price down on his end, and Queen Tur’stal was extending quite generous lines of credit to cover the rest of the expenses, so the cost of this was only moderately painful instead of outright impossible. He’d almost feel threatened by how easy she was trying to make it if not for the inconceivably vast scale of East Flower’s buying pool.

All he needed to do was be one of the first in line, and his planets’ and family’s fortunes alike would be set. That his wife was a skilled alchemist, his son had dabbled in runecraft some, and his daughter had recently broken through to Tier 4 only served to make his position practically ironclad. None of his peers were even half as well-equipped to take full advantage of this as he was.

The following weeks were some of the most nerve-wracking of Haluk’s life, but once the formation plates and seed items were delivered a month later, he began to calm. He was endlessly grateful for the very thorough instructions that Ascender Titan had included, which informed him that the grueling de-aspecting rates were expected, as well as all the ways to adjust things given common failure modes because without them he might have given up at the steep rate of loss they encountered in those first tests.

It took two painful months, but they had their first aura rift. Specifically a ‘sunrise’ light rift, and two months after that, it was joined by sharpness and ‘waterfall’ water rifts. From there, though, he was starting to get into more troublesome territory, because if he was going to make his planets able to meaningfully export aura, he’d need to start replacing public rifts.

There was outcry, of course, but there was always outcry. Nonetheless, he forced it through, upgrading the first public rift to being an aura rift within another month. It was no longer free, as he now treated it like any other valuable public rift, but the increased revenue from what he offered for the aura more than offset the increased price.

That raised his own tax income by a fraction, but the taxes from delving were minor in comparison to what he was expecting to come next. With the proof of concept established, he rapidly expanded. His long-term goal was to replace a full half of the rifts he controlled with aura rifts, but that was liable to take decades before it came to full fruition and his son was correct when he stated they needed to be at least a little cautious.

Their largest hurdle wasn’t unexpected but they ran into faster than Haluk could have anticipated, delvers. There were only so many Tier 4 delvers available and competent enough to delve the rifts to go around who were also willing to linger at Tier 4 for at least a decade. It was expensive but Haluk started recruiting from anywhere he could get his hands on competent delvers, guilds, corporations, neighboring planets, anywhere that had strong Tier 4s in excess he snatched them up.

Haluk wanted each and every aura rift delved the instant the rift cycled its instances to maximize their early profits.

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Alongside the opening of the first public rift, the first aura potion hit the market of East Flower. Its final price was sky-high, of course, but that was to be expected. Unlike the well-established subsidies for the traditional Concept potions, there were no Empire-provided sponsorships for selling aura potions which might limit their price. In time, they might come, but ‘in time’ was not now, and there was nothing to be gained from underselling one’s products when there were people who could afford the price of not having to wait around for an ascension or a shard of reality.

Only time would tell where the price would settle.

Right now, a Bottled Concept took years, sometimes decades, for a Tier 4 to afford, but even if aura potions settled out to costing twice that, which he rather doubted with how much cheaper the production was, their benefits were such that they’d still be immensely popular. That would be triply the case if the Empire stopped subsidizing Bottled Concept, which some rumors were saying was imminent. After all, why would they subsidize something when a superior replacement existed and was cheap enough to produce you don’t really need subsidies at all beyond start-up capital?

The first batch of aura potion, handmade by his own wife from sunrise aura Haluk had personally harvested, had produced two vials. After donating the first to charity, Haluk mounted the second on the mantelpiece in the family’s private gathering hall.

It would hopefully signal the first of many.

It would take years, decades probably, to fully convert all of the rifts he wanted into aura rifts, but with an even dozen rifts converted and stable, the production lines began to churn.

Haluk wanted to redirect all of them to East Flower, or the Capital, which was said to have even higher prices than what the regional capital’s civilians could afford to pay. But he knew that was an awful idea, even if the initial prices would have been incredibly favorable.

Instead, he made sure that the first batch was sold locally at the lowest feasible prices, which helped quell any remaining murmurings about his usurpations of the tamed rifts.

Instead, he contented himself with delivering the second batch of aura potions to East Flower himself. The shipment was only ten thousand aura potions, all of the basic four elements, but with this single shipment, he was able to pay off nearly the next ten years of payments to his loans.

Queen Tur’stal herself even gave him a public audience, which made him the envy of his political rivals, who now had to think twice about offending him with him in their liege’s good graces.

With the payment secure and extrapolating the success out along with the eventual drop in prices, Haluk still expected to have paid off the loans he had taken in less than a tenth of their allotted repayment periods. Even if he only dedicated half of the profit to the loans. Best of all, that didn’t even account for his taxes, which had been on the rise with all the new industry the aura potions were creating on his twin worlds.

He was sure Ascender Titan would never see it, but he sent the man a heartfelt thank you message.

It wasn’t much, but it was the only way he could show the gratitude he felt deep in his heart.

***

Marquess Enrique Castillero scoffed at the recording of Ascender Titan ‘giving aura potions to the Empire.’

What an incredible waste of time.

Anyone properly skilled would create their Concept on their own. That was how it was always done, and that was the proper way to do things. It was blatantly obvious. The vast majority of immortals had gotten there by making their own Concept, after all, and if you couldn’t even do that properly, what hope did you have as an immortal?

Those who made their Concept with external aid were but pitiful shades of a proper Cultivator. Ascensions, shards of reality, aura, or worst of all Minkalla, produced whelps unworthy of the everlasting life they’d been given.

How someone could be so strong and yet so foolish was a mystery Enrique couldn’t comprehend, but the damage was done. The man was living proof that a single strong individual was more valuable than a thousand lessers, but he insisted on trying to raise the commoners out of the mud they were destined to die in.