The Path of Ascension Chapter 363

Chapter 363

The once pristine marble around the rift was positively bathed in blood.

There wasn’t a single spot in the surrounding area that wasn’t completely soaked in blood, and looking up, the cause was obvious.

There was a battle happening in the sky above, while lower Tier sect members fought street by street.

The moment they appeared, several spiritual perceptions roughly scanned them, but none got through their defenses and the perceptions slunk away after the five of them lashed back out.

Sien was standing off in a corner watching the show and waved them over. “Look at what you guys set off!”

Phoenix Liz cocked her head so far, it was nearly upside down in confusion. “Us? How did we manage this?”

Sien chuckled darkly. “The corrupt local official was apparently bought out by another sect, and your issues exposed his connection, which caused the attacking sect to launch their attack early, before their influence was completely scoured from the local one. Well done!”

Matt scanned the surroundings but found that there were almost no low Tier unaffiliated people in the city, let alone mortals. They must have been evacuated before the fighting started in earnest.

That, or they had been slaughtered completely before they had exited, but Matt didn’t want to think of that possibility because that would force him to act.

Allie fingered one of her daggers even as her eyes darted around, but Sien waved her hand and created a portal out of a nearby shadow. “Best not to linger where we aren’t wanted.”

“I’m surprised they are letting us leave so easily. Unless you informed them of your identity, Sien.”

Zack’s question reached the heart of the issue, but Sien shook her head. “I said I was incognito for this trip, and I shall remain so.”

“Except for tea service,” Aster quipped.

“Or that time at the pastry cafe,” Allie added.

“Or—”

“A woman of my station needs her luxuries. Besides, it’s completely different here. If they had known exactly who I was, they never would have launched this attack, and how boring would that be?”

Matt shook his head. “Are the Sects usually this… involved? I feel like everywhere we have gone, things have been hectic.”

Sien nodded slowly before shrugging. “Yes and no. We are in valuable, high volume systems, and that leads to conflict more than average. I’d say what we are seeing is average for these systems, with the understanding that this region is more contested than most.”

From there, they broke into chaotic space and traversed seven worlds to reach their next destination.

The rift there was a fun puzzle-jungle theme that they actually delved twice, as there were two main ways to beat the rift, each with their own typical rewards, and they wanted both.

The first was the typical way to delve the rift by solving the puzzles, piecing together the clues until one was able to fix the hidden area with the boss.

The second was to fly up and punch the hidden boss, the false sun that loomed large in the rift.

Anyone who could kill the hidden boss was able to get an otherwise inaccessible rift reward, which was typically a Solar Oculus, a very rare Natural Treasure, which could be sold in the Empire for a large fortune to any fire mages who wanted the ability to shoot fire out of their eyes without a spell.

On their first delve, they got a giant block of Icarus marble that was a decently valuable floating material that they intended to sell back in the Empire. The second delve, the one where they fought the sun, instead gave them a mediocre [Warmth of the Sun Shines Down on All Below Me Thereby Initiating the Growth of Life]. The pretentious name aside, the Tier 32 skill was a fairly complex plant growth encouragement skill that could sadly be replicated by any decent formation master, which made it fairly worthless.

They were going to sell it, but Aster brought up a good point. They might be able to give it to Luna if she ever tried to turn Liz into a heat lamp, like she had done to Mara more than once. And if that didn’t work, the portable volcano might serve as a good heated bed.

Matt doubted it would work, personally, but it would be funny to try.

Allie wanted to try for a third time, but they ended up dragging her to the next location. But Matt was sure she made a waypoint at the system so they could return at any time. It was more of a question of if she would bring the rest of them, or delve the rift on her own when she inevitably slipped in.

Days quickly morphed and elongated into years as they kept delving. Not all of the rifts were that interesting, but the progress felt amazing. It could easily take centuries to millennia to Tier up, starting in the late 20s, as rift slots became ever-harder to come by and healing cooldowns absolutely skyrocketed. But with two teams of Ascenders working together, meaningful wounds were quite rare, and the Sects were footing the bill for the rifts they ran.

Were it not for the unavoidable injuries adding up and the time constraints they still had to deal with, Matt felt like they could make it to Tier 27 in as little as a half a century given their current pace. They weren’t even pushing that hard. Well, not by his standards of the Path and mid-war rushed delving, anyway.

At one point, they completed a set of rifts that was scheduled to take them almost a year in two and a half months, so they ended up going back to Yun Me’s planet where they spent the rest of the year messing around with Sien.

Yun Me and Gan Le were nearby, but the only one they saw was Gan Le, who was always battered and bruised when he came to visit.

Matt personally wanted to clash with Yun Me, it would have been a fun battle to see just what level a ‘normal’ person could reach with a million plus years of training. But she must have sensed that, as she never showed up in person.

During that time, Matt did get a better understanding of Gan Le and his powers. He had about as much offensive capabilities as a baby kitten. Well, by Ascender standards anyway. He was probably decent by more ‘normal’ comparisons, but Matt was self-aware enough to acknowledge he had no real clue what normal people their Tier were expected to be able to do. On the other hand his defensive prowess was top notch.

He even got to see it first hand, as at Sien’s encouragement, they went into a local rift that had a giant tentacle ooze monster as its final boss. When neither Matt or Liz wanted to get close, Allie, at Aster’s laughing suggestion, simply kidnapped Gan Le and they tossed him into the monster as a distraction. Despite yelling about the indignity, he didn’t actually get hurt in the entire fight, which was a statement of power all its own.

Even their time between rifts was rather fun. As part of Zack and Allie’s buyout, they’d ended up with access to a decent number of Sect experts for training and lessons. A lot of them were too directly connected to their respective specialties to really be useful to Matt, Liz, and Aster, and others refused to give their lessons to anyone except strictly those they’d been paid to teach. But with a bit of help from Sien, they still ended up spying on those.

Through the process, Matt’s overall impression of Sect skill modification culture ended up somewhere between skepticism and awe. It seemed like they were a bunch of superstitious, often-backwards self-righteous maniacs who were intentionally giving them bad advice at times… but at the same time, “might makes right” was a very literal proof that at least some of what they were saying had some truth to it.

Imperial modification techniques were rigorous, straightforward, and reliable. They’d been honed over eons for maximum effect, and a properly-honed skill was one with no extraneous effects, optimized for pure performance. Sure, if you wanted maximum performance you couldn’t just blindly follow a guide, but that still meant you just needed to learn the underlying principles as to why and how a given action would improve a skill’s efficiency, or power, or cooldown. Only then could you effectively apply them to your skill.

Aster could drastically cut back the prominence of the portion of her [Astral Path] skill that was responsible for generating aurora mana, for example, because the mana she supplied it was already aurora mana, and therefore didn’t need to be converted. It was simple, mathematical, and logical.

His prior exposure to Sect modification techniques, such as the one he’d built his [Analyze] based on, had led him to believe that Sect techniques were similar enough, though more elaborate and involved at earlier Tiers. But that was proven distinctly wrong as he spent time learning from the respective masters directly in the Sects.

Where an Empire module might guide someone to improve their [Fireball]’s cooldown speed by repeatedly dry-firing it while spiritually pulling on a particular portion of the structure, training the skill structure to prepare to fire faster while under stress, a Sect technique might involve a very specific and complex dance that needed to be memorized and mastered while tying the skill’s effect to completing that dance. Then, one would slowly pare down the dance itself until it got simpler and simpler, faster and faster, all the while reducing the cooldown it had been associated with.

Matt had, when first learning about it, commented that it was like intentionally giving themselves training wheels, then removing them to improve their overall performance. Luna had swiftly disabused him of the notion, pointing out all the ways in which his analogy was incorrect, even on a surface level. But the main thing he’d taken away from that whole experience was that Sect skills often went through periods of intentionally making themselves worse before they became better, sometimes overtaking the more-regular improvements of Empire methods, sometimes not.

He was only now learning just how true that was. Sect skill modifications could sometimes absolutely cripple the base skill, sometimes with no expectation that it would ever surpass the basic effect, just for entirely nebulous or incredibly rare benefit. There was a [Fireball] modification known as [The Blooming Of The Pyroclastic Garden] that was worse in every way than the basic skill, but was nonetheless quite popular, because if you later got ahold of an Embers Of An Ashen Rose, it almost instantly became an insane cascading multi-stage conflagration that coated everything in burning ash and opened the door for a dozen other improvements.

It wasn’t like skill modifications that depended on a specific natural treasure were unknown in the Empire. Matt’s own Sliver of True Night’s Sight was the basis of a modification he’d made to [Telekinesis] to help him with sensory feedback. There were even a couple of modifications that effectively subsumed a natural treasure as part of their modification, requiring you to drink a potion made of the treasure or absorb it like a skill shard while performing some form of spiritual exercise. But he was starting to suspect that those rare modifications may have been leaked or copied from Sect equivalents, rather than happening organically.

Matt considered himself fairly good at skill modifications.

No, on a second thought, he considered himself excellent at skill modifications.

His mana regeneration meant he could modify skills far faster than most people, an advantage only further amplified by his flexible innate skill slot from Minkalla, and he had taken lessons in skill modification from the very best teachers in the Empire. His skills had almost no truly wasted mana, with peripheral benefits resulting from everywhere it spilled beyond its bounds. If he had perfect mana control, his [Cracked Phantom Armor] wouldn’t glow slightly, but until that day came about, he’d rather benefit from it being harder to dispel. He knew all of the fundamental laws and basic principles for how skills worked and the ways they interacted with the world, the difference between good skill design and bad skill design, and had come up with several quite successful custom modifications.

He was damn good at skill modification.

Compared to Sect techniques, though, he was a baby playing with building blocks.

Maybe.

He still wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t being messed with.

According to one of the visiting teachers, what phase the local moon was in had a drastic impact on whether or not a given modification would work, and the world absolutely had to have exactly one moon, or else the modification would completely backfire. Another lecturer claimed that a certain modification must be performed while unconscious, advising that while an AI was acceptable, it would be better if either a dedicated skill- specifically, a modification of [Copy Text] of all things- or a Domain was used to do the mod. Oh, and while sleep was allowable, it would be better if it was due to passing out drunk while in a room filled with incense smoke. A specific kind of incense made it even better, supposedly.

By far the most outlandish one, though, was the woman who claimed that certain classes of skill modification techniques, performed in the same way by different people, could have different outcomes solely depending on whether someone was married or not.

That didn’t even make sense, but she had enough anecdotal evidence that made Matt question things.

Then again, there was a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense. Some skill patterns, from what he knew, couldn’t work. One modification for [Endurance] created a section of the skill completely disconnected from everything else that only functioned as a timer of sorts. Nevermind that it wasn’t built like a timer, and he had no idea how it kept track of time. But if that timer was removed after it was created, the entire skill stopped working. Even the basic skill effects that shouldn’t have been affected at all were disabled.

He was so close to calling the person who told him that out as just trying to give him bad info, but Sien confirmed that it was all true, as she had done a similar mod when she was a lower Tier, except hers had required her to be eating coconut as well.

So in the end, Matt was forced to acknowledge that there was at least some stuff going on that he didn’t understand, and that skill modification was more complicated than simple mathematics.

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A good half of what he was learning had to be pointless superstition, but there was no way to figure out which half or what grains of truth might be hidden within without decades, probably millennia, of testing. How anyone was supposed to figure out custom modifications in this framework was beyond him, but apparently very few people made entirely custom modifications. Those who did frequently had a Talent or Domain helping them, while everyone else managed to figure out a way to modify a modification to apply to a different skill.

Overall, the most tangible advice he picked up was regarding skill merges, how to identify what he thought of as “nodes of attachment,” and how to develop an eye for what apparently-harmless modifications might completely ruin everything. He’d need to pick up a bunch of low-Tier skills and experiment before committing to anything, but he had a few skills that he wouldn’t mind merging. Even at a very basic level, [Archmage’s Presence] and [Cracked Phantom Armor] were two skills that he basically never used separately, and even being able to get the benefits of his innate skill slot to both of them simultaneously was tempting.

It was probably Liz’s eternally optimistic attitude on how well things would go rubbing off on him, but depending on how he managed the merge, he might be able to make [Cracked Phantom Armor] into a true channel, entirely removing its normal mana throughput limits and freeing him from his everlasting efforts to keep it capable of keeping up with him.

Or maybe he’d be able to enhance [Archmage’s Presence] with his Tier 25? As a life-aspected spell, he couldn’t use his Talent’s skill-reinforcing mode to strengthen it, but having flexible mana crystal [Cracked Phantom Armor] embedded in his body would probably do something impressive if he could properly integrate the spells together. He’d been very pleased with how his Millennium Willow Lifesap had strengthened him, and tying the merger of [Cracked Phantom Armor] and [Archmage’s Presence] into the effects of that natural treasure could be very interesting.

Going for both would probably be… not impossible, nothing was impossible. But he would undoubtedly be forging new ground with such a merger.

The most likely outcome would probably require him to make one skill or the other a primary, and the other a more definitive subservient skill. As far as merges went, he was practically a complete novice, and none of the people he spoke to in the Sects had any experience too applicable to his exact situation.

Regardless, he needed to first finish up his modifications to help [Archmage’s Presence] stack with his lesser buffs like [Mage’s Retreat], [Ranger’s Sight], [Barbarian’s Hide], and the like. It was possible to get two buff skills that functioned in the same way to stack, but doing so would typically harm efficiency when only using one of the two. Not that Matt cared too much about that, not when doubling up would increase his effective maximum buffs and help him benefit from more than just the lower-Tier skill’s secondary effects. But it was an annoyingly long process, even if an entirely known one.

That meant it would be a long, long time before he tried to do that particular merge. Even beyond everything else, cracked skills and high-Tier skills were famously difficult to merge individually, and he was absolutely not going to risk his first skill and his highest-Tier skill until he was certain he wasn’t just throwing them away.

His first major target was probably going to be merging [Tribulation Strike] and [Mana Charge]. It was a good mid-term goal, as [Tribulation Strike] was already heavily modified from its original form as [Lightning Torrent], and if he could pull off a merge of a ranged channel skill and a melee weapon empowerment, he’d consider himself ‘pretty good’ at merges.

With just a few months left of their time in the Sects, the seven of them were out shopping. Gan Le had been dragged along, as he was the only one to have actually gone to the secret market they wanted to visit, when they had another incident.

Gan Le, over one of their dinners, had mentioned a black market he had visited when he was a mortal that had had a treasure Liz was looking for. Trees of Beginnings were rare, and all of the known ones weren’t set to flower for a few thousand years, but Gan Le suspected that the black market’s tree had flowered in the last fifty years based on when he had seen it last and their typical blooming cycle. If true that meant they might still have some of its pollen. Pollen that Liz wanted to augment her blood lemon tree.

Trees of Beginning were life mana treasures and their pollen was incredibly potent, almost dangerously so. It could, if transferred to other tree type Natural Treasures or items, rapidly age them without significant side effects.

Liz’s lemon tree was still incredibly young for a dryad spawn, which limited its maturity cycles. She believed that was why no matter how much mana and blood they fed it, the tree was slow to produce Rank 2 bloodlines and seemed to refuse Rank 3 ones all together.

Sien hadn’t even known there was a black market at that location and volunteered to get them close, despite Gan Le’s insistence that he could go there and get some of the pollen himself without creating an incident. Frankly, Matt agreed with him: Gan Le was nothing if not low key, and if he went to buy something no one would look twice at him, whereas their group was anything but and from what he had seen of the Sects, a black market was bound to be a truly lawless place.

Despite his misgivings, between Sien, Aster, and Allie wanting to go, he and Liz decided to just tag along.

After hearing that Gan Le had stumbled on the location when he was just a mortal, Matt hadn’t expected much, but he was proven wrong almost immediately. The black market was like a pocket dimension inside a slum that even Allie couldn’t pinpoint until after she entered the first time because, as she explained, it wasn’t actually a pocket dimension and they weren’t using spatial magic at all even if it looked like it.

Once they entered, they immediately found the Tree of Beginning, which bloomed with light as tens of thousands of paper lanterns were hung from its branches. The tree was far older than Gan Le had implied, and even Sien whistled upon seeing it.

“We can avoid the market itself and reach the House of Beginning in a few minutes. Their exchange house manages the tree and keeps its discards.” Gan Le almost seemed to beg them.

At least Matt imagined that was what he was doing as he tried to steer the group away from the bustling central market.

Allie laughed as she headed in the opposite direction. “Not a chance. Let’s check the stalls. I see a pair of bracelets I want to check.”

“This is a very lawless place. I recommend we complete the mission without detours. I—”