The Path of Ascension Chapter 367

Chapter 367

 

Grady Briggs sat in front of his team of lawyers along with the rest of his C-suite and Board of Directors, not wanting to believe that there was nothing they could do to stop the dissolution of Briggs Inc.

In the first weeks of the integration, he and his family had, like everyone else, feared for their lives, afraid they would be crushed by their nigh omnipotent gods that could fly around and do actual magic.

Once that initial fear had worn off, Noricum, and to a lesser extent, Soerilia, had taken to the new technologies with gusto. Or at least her companies had. Briggs Inc. had used the publicly available patents to update or outright replace several of their products and expand their market share.

The company and Grady himself had been worried about being bullied by planet-spanning companies run by immortals, which could simply undercut them until they were bankrupt. But just as it became clear this new Empire wouldn’t allow that and they started to settle down, they got bad news.

Baron Hastra, in his role as local lord, was breaking up several of the largest corporations on Soerilia that had ‘spread too far from their roots’.

That term had thrown them all for a loop, but apparently the Empire and its feudal governments didn’t like overly powerful conglomerates, and it limited companies to a single line of business. A food chain could only sell food, a media company could only make and sell media, and a tech company could only design and produce tech.

Grady could understand the logic, but from what the company lawyers had told them in the first weeks, such laws were rarely implemented on low-Tier worlds like theirs because they simply didn’t matter on a grand scale. That had hurt to hear, and had resulted in some bruised egos, but the company had no choice but to accept that they were ultimately very small cogs in an incomprehensibly large machine.

The problem was that Baron Hastra was breaking precedent and enforcing those laws, and Briggs Inc. had long since strayed from their roots as a simple textile manufacturer to a multinational conglomerate that had its fingers in every pie. Before the unveiling, they had operated in nearly every sector because that meant, unless a global recession happened, they could survive any swings in local economies or trends that would have shuttered smaller businesses.

Now they were being told that the company needed to pick a lane and split the rest of their branches off, or have the baron do it for them.

One of the board members asked if there was anything they could do to stop him, but Grady knew how foolish of a question that was.

Baron Hastra was an immortal who could fly and shoot fire out of his hand. Even if he was weaker than the god of death that had floated in the sky, he wasn’t someone they could fight against.

Using money to drag an issue out in the courts just wasn’t a viable tactic versus someone who had the physical ability and legal right to simply arrest them all.

Or just kill them.

Grady knew some monarchies allowed such things, and while it seemed the Empire allowed its nobles a great deal of freedom, it didn’t allow them to wantonly slaughter people. But not being allowed to and not being able to were two very different things.

At least, that’s what the information they were given said. As they had seen in the initial weeks, the Empire kept a tight grip on news outlets. Briggs Inc.’s news arm hadn’t been caught up in the arrests, but they were still close enough to the fires to feel the heat.

Officially, the Empire allowed the publication of any verifiable truth no matter what it was, but when there were people who could bend reality to their whims, did truth have a fixed definition?

Grady wasn’t sure it did.

Which brought him to the current meeting.

They had no recourse except to comply.

As the founding lineage of the company and the shareholder with the largest interest, he was to be given first dibs for what portion of the company he wanted, but after that, he would be forced to watch as the company he, and his forefathers before him, had built up through decades of hard work be torn apart.

He would get non-voting, non-transferable shares in all of those companies, which would pay hefty dividends until they expired, but that was all.

Or rather, his daughter would be given the shares. He had already confirmed that was a possibility, but the normal inheritance loopholes he was used to either no longer applied or were closed.

An Empire full of immortals cared far less about the accumulation of wealth by families than Soerilia had, and there weren’t even the typical taxes on such transfers of funds. Technically there was a tax, but it was more of a filing fee in practice rather than a proper percentage-based tax.

That very idea was still new and unnerving, but Grady was doing his best to wrap his head around it.

Thankfully, Baron Hastra was giving them six months to figure out how they wanted to divide the company, but Grady didn’t know which way he wanted to jump. His gut said he should take the media or the textile branches, but he worried that either of them would flop when put against similar companies that had existed for thousands of years.

That was why he wholesale wrote the tech branch off. They might survive for a decade or two off the publicly available patents, but once the restrictions on outside business were lifted, he was sure they would be either driven under by other companies or simply bought out and turned into a local subsidiary.

That might ensure prosperity for a generation or two, but Grady was forced to think long term. What would best serve his grandchildren, or their grandchildren in turn?

He wasn’t entirely sure how he got home, but his daughter was there to meet him in the foyer which pulled him out of his musings.

Hannah thought she was fifteen going on thirty, which led to a rebellious nature, but he was just glad that she wasn’t going through the hate-her-parents phase that so many teens seemed to go through.

His wife, Sharon, gave him a questioning look, but he simply shook his head, letting her know things hadn’t gone well.

He saw her tighten up, but she forced out a smile when Hannah looked between them trying to catch their subtle communication.

She quickly lost her patience however and exclaimed. “Dad, our first Empire class was today and it talked about cultivation. You need to hear about this stuff! It’s so cool.”

Grady winced internally. He had completely forgotten about that with everything that had gone on today, but he knew that his daughter, like most of her friends, was excited to get magical powers and possibly live forever.

He wasn’t happy about the much younger age of majority and reduction of schooling, but Baron Hastra had mandated that for the next three generations they would continue with schooling until 16. That was two years fewer than most countries had done before, but it was better than the typical Empire eight years of education for Empire citizens that ended at 14.

He still thought 14 was too young to get access to something as dangerous as magic, but he had no say in that. Besides, it was just a matter of time before her Awakening was due. Grady and Sharon were both over the age of mandatory Awakening, and so he hadn’t been thinking about it as often as he should.

Reminded of that, once his daughter went to bed he looked into the documents that had been sent over and found the one that talked about ambient cultivation.

He didn’t want his daughter going into one of those rifts.

That kind of foolishness was for the poor and the desperate. Or the crazy. In this new world, money could very much be turned into literal power if given enough time and resources.

Grady didn’t have any illusion that his considerable wealth would be enough to allow his daughter to cultivate to immortality. That hurdle was shrouded in mystery, but it didn’t take a genius to understand it wasn’t something most people reached.

There was information about cultivation in general, though.

The method itself seemed simple, too simple if Grady said so himself. But from the report, there genuinely didn’t seem to be anything beyond putting the essence where you wanted it and then ensuring you compressed it properly.

Rather, the difficulty apparently came from the gathering of the essence.

Grady got distracted by the note in the report that said the world’s scientists were still trying to figure out exactly what mana and essence were, but that they were struggling.

Mana was seemingly simple, if extraordinary. The example he liked most compared it to an Awakened person generating an appreciable amount of electricity and having the ability to store or use that power to fuel their stove. It wasn’t a perfectly clean energy and had its byproducts, but they weren’t harmful for living beings and were easy to dispose of.

Essence, on the other hand, seemed to break the laws of conservation of energy in a big, big way. It not only created itself out of seemingly nothing, but while other energy was converted when it was used, essence seemed to remain itself. It was like a wet sponge being drained of water, but the sponge in question made water from nothing and multiplied it on its own. It also had grades or Tiers, which seemed to correspond with the 50 Tiers of power that existed. And while using a grade of essence that was higher than your current Tier was neutral or possibly beneficial, using essence that was lower than your power level was allegedly bad. Crippling even, if the Empire reports were to be believed.

One of the two main ways to gain essence was going into the monster holes in reality and killing the creatures inside, which was considered the premier way to gather it in the Empire. Grady was skeptical of that, but he had noticed that this Empire seemed to greatly value martial prowess, which would make sense if that was true. He just didn’t understand how any of them were left alive if one mistake meant death.

The other way was to meditate and absorb the essence from the air around oneself and then compact it into a better form. Then one could allocate it just as those who gathered it from combat did.

That was where money came into play.

Despite being protected from the rest of the Empire and its various businesses, there were exceptions that were able to be imported. At least for those with the wealth to do so.

Mainly cultivation supplements.

Grady was aghast at the prices he was seeing for some of the items.

A bracelet that would automatically pull essence in cost fifty million credits, and lasted for six months of constant usage before the unit would need to be replaced. That was either planned obsolescence taken to the extreme, or the item was truly used up and it was just that expensive to create.

That, or the level of the item mattered. The Tier, he corrected himself. There had been comments about the economy past Tier 5 being based on crystalized mana instead of credits like the lower Tiers, and their conversion seemed to greatly favor the higher Tiers in the exchanges.

What was expensive in credits might be downright cheap for someone stronger who had higher earning potential thanks to their higher Tier.

That idea was given merit as he found a few other versions of that bracelet meant for higher Tiers which skyrocketed in price with each step up.

Grady’s business mind went to that, and he couldn’t help but scan the rest of the list of things that could be used to increase one’s ambient essence cultivation.

The bracelet wasn’t exactly an outlier, but it did seem like a product for the wealthy. And while Grady could afford to buy a few of them, he couldn’t sustain any sort of rapid consumption. There were other, more permanent items on the lists and his eyes were drawn to them.

A powder that increased the speed at which one compressed the essence was fairly cheap for the dosage, only around ten thousand credits per, but it was clearly stated that resistance to the drug would build up, and recommended usage was for no longer than for one year out of ten.

A meditation mat looking thing sold for a whopping eighty million credits and had a similar effect to the bracelet in that it increased the effect of absorbing ambient essence, but wasn’t automatic or portable. However, instead of only lasting six months of constant use, it was said to last ten years.

That… wasn’t so bad. Eight million a year for an item was expensive, but it was far more palatable.

Two hundred million credits for a mead that automatically compressed Tier 1 essence for a year seemed absurd, but combined with the bracelet, the results spoke for themselves. It was, however, alcoholic, which is another thing to consider when talking about a teenage daughter.

There was a powder that did the same, but unlike the mead, it built resistance in the body, or rather spirit, that needed time to clear. It only cost fifty million, but the dose only lasted for three months instead of the full year.

Checking further, there seemed to be dozens of variations available for all but the most effective items. Knockoffs with lesser effects but still effective.

As he reviewed all of the products which could assist his daughter’s cultivation, Grady couldn’t help but go back to the saying that it wasn’t the gold miners that made money in a gold rush, but those who were selling the shovels.

These rifts were clearly the gold mines and the delvers were the miners. He wanted to be selling them their shovels.

Except, it seemed that the normal weapons the Empire pushed were melee items. Maybe he should take the manufacturing arm of Briggs Inc. and start mass-producing weapons and armor. No, that would only work in the lowest levels, as Grady noted that the magical constructs called formations couldn’t be made by such processes, resulting in most higher-Tier equipment being handcrafted by what he could only call artisans.

No, that didn’t seem to be a valid method for his position.

Grady would rather find a way to sell these cultivation devices to the masses. No average worker could afford multi-million dollar expenses unless inflation was far worse than had been implied. But ultimately, price was simply a question of what was the cost of manufacture, overhead, and shipping.

A few quick searches showed Grady that there was some wiggle room.

Things like the bracelet were controlled by corporations, but the other items seemed to have expired patents, and he was able to see the manufacturing process on the designs.

Most took formations, making them impossible to mass produce, but a few of the items were said to be easy to create, and from what he was reading, Grady agreed.

There was a set of plates that when connected together through simple copper wire and powered by mana, could slowly draw in ambient essence. Someone with an awakened spirit would need to do the final bit of activating the formation, but that didn’t seem particularly onerous.

The operating costs seemed high, but Grady might just not understand costs in mana. The price for half an hour of run time seemed like a lot, but he could see a path forward where he created something like a country club where people could, for a nominal fee, get access to such formations, which would speed up their advancement.

Despite being a businessman at heart, he had an undergrad degree in engineering and he didn’t see anything wrong with the plans. Although, he also knew that anything publicly available probably had a better version hidden behind a patent or the like.

Still, while that was good, it wasn’t enough.

Grady wanted to create something that would last. That could propel his family up to immortality, even if it took time.

That meant he needed to think bigger than country clubs, though he intended to do that after having the idea. Places for the wealthy to gather would be valuable for their connections, more so than any monetary value they could generate.

No, what he was looking for was a way to break into the largest markets, the average salaried worker. There were items that seemed targeted to them. Formations that seemed crude in comparison to the ones that cost millions. It was like comparing a modern car to a horse and buggy. They might both work, but there was a noticeable difference in comfort and performance.

He spent another few hours working on further refining his plans, and by the time he stopped, it was deep into the night and both his daughter and wife were asleep.

The next day, he did something he hadn’t wanted to do originally.

He went and got Awakened.

A bribe got him in front of the line first thing in the morning, and he went through the process.

Like the reports said, it was painless and quick. Similar to the reports, his Talent was also seemingly useless.

Tier 1 Talent determined: Air spells you cast are 10% cheaper. Earth spells you cast have their cooldowns increased by 10%.

From what he understood, most people couldn’t even get actual magic spells until they were Tier 7 or 8, and the items that mages used to let them cast spells before that frequently didn’t interact with Talents. He would probably never see his Talent affect anything, for good or ill, but that didn’t matter to his overall ambitions.

Instead, he used his company’s resources to start testing the formation plates he had ordered. They weren’t great; the formation’s efficiency was far below the reported numbers, but he proved that it worked and costs weren’t that high.

Between carving the plates with a CNC machine and inlaying the copper, the costs for a set had only barely crossed the fifty thousand credit mark at worst.

With a reasonable margin, that was no more expensive than a new higher-end car.

Most people wouldn’t be able to afford it, but it was within grasp for the average upper middle class family.

With further refinements of both the process and the materials, it was probably possible to reduce the cost by half.

Further testing would be required to check for things like longevity, but Grady thought he had a viable product.

The issue would be in ensuring he was able to capture the market before it was flooded with imitations and competitors.

If he had figured this all out in a matter of days, others surely would do the same before too long.

The formation part would be a stumbling block for some, but the Tier 1 formations were simple enough he suspected most engineer types could figure it out before too long. If his attempt at Tier 2 formations was anything to go by, it wouldn’t be as simple as having machines create the base formation plate and filling the copper in by hand. The book he bought recommended hand carving, and he suspected that was to better activate the magical aspect of the formation, but he needed more testing before confirming these results.

He also needed to talk to Baron Hastra and see if he could negotiate some kind of state sponsorship.

Grady took most of the six months he was allocated for his company’s dissolution to settle his plans, but the time only confirmed his ideas.

Catering to delvers was a losing proposition for a company like his.

Instead, he bent his vast resources to creating cultivation parlors.

He wasn’t able to secure a partnership with Baron Hastra, but he did get a reduction of his company’s taxes so long as they met certain criteria. Mainly, it was keeping prices down and keeping production local, but Grady had no issues with those restrictions.

Even if he were to sell off-world, which seemed like it would be difficult at best in such a saturated market, he didn’t think the business would ever outgrow Soerilia. For all its flaws, Soerilia had a massive population when compared to their neighboring planets.

Stolen novel; please report.

Just nine months after integration, Briggs Cultivation Inc. opened its first location.

The initial reaction was large, with many people coming to use their facilities, but cultivation wasn’t an ingrained habit for most Soerilians and most people never bothered to come back. Grady feared he might have misstepped but he persisted. It wouldn’t be his first failed venture, but it would be a painful one.

He pushed through, funding the company though his own accumulated wealth, and slowly but surely they started getting more repeat customers.

In the end it wasn’t the more affluent persons nearby, but delvers who kept his business afloat in the initial months.

Delving, for all its advantages, was dangerous, and no one knew that better than those who went into rifts. Rift slots also seemed to be as frequent as one a week or as infrequent as once a month, which meant the dedicated were either delving two rifts at a time which doubled the danger or they came to his cultivation parlor for a risk-free way to advance in their down time.

Pulling on that thread, Grady had his people start creating better but more expensive formations, which encouraged the stronger delvers to continue to come to his place.

Grady even partnered with an old college buddy who had Awakened a construction Talent and created similar cultivation-enhancing formations in the estates he was building. Grady didn’t want them spreading too far too soon, but he knew it was inevitable for upper class housing to come with such formations innately as formation experts started to become more commonplace.

Currently, they were the only ones able to create and repair such plates, but his eyes and ears were already tracking a half dozen competitors.

It took another two years to become solvent, but once they did, things seemed to rapidly turn around. They went from one location in Noricum to half a dozen in the next three years, and by the end of the decade, they had over a hundred locations scattered in most major population centers.

And of course because it would be terrible optics for his business if he didn’t, he also used his products and cultivated. It still took nearly a decade but he reached T3 well ahead of most people which made for fantastic advertising. Privately he had to admit that he quite enjoyed the increased vitality it gave him. Even pushing sixty he felt better than he had in his forties.

When he failed to notice anything that could be his Tier 3 Talent in his daily life, he decided to forgo getting it checked out. A decision he rapidly came to regret as his daughter started incessantly questioning him about it. After several months of her pestering he finally gave in and booked an appointment.

T3: Gain a supplemental mana pool that can only be used to cast air spells. This mana pool is based on your mana cultivation, but only fills while airborne, and rapidly depletes while in contact with the ground.

As he expected, and to daughter’s dismay, it was just as irrelevant as his Tier 1 Talent.

Instead of bemoaning the theoretical loss he focused on his business. A large part of their success came from wanting to round his business out. He got permission for the creation of an alchemy sub-branch that could grow magical herbs and turn them into cultivation aids. If they started making other products, they risked being broken up as his original business was, but so long as they kept to their lane, they would be fine according to his lawyers.

Those products were incredibly popular despite their higher costs, even surpassing the income from the rented rooms. Something about the ease of simply taking a pill to see improvements was inherently addictive, and many people who didn’t use their rooms bought their pills, powders, and potions instead.

Their largest issue and hamperment for growth was their limited Tier. Tier 1 materials were easy enough to create and work with, Tier 2 was harder but still possible, while Tier 3 materials were basically impossible for anyone not at Tier 3 to manufacture.

Some processes could and were automated, but they still needed higher-Tier people to do parts and there just weren’t enough to fill the roles. As the younger generation was reaching the new age of majority, they were seeing an uptick in people interested in the magical professions like formations and alchemy which he took advantage of and started recruiting with incentives for people to Tier up via their products.

Grady wasn’t sentimental, but it was almost hard to believe that the Soerilia from just a decade ago had been what it was compared to its current form.

Things were hardly perfect. There were issues, but they seemed manageable enough.