The Path of Ascension Chapter 368

Chapter 368

Stepping out of the portal, Matt let out a deep breath.

That was less than ideal. They— no, he— had fucked up, but the only thing he could do was to try not to do it again.

Checking his calendar, Matt found that Cato had cleared some of his more immediate tasks, which gave him a few days before he and Liz needed to go check in on the worlds they had received in the last decade while they were away.

Their duchy had gone from a handful of planets to over a hundred, and they needed to follow up on the planets, their conditions, and how each noble they had put in charge was doing.

They could have just relied on their viscounts, counts, and marquess’s for such information but the point of touring their realm was to establish better connection with their nobles as well as familiarize themselves with their lands and that was best done going there themselves.

Still, checking in on others after their own failures felt like the largest, most hypocritical thing Matt could do at a time like this, but he tried to push those feelings away and focus on the task at hand.

After a brief check in with Titan’s Torch, Matt and Liz boarded their gift for finishing the Path, the Horizon class cruise ship and set off. Instead of letting themselves wallow in pity during their transit time, he and Liz sat down together and started going over practice scenarios and how they would solve them.

Some were as simple as a baron under their rule murdering a town for no reason, while others were far more complicated, like one of their baronies becoming the battleground for two Tier 45 businesses originating from the world that were trying their best to kick each other out. Both were incredibly unlikely historical events, but they had happened, so he tried his best to work out how he’d solve them. He didn’t want to copy the historical path for either incident, as they were at least partially infamous for how badly they had been handled.

Other scenarios were far more likely, such as a lower ranking noble flouting their orders or old feuds between lesser noble families flaring up. In theory, neither of those situations should have happened in a newly created duchy, but it inevitably happened as factions were created or old grudges from the nobles’ previous holdings surfaced.

With their higher-than-average proportion of meritocratically promoted nobles, both the hereditary and non-hereditary types, could either act as a mediating force in their duchy, or they would be a reactive element causing problems but they wouldn’t know until it happened.

Before the Soerilia fiasco, Matt felt like they could easily handle any such issues, but he was forced to realize that he couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, punch every problem he encountered.

While a lot of the problems were fairly binary with obviously correct solutions, he and Liz got some experience thinking through issues they wouldn’t normally encounter. Hopefully with some experience, even the simulated kind, they could react better should they run into any similar problems.

That wasn’t the only thing they did on the trip, though they were far too busy for relaxed activities. No, most of their free time was spent on catching up on the paperwork they hadn’t done in the last month. Thankfully, by the time they arrived at the Tier 5 world, Talvetcia, they had mostly caught up on their work which allowed them to fully focus on their inspections.

Baron Garth Leeds met their ship in orbit with his family floating behind him.

They were a new noble family raised from the masses thanks to Garth’s work at Viscountess Alergia Vaso’s court as an aide. Thanks to nearly five thousand years of dedicated service, he had finally been given his own lands. And from their brief earlier meeting when he had passed through Lilly, the man was incredibly grateful he had been given a world at all.

His wife and son were immortals, though Matt could feel that their cores were light and airy from cultivating ambient essence without bothering to compact things to the same level as rift monster essence.

After going through the typical greetings from vassal to liege, Matt and Liz were led along on a tour of the former Republic world that Baron Leeds had taken control of.

Talvetcia was, thankfully, a non-veil world, and while Matt expected the world to be completely alien from the veil world, the differences were more subtle.

Cities had the habit of being more sprawling than the Empire preferred, though that might have been a feature of the world’s large population.

From the reports, it had come with one and a half billion new citizens, which was more than an Empire world of comparable Tier would have.

With half an ear, Matt listened as Baron Leeds described the issues he had run into and what he had done to correct them.

Most problems were trivial and mostly pertained to changes in policy that the residents were resistant to, but a few were larger, such as the general population’s disgruntlement with non-elected leaders.

Baron Leeds had authorized more governors to be elected, trying to ensure the local population felt they had a voice, but when that had only mollified them for a short time, he had been forced to take harsher measures.

The Baron wasn’t too worried about it as, like with most worlds, mortal sentiments had a simple solution— wait it out. Those who were most resistant to change were typically older, and the children born under the rule of the Empire were typically more inline with Empire sensibilities. Thus, in a few generations the population would be right where they wanted it and they could avoid more draconian measures.

Not that Talvetcia was that bad.

Matt had looked up other failed integrations on their travels, and despite his fears, Soerilia wasn’t anywhere near the worst integrations. If Soerilia didn’t register, Talvetcia surely didn’t. He assured Garth of that fact, letting the man know that issues and friction were the norm.

What did surprise him was that two out of the top five worst recent integrations had come from Republic worlds, so he had done some digging.

It wasn’t that Republic world integrations usually went bad. In fact, especially during the reign of the Sophron dynasty, they typically went rather well. But when they went poorly, they almost always went really poorly.

Matt found a dozen reports on the subject that drew twelve different conclusions, but the first one he pulled up seemed the most plausible to him. Simply put, because the Republic and Sophron Empire were so similar, the few incompatibilities tended to hold a lot of sparking power. It was a lot easier for unrest to coalesce around a few very obvious pain points than for anyone to agree on a general sense of total upheaval. So when, say, a very prominent and well-liked personality was punished for doing something that was illegal in the Empire, but was legal in the Republic, it had the possibility to make a lot of people very mad.

On the bright side, Soerilia was in one piece and the sun hadn’t been extinguished, which helped put into perspective just how bad things could get.

Still, Matt was gratified to see that things were going well. After spending most of a day on a guided tour, he and Liz left.

Their next stop was one Matt had been looking forward to quite a bit. Thanks to a quirk of Corporations tax law regarding property taxes, space-based architecture was a lot more common in their worlds. Their planets usually served as a combination of heavy industry hub and pseudo nature preserve, and that only grew more pronounced at higher Tiers. It was something to do with how tax rates were based primarily on the raw land-value of planetary space at the time of purchase, so as planets increased in Tier, high tax rates pushed people off planetary soil and into the megastructures that used little-to-no planetary space.

The result was that Tier 8 or higher Corporations worlds tended to have expansive space stations, including, but not limited to, full orbital rings and Oneil cylinders.

Ixtal, being a Tier 11 world, had a somewhat barebones orbital ring, but the moment they entered the world’s real space, it was the first thing he noticed.

A Tier 11 world would typically only be a viscount level title, but Matt and Liz had made an exception at the request of the Emperor for Countess Heidi Walsh. Much like Matt, she had been raised in an orphanage and worked her way up from a job at an inn. Unlike Matt, her parents weren’t dead, though. Well, they might have been by now. Whoever her mother had been had dropped her off at an orphanage when she was an infant, and Matt wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than his own story.

Regardless, instead of joining the Path like Matt had, or starting a delving career like he had wanted to do, she had instead continued working for the inn, leveraging her natural leadership skills until she was practically running the place. She scrimped and saved until she, at only 22 years old, was in a position to buy the business from the old owner when they wanted to retire.

By the time she was 30, Countess Walsh had a chain of hotels, hostels, and short-term apartments under her control, but she had never started cultivating seriously. Using her vast, if low-Tier fortune, she paid to be carried through rifts until she was 40 and had reached the Tier cap of her world, Tier 5. Instead of just continuing as a local magnate, she had sold her holdings to buy a new location on a Tier 9 world, where she repeated the process.

As a Tier 14, she had caught the attention of her local noble who had gotten her a shard of reality, allowing her to form a true Concept in exchange for acting as their Minister of Finance.

Seemingly unable to underperform, Countess Walsh had tripled the baron’s wealth in a short century while stabilizing the economy, which caught the attention of that baron’s countess liege.

After bouncing between noble families, she eventually earned her own barony, and through time and a vast amount of resources, nurtured the originally Tier 3 world into a Tier 9 one. A self-made viscountess was a rarity, but such things did happen and were a method the Empire used to encourage nobles to actually invest into their planets. It was just rare for people to be as successful as she had been, or as fast in developing a world without serious issues cropping up.

Her promotion when transferring to Matt and Liz’s duchy wasn’t because of them, though Matt greatly admired someone so similar but different to himself, but rather a reward from the Emperor himself after Countess Walsh had taken over a supply outpost during the war and kept it running through both material deficits and enemy attacks.

When for her reward she had asked to take ownership of the highest-Tier Corporations world, no one had denied her. He and Liz had accepted with the provision that she would need to get the planet’s Tier to an appropriate level as soon as feasibly possible.

It wasn’t a strict rule, but a fiefdom’s Tier was typically correlated to the planets Tier, and Tier 15 planets were typically the lowest Tier given to count titles.

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Countess Walsh met them alone with a beaming smile and a deep bow. “I pay my respects to my Lord and my Lady and humbly welcome you to Mythena.”

Matt raised an eyebrow at the old word for prosperity, but didn’t comment on Countess Walsh renaming her world. It wasn’t commonly done, but such a decision was fully at the discretion of the ruling noble, and neither he nor Liz cared.

“How are you settling in? Are you running into issues or things you’d like help with, or is there anything you feel the need to report directly to us?”

Countess Walsh shook her head and positively beamed at him. “It has been most exhilarating to pit my acumen against the corporations that chose to remain, but there have been no issues.”

With a deep sigh, she added, “It has been everything I could have hoped for and more.”

Matt exchanged a look with Liz and they gave Countess Walsh a moment to collect herself before Liz asked, “That’s good to hear. We weren’t at war with the Corporations, but has that eased the integration?”

Countess Walsh shook her head. “I don’t believe that it has had any appreciable change. Everyone, or rather anyone with power in Mythena, understands that they were transferred to the newest Ascenders’ domain and are treating it like the opportunity it is. Give me another century, and we will be the envy of the duchy.”

Turning to Matt, Countess Walsh bowed slightly. “Speaking of business opportunities, my Lord, I put together a proposal for the duchy to take your aura potions and turn them into an export. I hope you can look it ove—”

Receiving the packet, Matt increased his perception to the max and reviewed the document. He had learned his lesson about skimming such things, and made a thorough pass before lowering his perception to a typical Tier 20.

Countess Walsh had put together a general plan for how to make their duchy an exporter of aura potions via a round of tax breaks, incentives, and deals with shipping companies who might be interested in bulk freight to and from the capital worlds.

It was ambitious. More ambitious than Matt would have proposed, but he liked the general flavor of the idea.

Even after a decade of progress, the Empire hadn’t fully embraced the aura potions like he had hoped, and on higher-Tier worlds, aura potions were still basically impossible to get, as they were gone the moment they were restocked.

Given a few thousand, possibly ten or twenty thousand years, Matt was sure things would stabilize, but this opened up other opportunities.