The Path of Ascension Chapter 372

Chapter 372

With the sects properly cowed, Matt turned to where Cui Ming and Lang Ru were convalescing.

With a step across folded space, he and Liz appeared next to them, and as the medic tending to the pair gave them space, Matt added the duo to his Concept’s whitelist. He felt Liz chortle on his shoulder at their reaction to just how much mana their spirits were suddenly being inundated with, and had his own turn to chuckle as the other phoenix Liz hopped off Liz’s shoulder, split in two, and turned into a pair of golden lightning bolts. Those phoenixes each struck one of the sectmasters, being absorbed into their bodies and expending themselves utterly to heal them.

The full range of emotions they went through was amusing, but they didn’t resist in any way.

“This one greets the Masters Titan and Legion,” Lang Ru declared, prostrating herself on the ground. “And expresses her gratitude for your benevolence.”

“Rise,” Liz indicated. “Now follow us. We wish to discuss how this will proceed. In detail.”

She changed into phoenix form and took to the skies alongside the body that had been on Matt’s shoulder, leading the four of them to an erupting volcano near the horizon. Though the clouds of toxic smoke and plumes of burning ash would be deadly even to them, Matt used his skills to calm the eruption and open a safe passage into the pyroclastic cloud as he activated a privacy formation, turning the illusion of privacy into something that would block most forms of onlooking.

It wouldn’t do for either side to be seen in a negative light by the disciples who were still lingering in the valley. Captain Kestrel was their secondary security measure, with his spiritual perception wrapping the location and preventing anyone else from getting through. It was probably overkill, but it was also just good practice.

Matt finished setting up their meeting room by creating a floor out of mana crystal [Bulwark], and fashioning a pair of sturdy raised chairs out of mana crystal for himself and Liz. The sectmasters received cushions for kneeling on, and as they took their relative seats, Liz spoke up, “I trust that you have received, read, and understood the manuscripts relevant to you, outlining the baseline changes as you transition to guild status. This is your opportunity to petition us for any changes you wish to see, for, after today, I expect you to abide by your new charters.”

From there, they spent close to a full day hashing out just what rules and regulations the sects would follow as they converted to guilds.

As the local nobles, they had some wiggle room for what was acceptable, but there were also hard limits in place, and the sect leaders both started by asking for the absolute limit of what they could do. He and Liz immediately shut that down.

Neither of them wanted to play the game where both sides started at the extremes and worked to a middle. It wasn’t a negotiation. Not when he and Liz held all the power.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, they settled about where Matt and Liz wanted in the end, easily buying goodwill by conceding on a few points they really didn’t care about. Namely the sects’ libraries of unique skill modifications. Typically, they were just added to the Empire’s collective knowledge bank in the form of a buyable listing on the EmpireNet, or if they were truly unique, put under patent like anything else of significant value.

Matt and Liz agreed to give the sects a full five thousand years of exclusivity before they had to offer their most core inheritances and the modifications they typically required to take a basic skill and make it something unique. The time delay was to give the sect-turned-guilds a draw beyond their location on Palustris in the early years while the system was built out.

As for the sole legacy the Dancing Flames sect had, it was, despite their requests for delays, handed over to the Empire’s collection.

In return, they asked for and got more than the usual lands a guild would be given. Matt and Liz stipulated that the former sects would have to sell to get within legal limits within the next ten thousand years, but that was a net positive for the guilds. They would not only be able to use those lands, but the value of them would be magnitudes higher that far out.

As a Tier 27 planet, the world would be fully developed in the coming years. He and Liz wanted to ensure that they had resources to lease or sell, and the most valuable resource of a high-Tier world was its rifts. For Palustris, the land itself was valuable as well, and so having more was a boon for he and Liz’s future plans.

The other thing they pushed for that was a major sticking point was allowing anyone who wanted to leave the sect the right to do so without penalty.

Guilds, unlike sects, were not lifetime bonds. At least not legally, like they were in the Sects. In the Empire, a guild member who Tiered past his guild and moved to a higher-Tier guild might feel like a member of the lower-Tier guild and be treated as such by his former guild mates, but legally, there was no bond remaining. In the Sects, it was the exact opposite: a disciple for a day was a disciple for life.

Even for those like Elder Winter Hornet, the Sects’ Tier 50 who had risen from a lower-Tier sect, took great pride in his lower-sect heritage and was still technically a disciple of the sect he had started life as a slave in.

That just wouldn’t fly in the Empire. The Empire did, however, allow guilds to set reasonable repayment terms for those who left the guild, which most former sects pushed to the legal limit to try and keep anyone from leaving. The same went for the durations of the contracts, which they tried to get extensions on, but Matt and Liz refused to budge from the Empire standards.

Matt personally doubted that many people would take the offer out, but that number wouldn’t be zero. Those few would be grateful for the opportunity, which is why he pushed so hard for it.

Most other things were minor quibbles that were, if not easily resolved, at least resolved without another round of fighting. Which amounted to the same thing.

Emerging from the platform, Matt and Liz flew up to where Captain Kestrel floated with their personal guards.

“Everything good on your end Captain?”

Captain Kestrel nodded like his namesake. “Yes, my lord. Most sect members returned to their headquarters. There have been a few who lingered, but they haven’t done anything that would force us to interfere.”

Matt nodded, letting some of his excitement bleed through. “You said our island arrived during the negotiation?”

Captain Kestrel nodded once more, and upon confirmation, Matt and Liz each ripped to chaotic space, where they found a Tier 30, large-scale courier ship waiting for them. Inside one of its berths was a mile-wide island that floated completely disconnected from the walls.

It was empty, barren really, but that didn’t stop Matt from grinning. It was, however, perfectly primed for life and ready to accept whatever local flora and fauna.

Matt connected to the drive controls of the island with his [AI], quickly setting up some basic logic on the pseudo-AI used to control it. He and Liz were the only full administrators, and he purged all prior permissions while setting up his own. Going forward, only they would be able to move the island freely, with more restricted access to their families, seneschals, and trusted friends.

The island controls were a marvel of engineering, and it could even travel through chaotic space directly, like a spaceship. That wasn’t the typical way the islands traveled, as part of the ducal island’s expense was a special device that linked in with the tethers connected planets together, allowing them to teleport between any connected worlds.

The drives required a fair bit of priming and preparation, and could only accept a finite number of paired teleportation-objects, making their uses limited even before the legal restrictions came into play, so they weren’t in common use. But they made quite the statement, and while their upkeep was expensive enough that even some dukes didn’t have them, Matt felt that having the option available was more than worth the price.

He and Liz had a design team scheduled to arrive in the next few years. They would need a proper ducal estate, but they had their portable house which would serve in the meantime.

Their house did look very conspicuous on the massive, grassless island, but a thought transplanted a few clumps of grasses that Matt thought looked good on the island. Liz added a few small trees she grabbed, including one of the oaks Matt liked so much. Once they had a good seed group, Matt spread his mana into a formation, crystalized it, and activated the makeshift formation and the magical growth effect.

In the first fifteen seconds, nothing seemed to happen, but watching through his spiritual perception, Matt followed along as the trees and grasses settled into their homes before their roots started spreading. In the case of the grasses, they spread and popped up secondary growths before they all started flowering and dropping their seeds.

The formation automatically added nutrients into the soil and watered the foliage as needed, even with the increased growth cycles. In just fifteen minutes, they had a small little floating oasis ripe with local flora.

A thought cut a winding path through the grass to their front door, but Matt and Liz kept to the edge of the island as they directed it to float over to the archipelago they had found earlier.

The terraforming lessons he had taken after the guild island didn’t make him an expert, but it gave him enough of a foundation to be confident in this small gardening work.

Lowering the floating island into the sea, it wasn’t even obvious the island wasn’t native. Or, it wasn’t too obvious.

Matt changed his mind as he inspected the island with a critical eye. It was very obvious. With the island prepared for a sprawling estate, it was flat, which stood out as unnatural with the mountainous islands all around them.

“Should we build a mountain?”

Hearing Liz’s question, Matt couldn’t help but laugh and pull her into a kiss.

“I had the same thought, but I don’t think we need to go that far. Once the castle is built, it will look more natural.” He responded.

Liz pushed away and broke free from his grasp where she started running through the grass. “No way mister. We are not having a castle.”

Matt chased after Liz, but she slipped from his grasp every time he was about to grab her. “Castles are cool, and it’ll let us hide more stuff.”

“They’re tacky. We definitely don’t need a castle. We can just have an estate.”

“An estate with a castle as the main housing.”

“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t work, by definition.”

Matt nipped at Liz’s ear as he caught her. “Then I’ll change the definition.”

Dragging him down into the grass, Liz smirked. “I’d like to see you try.”

The sky was beautiful.

As he and Liz laid in the grass, they watched the stars overhead twinkle down at them.

“A young universe.” Liz pointed to the side. “That constellation looks like a sword.”

She was right, and they pointed out a dozen other shapes until the sun rose and blocked their view.

Matt was personally happy the universe Palustris was in was young. Essence kept the local star from burning out, but unless essence was spread to the neighboring star systems, they could, and eventually would, die.

Even for them, as immortals, that would take an incredibly long time, but there were still examples they could look to. They had spent time on one world where the night sky was empty, as the local star fueled by essence was the last remaining star still shining in the universe.

It was a sad end for so much potential, even if it was natural in a place without essence.

Palustris having a robust universe was purely a positive, and Matt made a note that they should look into settling the nearest star systems in a few millennia. Some people liked to roll the dice on creating a functional realspace crossing – not that it had ever succeeded – but Matt just wanted to ensure that even trillions of years from now, Palustris’ night sky wouldn’t be empty.

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It was, however, an idea for long in the future, and Matt tossed it to the side.

Instead, he turned his attention to the local star.

Once one planet in a system started Tiering up past Tier 10 or so, it would typically start affecting other celestial bodies in the same solar system. That usually started with any moons and the sun, and then would slowly Tier up other planets afterwards, but the original planet would usually be ten to fifteen tiers above anything else.

Yet here, the local star was Tier 20, and the planet second-closest to said sun was Tier 21. Matt was very interested in investigating how exactly all of that happened, but what he was more curious about was how to properly leverage the comparative glut of opportunity it provided. The sun would attract some delvers, but star-delving required a specific set of skills that most delvers never developed.

Looking at it more closely, Matt realized just how busy the star system was. There were five other rocky planets besides Palustris and five gas giants, two truly massive ones in the outer system and three smaller ones that orbited in the system.

The gas giants were fairly useless until they either hit Tier 15, which the two largest hadn’t yet, as they were far out from Palustris, which was the main source of ambient essence as it leaked from the planet. That, or until people decided to settle them with things like floating cities. But they were so expensive that Matt and Liz wouldn’t be funding them any time soon.