The Path of Ascension Chapter 376

Chapter 376

Emmanuel stood up from his desk and stepped through space to arrive in one of the palace’s personal gardens. It wasn’t one of his or Carissa’s favorite ones but it was empty and he needed to think.

The Empire’s economy was… not great.

Fighting a war nearly alone against three opponents was not easy, and it surely wasn’t cheap.

They had been digging deep and at most, they had another century before they would have been forced to throw in the towel solely due to mounting costs. And they certainly were not fine just because they pulled out before they had truly reached the bottom of the barrel. This was even in spite of the diversion of resources from the Farm.

For all its expenses, the military and its various support structures had been bolstering the economy as money flowed in and out of a million and one facets of the civilian and military economies.

With those institutions being shuttered, the core financial mechanisms had more money to spend on other things, but it also lost an easy way to circulate money back into the economy.

Frederic was doing a masterful job in keeping things balanced without a recession or inflation of mortal economies which tended to be the most susceptible to such fluctuations. The immortal economies on the other hand were not doing quite so hot and it was causing some political fallout.

Things should improve, as wealth from the other Great Powers began to flow in thanks to the terms of the treaties, but it would take centuries before that started to actually generate a meaningful impact and stabilized them. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue, but the Empire hadn’t been truly robust since before Emmanuel had come to power. Since before his family came to power, really. They’d been stretched thin even before the war, and that had pushed them nearly to the breaking point.

Now? Emmanuel wouldn’t say that Matt’s Talent was solely, or even primarily, contributing to the solvency of the Empire, but the amount of mana he was receiving from the Ascender, paired with the times he spent producing mana using his Talents himself, was responsible for an uncomfortable amount of their mana bank.

If it was being this genuinely useful right now, what would it be like in ten to twenty Tiers?

He wasn’t sure they could actually hide the influx of mana if they intended to use it like he wanted no matter the projections and plans they had in place.

It didn’t help that he felt adrift.

He, like the economy, was slumping.

They had been pushing so hard that the lack of pressure thanks to the treaties from all the other Great Powers left him feeling like he was missing the firm footing he was used to.

He felt like he and the Empire should be doing something, that they should be hunkering down for the next battle, hoarding their strength while waiting anxiously for the next blow to land.

Emmanuel knew that that was emotion and not rationality speaking but logic was losing out to feelings.

The Empire needed a breath so they could relax and be in a good place for the inevitable true war, which made this slump part of the natural process they needed to go through. Not just in the sense of the economy but the people. Everyone needed time to breathe. The high-Tier crafters needed breaks, the medium-Tier soldiers needed time to return to their families and or just reintegrate back into civilian life, while the low Tiers needed time for the existential fear of crushing defeat and being handed over to their enemies to fade from their memory.

They needed to process but it wasn’t so easy to relax like that.

At least, Emmanuel didn’t find it that easy.

He wanted to do something. Fix something. Keep himself busy.

And he couldn’t, which made him feel adrift.

He once again pulled up his models, trying a slightly different set of variables to see if they could afford to force one of the Tier 47 rifts to Tier 50. He could technically do it, but doing so put the Empire uncomfortably close to an economic death-spiral, at least until Matt Tiered up to Tier 35. Tier 40 would be even better but that was the problem with growth Talents, it was always a balancing act between doing and waiting until the doing was easier.

Seeing the numbers again made a part of him, a small part but a part nonetheless, want to put pressure on Matt to get him to move a little faster. After all, would it be so bad to send Matt and Liz a capable administrator who could handle most of their ducal problems? Would it be so bad to preemptively end some of the plotting that was targeting Matt and his guild? Would it be so bad to just make a suggestion or two the next time he saw them that advancing faster and out of the war Tier’s would lessen the Empire’s political burden? Would it be so bad to just come out and state that the Empire needed Matt delving back-to-back to be in a better state than it might otherwise be? He could even Talent up some unique rifts for them to delve he was sure. Would that really be so bad?

Yes. They would all be bad.

Emmanuel didn’t like to bend his morals, He Was Not A Tyrant, but it was so, so tempting sometimes to justify just one thing. Which was exactly the problem and was the first step in breaking his Aspect.

No, the kids were doing fine. In fact, they were doing exactly as he had foreseen, which was a relief considering everything else beyond his control these days. They were making mistakes, learning, growing, and imposing their will upon everyone around them.

That was part of the interesting things he had only really understood about reality and human interactions and society after he had access to a Tier 50’s future sight.

Some people bent the Realm around them. Their very actions changed things in far reaching ways that weren’t always obvious.

Sure, an Ascender killing another duke because he was a rapist obviously changed things, anyone with eyes could see that a number of nobles pulled back on some of their more… obviously eclectic behaviors after Aiden’s rampage, but it went beyond that. Even just Allie teleporting around and frequenting various small bakeries in her quest for the best scone had an impact. It wasn’t as obvious; no economist would have predicted it or would even really notice anything, but when he delved into her futures and their myriad permutations, those simple actions had impacts not readily obvious.

Allie’s frequenting of bakeries around the Empire shouldn’t matter, she usually took precautions to obfuscate her identity and Talent even now, but she was an outside influence that normally wouldn’t have interacted with the normal trajectories of fate. Her mere occasional presence shouldn’t change things, but it did.

One of her favorite bakeries had been on a path to foreclosure but her additional semi-frequent presence in the shop had added to the shop’s ambiance, which in turn drew in new customers because busy establishments always did better. After all, other people wouldn’t be there if the food was bad. Now, the shop that should have shuttered its doors was considering opening a second location.

And that was just Allie and her snack addiction.

All people had similar impacts, but some had more weight than others. Some a lot more than others.

Titan’s Torch had been like a boulder landing in a puddle with its impact, so much so that he was still trying to parse the changes in fate that had been kicked up. Scientific discoveries were often as much chance as they were fate after all, but thankfully most of what he had seen was positive.

Even the things that would be negative to Matt himself.

He was stepping on established interests, and the next few millennia would be interesting as they collided.

That was one place where his intervention would be a strict net negative.

At least from a monarch’s perspective.

The Empire needed internal struggle and strife if it was to grow. Trees grown in a greenhouse never grew as tall as those that grew under the open sky and people were the same way. They didn’t grow without some strife.

That was however a fine line to walk. Too much struggle and most people could never climb out of their starting locations, at least not the average mortals. Too little and they just never felt the need to rise up and improve themselves or their station.

And what a pity that would be. Even just looking at the highest profile examples, the Ascenders who had risen from humble beginnings, Lila, Aiden, Zack, Matt, and Aster. They were able to rise up because they had the opportunity to risk it all. Not that they were alone. With his father’s past sight, he was able to see the ever-changing web of the future and the happenings of the past, which let him see how effective those methods were even for the average folk.

Even without pre and postcognition, it was obvious that what the Empire was doing was working. Create a happy baseline for the mortals where those who wanted to live normal mortal lives could do so without being trampled while giving the ambitious a ladder to climb and things sorted themselves before too long.

It wasn’t just The Path, though that was one of the imperial government’s more useful pipelines. It was the low-Tier guilds, the laws that allowed corporations to flourish and fail. It was opportunity and growth that fed back into a system that lived and breathed like any other.

A system that could all too easily break if neglected or put under the wrong sorts of pressure.

Manny had been well trained and prepared for his throne but he felt adrift having overcome his first real hurdle.

He was the culmination of two generations of effort to change not just the Empire but the Realm.

What if he failed?

It was a scary thought that weighed down on him every minute of every day. He should have been able to wave away such thoughts with the proof of executing the war not just better than expected but as close to perfect as was possible. But if anything, that success made every fear and doubt so much worse.

Things were going so well compared to his original projections, he was terrified that any misstep would not just ruin the foundation that his father and grandmother had set, but also ruin the perfect start he had unexpectedly created.

Which was why Emmanuel was stuck in a loop of self-doubt and condemnation, worrying about things beyond his immediate control. A loop that logic played no part in pulling himself out of.

Sitting down in the garden, Emmanuel retracted himself.

He deactivated all of his Talents, muted his [AI], broke down the partitions of his separate mental walls letting the other selves that took care of other tasks return to the greater whole, clamped down on his cultivation letting his proprioception fall to a mortal level, and finally closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Emmanuel let himself lay there for an unknown amount of time, but he knew it couldn’t have been that much time. His job would never let him be absent for too long. At some point, Carissa found him and laid down next to him without saying a word, but Emmanuel just continued to lay there.

Thoughts flitted in and out of his mind until things calmed down. Like an ocean having just experienced a storm, his mind slowly stilled.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Sitting up, Emmanuel didn’t feel instantly better but he was in a much better mental place.

Taking Carissa to breakfast, they cooked up a simple fare together without fanfare and talked about nothing important.

Their morning was interrupted when a meeting alert broke through Emmanuel’s silences.

The meeting was about war. The cynical side of him wanted to dismiss it but war was simultaneously unimportant with the rules in place and also the most important method of diplomacy the Realm had.

Thankfully, this meeting wasn’t about their wars.

General Ios was the one giving today’s brief and despite trying to keep those ranks apolitical, she was a well-positioned noble scion who held great influence in his oppositional factions. She was also a competent military leader who kept her political aspirations out of her orders and job but he still couldn’t afford to slight her by ignoring the briefing she had asked for the opportunity to give.

“Good day, Your Majesty,” she bowed as he entered and stood at attention waiting for him to singla her to star.

Her greeting was perfect in every way and Emmanuel acknowledged her, then indicated that she ought to proceed.

“The war between the Federation and the Monster Collective is going about as well as we expected. The Federation, despite losing a substantial amount of their top-end power in the Tier 25 bracket, is holding on well. This is the first major conflict between the two Great Powers and we are getting a look at how the Collective has diverged from the Federation and how the Federation has prepared for them. As we suspected, the Federation has a number of anti-bloodline weapons and potions they have been putting into play. The ones we are seeing currently are all clearly from before their dissolution but their existence speaks to greater capabilities, as we suspected. The Collective’s countermeasures have proven mostly positive but there has been noticeable slippage.”

Emmanuel nodded as that all fit their predictions.

The Federation had had anti-bloodline equipment for a long time; most of them just disrupted the usage of the bloodline core similar to any cultivation suppression, but it had always been hard to deploy on a large scale or wasn’t more impactful than any other poisons.

Yes, you could block a phoenix from reviving. But in most cases, it was far easier to just trap and double or even triple-kill the bird in question.

Given how rare bloodlines were on the whole, anti-bloodline armaments were rarely deployed in war. But, he supposed, using them against the Monster Collective did make the most sense, and if they were attempting to refine something old or field-test something new, they could hardly ask for better targets.

With their most hated enemy attacking them, everyone had been expecting the weapons to make a resurgence, but it seemed like both sides were taking the slow and cautious approach.

“Currently the Collective has pushed a quarter of a sector into the Federation border territory but they are struggling upon the secondary lines of defense.”

Emmanuel raised a finger, and Ios explained. “The Federation defenses are holding up surprisingly well. Part of that can be attributed to them reinforcing that portion of the border heavily in recent history, but another part can be blamed on our last war. Their soldiers are bloodied and hardened where the Collective’s troops aren’t. The Collective strategy seemed to expect that and they are taking a slow but steady approach, ensuring their people outnumber the Federation where they can and cycling battalions in and out of the frontlines. That is contributing to their slow progress.”

“How are the Collective’s troops faring?”