The Path of Ascension Chapter 378

Chapter 378

Matt couldn’t help but look at the ascender in awe as Manny talked to him. It was just so strange to think of someone ascending into their Realm.

They didn’t get many people from lower Realms, as there weren’t any Tier 25 Realms directly connected to this Realm, but they still tended to pop up every few generations give or take a dozen as the complex currents of inter-Realm cosmology pulled someone off-course. Weirdly, they knew a lot more about higher Realms than they did lower Realms, thanks to the cosmologers who had made it their lives’ missions to learn as much about the structure of Realms and how they related. But Tier 25 Realms were subtle and difficult to spot, and there were some people who thought that they simply couldn’t see the lower Realms connected to their own, with the people there simply not developing the Intents needed to survive ascending.

The man in front of him was a mark against that theory, as a Tier 26, which implied he had advanced the whole way through Tier 25 without accidentally ascending, or he had had an inspiration which caused him to advance. If he was a front-runner of the Realm, it was possible he was just the first of many ascenders.

Which might not be a good thing.

About a year ago, Manny had sent Allie on a mission to the border world of Exalon, just to monitor the situation. Not wanting to do a long-term recon mission alone, Allie had grabbed Aster, who had in turn messaged him and Liz, who then decided they might as well brings the whole group and told Allie to go get Zack, who had been with Susanne at the time, which was why they had all gathered for the Ascension.

Who wouldn’t want to meet an ascender?

It was a good thing too, because the actual process of Ascension was quiet. It wasn’t like an Ascension leaving the Realm, which had benefits to those around the ascender and was impossible to miss. No, Ra’thala had not been there one minute and had appeared the next like a ghost.

A good thing for their own possible Ascension, but that was a thought Matt didn’t really want to consider quite yet. He had way too much unfinished business in this Realm to even consider leaving.

There had been a bit of last-minute panic when the cosmological sensors they were using indicated the proximal lower-Realm crossing had fully vanished, but Zack’s insistence on overbuilding their observatory array paid off when they identified that it had just spontaneously shifted four planets over, into Federation space.

He didn’t even land on that Federation world, instead showing up two planets away from there, and it was only a combination of sheer luck and the fact they were already scouring the surroundings for their missing readings that they found him at all.

Not that landing in the Federation would have been a good thing. Matt might have had some moral scruples about ‘stealing’ an ‘Ascender’ from any other Great Power, but he had none when it came to the Federation.

Even if Ra’thala wasn’t as pleasant as he was showcasing, he didn’t deserve to be subjected to the Federation and their perversions.

And what they would have lost if they hadn’t grabbed him.

Matt had, of course, surreptitiously scanned his spirit, but what he’d seen was just kind of weird. It was recognizable, but it was just different.

Ra’thala had two overlapping cores, one magical, and one physical, but instead of peaks and valleys where his essence was distributed to raise his attributes, his essence swirled and eddied in complicated patterns Matt had never seen before. He wouldn’t have thought them possible without a living example.

A quick search with his [AI] told him that such cultivation methods had been seen in their Realm before, but not for at least five generations of political entities. Even then, which was the last record they had of such things, the practice had already been falling out of favor for the current methods. Or so the historians believed from the tidbits of information they had found of such old civilizations long lost to the sands of time.

Though from what he could see of Ra’thala’s cultivation, he had a veil up but it wasn’t the most complex one he had ever seen and while it was unique it had flaws that let Matt see through it without too much issue even if some things were still obscured. That was still more than enough to know Ra’thala was doing something wholly different than even those records. Not a single report mentioned pulsing lights at certain spots in each Tier layer of the core. Really the only similarity was the way the essence wasn’t static.

Which was another thing that was strange. Matt could see that this Ra’thala had twenty six bands of cultivation but they weren’t crushed together like his own. Instead, each seemed to be its own swirling mass of essence that flowed into nodes reminiscent of embers. Also, the way he grouped his essence was… weird. Most modern forms of cultivation recognized seven physical attributes, though what those seven were could vary, but Ra’thala only had five physical groupings.

A node seemed to represent favoring a specific attribute like leaning one way in physical cultivation did.

From what he could see, Ra’thala favored a slightly off-pure strength location that overlapped with endurance for a lot of his nodes but not always. His second most allocated area was a mix between mind and durability, which was a strange combo: Matt wasn’t sure what it would show as.

His inspection was cut short when Manny summoned a handful of skill shards onto the table. “A suite of the [AI] skill shards and their auxiliary skills. They are like an artificial mind that acts in conjunction with your own. With them, you should be able to better integrate into Empire society or any Great Power society you choose to settle in. A gift free of obligation or need for return.”

“What are these?”

Matt expected Ra’thala to ask for clarification on what [AI] actually was but he hadn’t expected him not to recognize skill gems.

Did skill shards look different in other Realms?

That was a very interesting hypothesis and Matt instantly wanted to interrupt and ask Ra’thala all about his world and the nuances of cultivation there but knew this wasn’t the right time and instead just marked it as a note for later.

Even Manny looked confused as he explained. “These are skill shards. I’m not sure what you call them but they contain the activatable abilities found in rifts, the areas where monsters form up.”

At the mention of rifts, Ra’thala nodded. “Monster Dens. Yes, foul places that spill out beasts who seek nothing but destruction. Containing them is a pain but I don’t know of any Constellations that come from the slain monsters.”

“No not from the monster but from clearing the rift, the Monster Den itself.”

“Clear it?” Ra’thala looked apologetic as he continued, “This translation Constellation is good but I believe it is confused. What do you mean ‘clear’? The monsters pour out in waves. Their foulness is then returned to the sky and the stars where it is purified and returned back down as energy for Celestials to absorb.”

Realizing what Ra’thala was implying, Matt’s eyes went wide.

Manny was faster to speak however. “Where did you get your skills, Constellations, from then? Are they all self-created?”

“No.” Matt nodded but froze almost immediately, “Only half or so are unique to me. Others are from various Celestials Guides I gathered in my travels.”

Even Manny looked genuinely surprised at the revelation and Zack looked like he had found an entirely new specimen he could dissect to find new knowledge. Not that Matt disagreed.

A Realm that seemingly used entirely self-made and replicable skills to function was an incredible find for a million and one reasons. It made sense they would need to do something like that if they didn’t enter rifts to advance and instead considered them pests, but he had never considered the ramifications of such a cultivation civilization.

As for them not entering rifts, Matt thought he had an answer for how that came about. Whether accidentally or intentionally, they had run into an aperology-based strategy to increase the speed of Tiering up their planets.

By letting rifts constantly stay full of mana the rift would be pouring the maximum amount of essence into the air as it converted ambient mana. Consequently, that same overflow would lead to rift breaks and possible ruins without any direct rewards such as skills shards.

It explained why Ra’thala didn’t seem to understand what skills shards were but that seemed anathema to having any sort of functional society.

Matt then had the thought they might not have any kind of structured society, but that couldn’t be true, as Ra’thala was clearly educated and intelligent. He also implied that he found various skills in cultivation methods, which implied linages and methods to pass down knowledge, which meant there had to be a base level of civilization.

After a moment of stunned silence, Manny looked at Zack. “Can you project a [Fireball] spell structure in the air please.”

Once Zack had done so and Ra’thala had been given a few moments to inspect the structure, Manny asked, “How complicated would you rate this skill?”

“Moderate for a mid-level Divine but too complicated for a Celestial to create in any reasonable amount of time.”

Matt mouthed the words as they were translated and the general confusion reignited as each side explained the steps on cultivation.

A [Fireball] being hard to replicate for a Tier 4 or under seemed normal but it being only moderately hard for a Tier 5 to Tier 8 seemed ludicrous. Carving a skill into one’s spirit was not trivial. He could have managed it as a Tier 10 given a decade or so but that didn’t make it easy.

Ra’thala cocked his head and nodded to the skills. “Do you not do that? Because of these ‘skill shards’?”

Liz waved and summoned a pile of Tier 8 skills they kept on hand. “I wouldn’t say they are common, they don’t start dropping consistently until Tier 8, peak of the Divine Realm for you if I understood the conversion of names correctly, but they aren’t that hard to get in our Realm just by clearing a rift.”

Ra’thala made a hand gesture Matt interpreted as a shrug. “There are so few peak Divines, even if we know they would be extraordinarily rare. I suspect that even Almighty’s, your Tier 15s or 16’s, I believe, would struggle to bring out so many.”

That caught both of them off guard before everyone made noises of agreement.

All but Zack who leaned forward. “Would you mind sharing what one of your beginner skills would look like?”

Ra’thala copped Zack’s hand gesture and created a skill structure out of stone in something that Matt would have called [Create Stone] but that worked very differently. Where [Create Stone] made real but low-Tier matter, the spell Ra’thala used condensed ambient essence into stone. It felt non-permanent but Matt wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it wasn’t so simple.

The skill structure he created took Matt aback.

It was so… simple.

“This is a general physical enhancement spell that many Celestial Guides use and anyone can get copies off. It is considered a good starting point for most physical Constellations. I mean skills. I apologize for the slip up.”

As Matt inspected the skill structure, he realized what he was seeing. It wasn’t simple. Or rather it was, but that wasn’t the whole truth.

It was… large, for a skill. Very large. Matt wasn’t certain if it would even fit in a normal skill slot were he to have it in his spirit. It would possibly take up as much space as one and a half, even two skills, and it was crudely created. Or perhaps simple would be the better way to phrase it.

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But what it lost in elegance, it certainly made up for in robustness. If a normal skill was like a carpenter’s finishing hammer, this skill was like a sledgehammer. There was nothing delicate about the skill, in any sense of the word. It was unsuitable for fine-control work, but anything that tried to break it would just find itself shattered. As a consequence it also had a lot more room for error when inscribing it in your spirit, making doing so significantly easier.

It was a general physical enhancement but Matt could see where, with an expansion and multiplication of the skill structure in one quadrant, you could multiply the speed of the user. On the other side of the skill was what he would call the strength nodes that would make the caster physically stronger and more durable.