The Path of Ascension Chapter 417

Chapter 417

Matt was still heated enough that the moment they left the estate, he opened a [Portal] to a Tier 28 rift and entered inside, with Liz hot on his heels.

Once he had killed the first dozen monsters, she asked, “Feeling better?”

“Not really, but good enough I guess. This whole thing just pisses me off and I feel helpless.”

Liz just opened her arms, and Matt hugged her for a long minute before pulling back. “I get it. How do you want to handle it?”

Matt rubbed his eyes before groaning. “I want to just kill the asshole but that’s not really possible and possibly not warranted.”

Liz grinned. “And here I thought I was going to have to point that out.”

Matt snorted. “I do realize that while he’s an asshole, same with that baron— speaking of which, that reminds me, I want to make him relinquish his title if we ever see him— they both don’t deserve to die. Maybe. My point being I’m too close to this, and that’s exactly the lever that is being pulled. Which is pissing me off even more.”

Liz rubbed the back of his hand with a thumb. “And that’s okay. If you really go too far, I can always pull you back.”

Knowing his wife all too well Matt smirked. “Would you have pulled me back if we could have killed him? Be at the right Tier and his real body was here I mean?”

Liz scrunched up her face as she said, “Ehhhh. Maybe. Dude’s a dick and used his position to very carefully take advantage of a kid. Maybe he doesn’t actually deserve to die, but I wouldn’t weep over his loss if you managed it. If he’s willing to do something that shady to Eirene, how many others has he done similar things to?”

That just started to get Matt heated once again but he forced himself to calm down. “How do we want to handle it then?”

“He’s going to sue us.”

Matt nodded. “Probably. Us and Eriene.”

Liz waggled her hand back and forth. “Maybe, maybe not on her. I doubt he wants his deal made public, and if it goes to trial it will be made public. It’s smarter to go after us and leverage our attacking him as an excuse to make us pay him.”

“We aren’t paying him a single credit. I wouldn’t give him a counterfeit credit just in case he might be able to pass it off as real.”

Liz snorted. “Speaking of, we have another group making counterfeit credits. This time in Rilies County.”

Matt groaned. “Fucking bullshit. I know we statistically have less of this petty crime than others, but it’s really pissing me off. Can we just get rid of physical credits already?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Yeah and they are useful, but they are also surprisingly easy to counterfeit despite a lot of effort going into preventing exactly that. Talents like that are bullshit.”

And they were.

Not every false credit was Talent-made, but a majority of them were, which meant any number of preventative measures generally just didn’t work or were actually used to add legitimacy to the credits.

The smart counterfeiters never went over a million credit coins, but not everyone was smart, and enough of the coins could start to shift mortal economies on a small scale. Most of that came from fear of accepting one of the coins, which then ruined the few legitimate reasons for the physical, less traceable currency. But it was a disruption all the same.

As dukes, it was their duty to deal with such things, but it was still annoying and took up resources they could otherwise use on more valuable and important projects.

Matt personally just wished they could get rid of the physical coinage altogether, but there were legitimate reasons to keep them around.

Still, letting his mind drift over having to send someone, possibly Cato if it was bad enough, to Count Rilies’ worlds was a worthy distraction.

Economies were fragile things, and one of the few warnings Manny did give all of his nobles after the execution was about keeping their economies as healthy as possible.

He wouldn’t elaborate on the why, but they were going to take the warning seriously.

Standing up, Matt dusted himself off before walking back to the rift entrance. “We do need to delve in the coming weeks, that’s for sure. I’d like to reach Tier 28 during our Clans visit.”

“We’d need to delve like mad for that to have any realistic chance at happening. I—”

Liz’s sentence was cut off as Aster dropped a pile of snow onto the two of them the moment they exited the rift. “You could have called. Assholes.”

Brushing the snow away from his collar where it tried to sneak down his spine, Matt pulled Aster into a quick hug.

“It all happened pretty quick.”

“Half an hour is not quick. I’m one teleport trip away.”

“You’re right. You’re right.”

“I know I am. So what are we going to do?”

Liz shook her head. “For now, nothing major. No storming off to kill anyone at least. We would have gotten you for that.”

Aster put away her armor with a snort. “Shame that, given what I heard second hand.”

Matt felt his mood lighten as the three of them retreated to the ducal castle, where they chatted for a little while before splitting back up. They were all busy and needed to get back to work.

Matt started dealing with the paperwork Liz hadn’t gotten to yet, giving her a small break she used to check up on her research institute’s progress. According to her latest reports, they had figured out a replacement for an important bloodline strengthening potion’s main ingredient.

Seconds Falls Echo wasn’t necessarily a rare Natural Treasure, as it normally appeared in the Tier 9 to 13 range of rifts, but it was always in high demand thanks to being a main ingredient in one of the potions that could reinforce a bloodline. Its situation wasn’t helped by also being a useful Natural Treasure on its own for anyone wanting an increased ability to see sudden movement.

Natural Treasures, being rare and nigh impossible to farm, were mostly pulled out of rifts.

As for why Natural Treasures didn’t form on inhabited planets, that was a topic often debated. But whatever the reason might be, it was an undeniable truth, and unless they wanted to depopulate planets, they weren’t able to get them from anywhere other than rifts that spawned them.

There had been dozens of requests from teams at Titan’s Torch to test making rifts using Natural Treasures, but so far, the tests had been deemed too expensive and were put on the back burner until they had more funding.

While they didn’t have unlimited funding with the cover of the bespoke rifts, Matt figured there was a chance he could allow a few more projects to run simultaneously. And given that there was a chance the Knightly Order rifts might need Natural Treasure as anchor items, it would make for a good cover to start investing in them.

After sending the idea to Kees and Cato for deliberation, Matt refocused himself on Liz’s successful Seconds Falls Echo replacement.

Given the sheer amount of rifts in the Tier 9 to 13 range, there were usually enough Seconds Falls Echoes to make a decent amount of potions, but there most certainly wasn’t enough to support demand.

Everyone wanted to strengthen their bloodline, and it took resources to do so.

Essence could make a bloodline stronger, but like everything else, no one wanted to spend their precious essence on something a potion could do when they could spend it on an aspect of their cultivation with more tangible benefits. The same went for mana concentration, and he knew how expensive those potions were, given that he had been the one to help Liz make them while they were on the Path.

It was the same problem the Monster Collective had run into, though they had figured out a method to increase the supply of such potions to a more reasonable level that their price was actually approaching something reasonable. It was speculated that they had their own variations of the potion, but if that was true, they kept such details tightly controlled, as there had never even been a hint of a leaked new potion recipe.

Matt personally suspected they were just using Talented alchemists to make the same known ingredients go further, but there was no real way to prove that. So long as they were being paid properly for their work, he didn’t even mind, as that was an ideal use case for an efficient alchemy Talent and they weren’t particularly rare as those things went.

As for Liz’s bloodline research facility, they had been working on trying to rework the potion to use cheaper materials. That was a process that had been done dozens of times before on other potions, which resulted in just as many variations on the same potion which did help, so long as they didn’t rely on the same rarer Natural Treasures. So the effort was nothing new in and of itself, but they had succeeded.

At least in a minor way.

Currently, they had managed to replace the Seconds Falls Echo with six other non-Natural Treasure herbs, a monumental feat in and of itself. The problem was that their new potion wasn’t as effective as the original by an order of magnitude, and it was up to Liz to decide if she wanted to keep working and iterating on the potion. Or, they could release it as it was and let the various potion industries run with the current idea.

Matt was pretty sure she would end up going with her first idea of letting the teams have a bit more time, twenty to thirty years, then reevaluate them but he was happy to give her the break so she could deal with it all.

That just left Matt with dealing with their ducal duties.

Thankfully, Liz had been working her feathers off and there was no backlog of high priority incidents, which he was grateful for, but that just meant Matt got to start digging into increasingly menial tasks. They were still important, but Matt personally couldn’t care less that two of his barons were squabbling about who got to raid a planet passing by, marked by one of the Empire explorer teams, so long as they didn’t actually kill each other or violate any laws regarding their subjects.

Best outcome he saw was that the two of them punched each other in the face a few times and got over it.

Matt corrected himself, the actual best outcome was that both groups just raided the planet in a competition similar to the border world he had visited while it was still within tether range.

According to the report from the initial explorers, the Tier 4 world wasn’t really notable.

Explorers usually got to them first, but explorers were also Tier 15 at a minimum. And for worlds under Tier 10, they usually only bothered to enter their real space long enough to scout them for the Empire bounty before grabbing any rare resources, usually Natural Treasures, then just moved on to look for bigger and better finds.

Previously, when the Empire was rapidly expanding its footprint, it would have grabbed a Tier 4 world like this one. But with them being unable to do so due to the war treaty, they instead turned to establishing temporary teleport tethers and spending a few months raiding the world for everything it was worth, as the other Great Powers often did.

Usually it was a free-for-all, similar to the training world Matt had experienced when he was Tier 4, but with just one or two planets from a singular Great Power, meaning the actual fighting was kept to a minimum.

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With the two barons each claiming the world for themselves, Matt just gave them both authorization to jointly raid the world and stated he would reward the person whose people did the best, so long as there weren’t too many deaths. He wished he could mandate no deaths, but there would undoubtedly be people who messed up a delve in some way and died for their mistake. He just didn’t want them to order their people to follow others into rifts and kill them inside, where no one could see, which is why Matt didn’t apply any qualifiers for types of deaths. If he did, he was sure they would encourage their people to abuse any apparent loopholes.

What was more concerning was that there had been a noticeable uptick in low level worlds reaching the collected Great Powers in the last decade. That just could mean they were passing through a particularly thick grouping of such worlds, or that one of a dozen much worse things were happening deeper in chaotic space. Thankfully, the former was much more likely than the latter but it was something he made a note of and sent a request to the relevant Imperial authorities, asking for their evaluation.

That taken care of, he moved onto the next situation, which was, amusingly enough, a request to settle down on Palustris from a ‘notable’, which flagged their system. People tagged as notable were usually unaffiliated high Tiers, but lower-Tier people could also get tagged as notable for various reasons.

This person, however, was someone Matt knew all too well.

Seeing Liz twirling her hair as she was stressing about what to do at her desk, Matt decided to give her a distraction. “Hey honey, I think you need to see this request for residence. Should we accept?”

Liz looked up and then around before standing up and walking over to his desk and linking into what he was looking at.

He felt as Liz realized what she was looking at as her body language changed into something more relaxed. “Na, let’s reject her.”

Saying that, Liz reached over and tapped his reject button before Matt could stop her.