The Path of Ascension Chapter 426

Chapter 426

 

Tim sighed and put his head down on his desk, placing his pad in the holder on the side. He could hear as his teacher, Mr. Hasta, started tapping at his own pad to check on Tim’s work. But when Tim didn’t hear him say anything, the boy let himself drift off into a blissful daydream.

It almost turned into a full-on nap, but he didn’t finish quite early enough for that.

He was woken up when Mr. Hasta called out, far more loudly than was actually necessary while standing right next to Tim’s desk, “And time. Put your pads down and go to lunch. We’ll resume with the writing portion of the test after. Please don’t talk about the test during the break. Pl—”

Tim tuned the bland man out and waited until they were dismissed, where he jumped to his feet and slung his bag over his shoulder and was the second out of the door. Waiting, he fell into step with his best friend Garrett.

“What did you get for question ninety five? The one asking about the differential. I got seventy two.”

Tim rubbed his eyes and tried not to groan. Garrett hated when he did that, but it was hard sometimes when his friend could be so dense.

“It was thirty seven point two. If you got seventy two you must have used Haltur’s formula instead of Yellik’s, but you only use that when it’s… Whatever, it doesn’t matter. None of this shit will matter in a few days when we get out of school and Awaken.”

Garrett bumped him into the wall. “It doesn’t matter for you because you’re smart. I need to work at this stuff.”

“No, you don’t. You’re going to go work at your mother’s, making leather armor just like she did, and her father did, and his father before him did. This stuff is pointless. Why bother teaching it before college? Then, at least, you are choosing to learn it.”

Garrett, normally one to complain about the same lessons, disagreed. “That’s ripe coming from you, when you are going to rank in the top twenty of the class without ever opening a book.”

Hearing a twinge of something new in Garrett’s voice, Tim focused on it. “What’s wrong, man?”

“Nothing.”

Returning the shove from earlier, Tim asked again, “What’s wrong? Don’t bullshit me.”

“I… My mom wasn’t happy with my grades and so I’ve been studying a lot, but it’s so hard. The writing and science stuff isn’t so bad, but the math just doesn’t seem to stick. There is always a rule and then an exception to the rule and now I’m pretty sure my results were awful and I’m upset, okay? Just let it be.”

Tim looked at his friend. Shorter and a bit stocky instead of his own tall and lanky frame, Garrett was usually a ball of chaotic energy who hammed up everything. But today, he seemed really upset.

“Then why didn’t you say something? I could have helped you study. We still can. Retests are in two weeks, right before awakenings. If we push hard, we can bump your scores up, I’m sure.”

Garrett shook his head. “Do you even know how to study?”

That caught Tim off guard, but he nodded. “I might not need to do it, but I know you and how we can get you to learn the stuff you need to get a better score.”

All at once, every student’s personal pad beeped. Tim didn’t bother to check it, but Garrett did and looked like he wanted to throw the pad.

Peeking, he saw his friend hadn’t exaggerated earlier. He had only scored sixty-four percent. Over the fifty percent passing mark, but not by much.

Grabbing the pad from Garrett, Tim opened the report and started skimming the more detailed results.

“See, this isn’t so bad. I can see where you went wrong. If we spend every day studying after school, we can get you into the seventy five percent area easily enough. In the multiple choice section, you got more tripped up by the questions it seems. That’s not so much the math, but test taking skills.”

Garrett nodded, agreeing, but there was a melancholy air about him as they walked in silence until they got their food.

The fish wasn’t one of Tim’s favorites, but it was light and refreshing, which landed perfectly after his earlier nearly nap. But midway through, Garrett gestured to Tim’s bag. “Aren’t you going to check on your results?”

“What for?”

“So you know how you did?”

“I already know how I did,” Tim mumbled around a mouth full of rice and greens.

“No you don’t, you think you know, but you don’t actually know.”

Pulling out his pad and unlocking it, he tapped to open the latest message without looking down. “Ninety-six percent.”

Garrett let his fork fall onto his plate, pushing it away disgusted. “Ugh, I hate you. That’s better than most college students could get. That last ten percent is brutal.”

“Only the dumb ones.”

Garrett ignored his quip and pressed his face into his hands. “Let’s change the subject please.”

Tim was all too happy to do so, and instead pestered Garrett into agreeing to take him to his house, where they could study in peace.

By the time he got home, his mother was thankfully passed out, bottle still at her fingertips.

Making sure he didn’t make too much noise, Tim slipped through the house.

Two weeks and he’d be free.

He had saved up just over one and a half thousand credits over the years, doing odd jobs for neighbors and other students. It wasn’t much, but it would see him housed for a few months as he figured out his next steps.

He had plans, but they would mainly depend on his Talent and just what it was.

Two weeks later, Tim stood in front of a chair along with the rest of his class and closed his eyes, centering himself.

He had been dreaming of this moment for years, and now that he was done with school, he was finally able to Awaken and set off on his own.

Sitting down in the chair, he took a deep breath, feeling the Awakening machine thrum as everyone went through the prompts.

Finally, after everyone finished agreeing not to share their Talents, Tim felt a pulse of essence rush through him.

It felt as good as everyone said it did, and he felt his spiritual perception manifest over his skin as his spirit was Awakened.

He took a minute to revel in the joy of the moment before tapping at the screen to get his Talent readout.

Instead of spitting out a result immediately like he expected, he waited as the device processed.

…

…

…

Tier 1 Talent: Complexity into simplicity.

Primary effect: Simplify abilities into easy-to-understand effects.

Secondary effect: Practice the simplified skill or ability to increase proficiency.

Tertiary effect: Perform, view, or absorb skills or abilities to unlock them.

Quaternary effect: Spend money to unlock new abilities to make them eligible to simplify.

Tim blinked, not knowing how to process his Talent, but got up and cleared the seat for the next person, his heart and mind racing.

Instead of leaving the Awakening center, he reserved one of the private rooms meant for people who needed to consider their new Talent in private. Which he was, he supposed.

An instinctive thought brought up a virtual screen similar to what he had seen an AI would give if games were as accurate as they portrayed themselves as being. It was a simple empty list of his ‘Abilities’ but Tim didn’t know how he’d get an ability to show up.

Drumming his fingers on the table, he hoped for something to pop up, but when nothing happened, he rummaged around in the cabinet for a piece of paper.

Quickly writing a few lines, something finally popped up in his view.

Beginner Writing: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 200 credits.

Instinctively, he understood that his Talent had several ranks, and beginner was only the first, but his mind was more preoccupied on the fact that his Talent was charging him money.

What would it even do with the money?

Did his Talent create a bank account?

Could it link up to his bank account? He didn’t see an easy way to do that, but he had no idea what his Talent was capable of.

What would it even do with the money? His money?

And most importantly, how was his Talent wanting to charge him a week’s worth of rent at a shitty apartment for a writing skill? A beginner writing skill.

Crumpling the paper up and throwing it into the trash, he jerked as a new entry popped up in his Talent, silently pinging him. With a thought, the screen opened up and a second entry was there just under the writing skill.

Beginner Throwing(Overhand): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 500 Credits.

Spluttering, Tim cursed his greedy Talent, then got a second piece of paper and folded it into a paper airplane to get a new skill unlocked.

Beginner Paper Folding: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 150 Credits.

Standing up and leaving the Awakening facility, Tim got out of the building and went into the nearby park where he started jogging.

After a few dozen steps, he felt a ping and brought up his screen.

Beginner Jogging: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 1,000 Credits.

Picking up the pace, he sprinted.

It took longer, but he once more felt a ping.

Beginner Sprinting: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 3,000 Credits.

Seeing that such a simple thing as sprinting would cost him more than he had saved up through years of effort, Tim felt like screaming.

He had so many plans for whether his Talent was good or bad, crafting, fighting, or utility, but he had never considered that his Talent would be a black hole of money and he didn’t know how to pivot. Well, aside from just pretending it was strictly useless and ignoring it, but that felt like too much of a waste, considering it seemed like it could be very strong if he was understanding it.

His Talent seemed like an incredibly useful form of an innate understanding Talent, but he didn’t have enough money to get it going.

He could afford one or maybe two of these unlocks, but then what? What did beginner paper folding give him?

Nothing that would make him easy or quick money, that was for sure. But even that wasn’t his main issue. He needed to know how the Talent worked. It talked about simplifying the complex, but what did that mean in practice?

He didn’t know. It could either be really good or useless, and he was too scared to test it.

Heart thumping and breathing hard, Tim slowed down to a walk, letting himself calm down both mentally and physically.

Beginner Breath Control: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 2,000 Credits.

Not letting himself get worked up, he pondered how breath control was a thing but breathing wasn’t and hadn’t unlocked anything. Squinting at a faraway sign, he tried to get a better vision unlock, but nothing happened, so he gave up.

Finding a fairly sword-shaped stick under a tree, he picked it up and went through one of the more basic sword forms he had learned at school.

Beginner Sword Fighting: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 10,000 Credits.

Seeing the sky-high credit cost, he groaned but dutifully went through several of the other martial skills he knew. They all cost over five thousand credits, putting them well out of his price range, but that wasn’t all he unlocked.

Beginner Footwork: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 300 Credits.

Beginner Jumping: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 150 Credits.

Beginner Flexibility: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 2,000 Credits.

The prices seemed semi-random, but he thought he was beginning to come up with an idea.

One of his original ideas had been to use his savings to delve. But it was a last resort, only to be done if he got a purely combat Talent.

He knew how to fight as well as basically any regular new Tier 1, thanks to school. But his original idea, if he had to go the delving route, had been to use the Tier 0 skills to establish a foundation while relying on the combat Talent to make enough to afford housing.

Tim didn’t want to fight for a living, but it was one of the easiest ways to make money fast since Ascender Titan had made the skills public so many years ago.

Another of his ideas was to rely on his Talent and go a crafter route, but that was slow and expensive to start, and he really didn’t want to join a guild or corporation. They weren’t bad, but after being in school and having someone tell him what to do every day in and out, Tim wanted his freedom. The problem was that even if his Talent gave him unparalleled skills in crafting, that didn’t negate both the material costs and the upfront costs of the unlocks and tool purchases to boot.

Pulling out his pad, he checked a few of the local nearby rifts, and when he saw nothing major had changed since he checked it this morning, put away his pad, an idea slowly forming.

Pulling his pad back out, he realized he was now a registered adult and downloaded Ascender Titan’s Tier 0 skill-making trainer, reading through the introductory information until he felt a ping in his mind.

Beginner Skill Making Abbreviated([Solar Flare]): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 120,000 Credits.

Seeing four other and nearly identical entries, Tim wanted to strangle his Talent.

Over a hundred thousand credits.

It might as well be asking for the moon. Sure, a skill cost way more than that to buy, but the price just seemed impossibly high. He could probably make the skill manually before he earned enough money to unlock the skill with his Talent.

Once more, his mind went back to delving.

If there was one way to make money fast, it was delving. But all of that hinged on his Talent actually being useful.

If the unlocked skills were worthless or hard to gain proficiency in, he would have to go with his backup, backup plan of getting a normal job and just… existing.

Seeing how that had treated his mother, working by day and getting drunk by night, he wanted nothing to do with it. He, like pretty much everyone else, wanted to get strong enough to reach immortality, but he also wanted to do it in the best, safest, and preferably easiest way possible.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Knowing he needed to bite the bolt and get it over with, he opened his page and tried to buy the jumping skill, it being one of the cheapest ones, but nothing happened when he mentally clicked on it.

Theorizing he might need to get actual, physical credits, he got up and took a trip to the nearest branch of his local bank. After listening to and accepting the warnings about how physical currency wasn’t digital and so couldn’t be retrieved in the event of a scam, he was given his credits.

Four one-hundred credits took up nearly no room in his pocket, as the coins were small, but he felt their weight like they were bricks.

Having gotten more credits out than he initially planned, Tim found a cheaper hotel room for rent-by-the-week and rented it for sixty credits, which were immediately deducted from his digital account, making him wince. It was a shitty, hole-in-the-wall single room without even a private toilet or shower, but it would work for what he needed, which was a place to sleep.

Sitting on the bed with his credits in hand, Tim clicked on the beginner footwork.

Jumping had been cheaper, but he felt footwork was more useful both in and out of a rift, and it wasn’t that much more expensive.

When Tim clicked the skill with the credits in hand, he felt something in his spirit flex and shift as the credit coins vanished into nothingness.

Instead of letting that distract him, he instead watched his Talent display as it updated.

Beginner Footwork: 0/100 Proficiency — Walk to gain proficiency.

Blinking, Tim looked at the words in disbelief.

Getting up, he paced around his room and, after thirty steps, the display changed to 0.1/100.

Some quick math later, he realized he would need to walk about fifteen miles to reach full proficiency.

That wasn’t all, though. Even with just that little bit of proficiency, he had an instinctive idea of how he could walk better. It was more a vague notion than anything concrete, but it was a sign that his Talent might be even more powerful than he realized.

Knowledge Talents were inscrutable, so there wasn’t much he had been able to learn about them when preparing.

Thankfully, walking was on his list of things to do.

One of his plans for short-term employment was to do deliveries for establishments. Normally, they were done on bikes, or by people with speed Talents or the like, to maximize profit, but there was no rule against walking other than smaller or no tips.