The Path of Ascension Chapter 428

Chapter 428

Tim looked at his familiar apartment door with shock as adrenaline flooded his body and made him shake as if he had just had a near death experience.

Which might be true.

Carefully reaching out to open the door to make sure he hadn’t been hallucinating, he paused as he stared at his hand shaking like a dog shitting razor blades.

Why a dog would eat razor blades, or how they could get all the way through a dog’s digestive tract to be defecated, remained a mystery. It was one of the more colorful descriptors his mother liked to spout when he was younger, and had stuck with him for just how damn accurate it could be.

She used to be eloquent like that before the alcohol had really gotten to her.

With an effort of will, Tim carefully reached out to the doorknob and slowly twisted it.

Blinking up at one of the most recognizable faces in the Empire, Tim swallowed and wondered if it was possible that the person in front of him was an imposter.

Ascenders’ appearances were legally protected, and while people could naturally have similar faces, anyone who deliberately changed their appearance into a likeness too similar was just begging to be fined into the ground. Or at least, that was how he understood the law was written from his school days. But that same lesson had mentioned how so long as the person in question wasn’t trying to make money off the appearance or pretending to be an Ascender, enforcement was fairly lax.

That might have explained the man outside, but he wasn’t just similar to Ascender Titan, the person in front of him was the spitting image of the face Tim had seen in his history books. So he was either the real Ascender Titan or a near perfect lookalike, which was most certainly illegal.

As no one was arriving to arrest the man or whatever, Tim’s disbelief increased further and further until the man smiled as Tim’s pad pinged softly.

When the man silently pointed to where Tim had previously tossed it on the counter, he just swallowed.

Hands rock steady, as his brain simply didn’t have any more adrenaline to dump into his body, he saw an AI verification message from the LocalNet, CityNet, PlanetNet, and two EmpireNet relays all confirming the person in front of him was truely who he appeared to be.

The message itself could be fake, but the amount of effort and power needed… if they could do that, they wouldn’t need subterfuge to get anything they wanted.

Which meant Tim was starting to believe the man in front of him was actually who he looked like.

Tim felt like his brain was going to melt as Ascender Titan smiled. “Hello, Timothy. Mind if I come in to chat?”

Tim instinctively said, “Tim, please.”

It was only a moment later when Ascender Titan smiled that he realized that he had corrected an Ascender.

Instead of getting angry the giant just smiled. “I tell people to call me Matt all the time, however it never works. I’ll extend the offer to you as well, if you feel comfortable with the idea. I do get the whole name thing. It’s just generally better to assume the full name rather than call someone the wrong one. Mind if I step in?”

Tim couldn’t quite process that Ascender Titan had just told him he could address him by his first name, but that felt like calling Garrett’s mother anything but Ms. Torres, or a teacher by their first name. Weird and uncomfortable. Except a million times worse.

Realizing that he hadn’t spoken to answer the last question, Tim stepped back and Ascender Titan strolled inside the apartment, entering the little seating area that separated the kitchen from the living room.

It was where Tim had set up his alchemy equipment, and the area was usually only a little cramped, but Ascender Titan was huge and took up a lot of the available space.

Tim wasn’t used to being towered over, but Ascender Titan had several inches on his six foot one and the man was wide, with shoulders that looked like boulders.

“Nice setup. The Anderson line. I remember when Liz used a similar model. She either blew it up, or we sold it by accident. Honestly, I don’t remember which.”

Chuckling, Ascender Titan sat down in one of the chairs and the easily distracted part of Tim’s mind noticed how the chair didn’t creak, which it most definitely should have given the man’s size, let alone his weight.

“Okay, I’m sure you have some questions.”

At Tim’s nod, Ascender Titan continued, “Mind if we try something first? I think it will make things more clear.”

The Ascender waved, and a small handful of fifty credit coins appeared on the table. “Let’s call this my payment for barging in. Absorb ‘em if you will.”

Tim swallowed, realizing the Ascender was here for his Talent. He didn’t think it was so impressive as to require a duke, let alone an Ascender, to intervene, but Tim knew he had little choice but to comply and so did.

Except, one of the coins remained sitting on the table.

Tim blinked even as Ascender Titan clicked his tongue. “Well damn. Okay, first let me explain a little something. The duchy has a small counterfeiting problem. It’s actually small. Significantly smaller than the corresponding counterfeiting rings that infest pretty much every duchy, but I don’t like it.”

There was a layer of steel in those last words that made Tim nod along. He wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with the Ascender or proclaiming his innocence in the matter, but he nodded all the same.

Ascender Titan picked up the coin Tim hadn’t been able to absorb and started to let it run over his fingers. “This is a counterfeit coin. It’s a literal perfect replica. This counterfeiter makes such perfect copies that even I can’t tell the difference. Or so we believe, given the serial numbers and such. You got flagged when you started withdrawing large numbers of coins and they didn’t hit circulation.”

Tim felt his heart somehow go into his throat and his stomach try to sink to his feet, but Ascender Titan waved at him. “No one thought you were involved or anything. It was pretty clear that your Talent was eating the coins in some way. A fairly rare side effect, but not unheard of, and one of the reasons we keep the stupid physical currency. Originally, I was hoping you might be able to identify counterfeit coins and I’d hire you, but I assume you can’t spit those coins back out?”

Tim could only shake his head, not able to speak with his lungs somewhere in the next city over, but Ascender Titan didn’t seem bothered by that.

“That’s what I figured, having seen you absorb the coins I brought to the bank. Yeah, I brought the coins you absorbed earlier. Given that and your potion skills, I figure you have an innate knowledge Talent. Seeing that, I’m even more interested. Want a sponsor?”

Tim’s mind struggled to process everything Ascender Titan had said, but the final words jolted him. The Path? That deathtrap? He’d looked into it back when his only priority was leaving his mother’s home, but seeing the statistics made him scrap that option. He wanted independence, not a funeral. No hair on his head wanted a part of it. But how could he say that to somebody who actually finished it without sounding like an ass?

“I’m sorry, Ascender Titan, but I’m already too old for it.”

Instead of looking mad, the Ascender just waved. “Bad choice of words on my part, sorry. I meant a ducal sponsor, or guild sponsor if that suits you more. I sponsor you in the early Tiers, help you advance, and then you can pay it back once you are a higher Tier.”

Tim finally thought he understood, and that helped center him. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for that. I’m not like you. I’m hardly a fighter. I just want to reach immortality and live forever.”

Ascender Titan smiled. “Self-preservation is a laudable goal regardless. I won’t push on that, given how you do seem to delve at-Tier safely enough. If you really aren’t interested, I can leave and we can pretend we never had this conversation, but innate understanding Talents can be incredibly strong if you are willing to push them. Jack of All, the Ascender from the Clans, has one that she pushed into being a monster. I don’t know what yours does, but seeing your records and you absorbing money, my gut says it’s strong and I’d be happy to help you a little as part of a program we are spinning up.”

Having accrued so much proficiency in the last ten years, Tim was quite aware of how strong innate understanding Talents could be.

He had worked incredibly hard to slowly but surely increase his skills while grinding his Tier in the rifts, but even then, his progress had been less than ideal.

According to his calculations, he was still fairly well on track for the needed speeds if he really wanted to reach immortality with any amount of certainty. The costs of all the things he needed to buy had slowed him down, as well as all of the proficiency grinding he had to do between delves. But while he had lost ground, he hadn’t fallen off entirely.

It was a slow grind, and having done it for the last decade, he understood why so many people joined guilds and other cooperative organizations. He had made fun of it before when he was in high school, but on the other side, he got it. It was hard to keep up the motivation to grind day in and day out without severe burnout or getting yourself killed by making a careless mistake.

Garrett was the only friend from high school he still talked to regularly, and even that was becoming harder with him taking over more responsibilities from his mother, having reached Tier 3 himself not too long ago with a group of fellow crafters’ children. Garrett would slowly advance further but he would no longer be getting carried through rifts to speed that process up.

His friend, like so many others, just didn’t have the drive to make it all the way to Tier 15.

Some days, Tim wasn’t sure why he wanted to be immortal, but it just seemed like the first real goal he could set for himself. Once he had all the time in the world, he could truly take his time. But until then, old age hung over his head like a sword.

It wasn’t impossible by any means, but having someone like a duke, let alone an Ascender, backing him could let him rocket ahead.

He could also possibly learn new entries that would have taken him decades to otherwise get his hands on.

It wasn’t just access to the skills themselves, but being able to see higher Tier skills was part of his Talent that he’d never really been able to truly leverage before, but it might be an untapped gold mine of proficiency.

Seeing Tim was interested, Ascender Titan said, “If you don’t mind talking about your Talent, let’s start there.”

It was a bit of a gamble, but it was one Tim was willing to take.

Maybe.

***

Matt looked on as the kid’s mind worked overtime trying to process everything.

He had deliberately come in quick and fast, but he didn’t intend to actually sign anything with Tim here and now. He mostly wanted to shake him loose from the routine he had been in.

And he hadn’t even lied. There was another young man who had made his way to Palustris via Mathew and Vinnie’s delving prep school, Stewart Reynolds, who had a Talent that let him absorb the full effect of a potion.

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It seemed like a simple Talent, but he had come up with ideas of how he could grow the Talent, and Matt and Liz were more than happy to help someone so dedicated. Making the test group larger didn’t really change those plans, and Matt hoped the two could feed off each other and encourage the other to grow.

But a lot of that depended on Tim’s Talent and how it actually worked.

“My Talent is about proficiency. I spend money and unlock the ability to grow the entry. I, umm… It also simplifies the skill. So my current potion, the healing potion, shows up like: ‘Beginner Alchemy(Healing Potion | Variant Calafor): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 100,000 Credits’. Then when I pay the unlock cost, it wants me to make soup, or stir soup actually, and that feeds me some information about the potion. Then once I get the full proficiency, I get what I estimate to be a decade’s worth of information about the skill. I… Yeah, that’s kinda it. Oh! Actually, my Tier 3 Talent lets me merge bought skills. It creates a new proficiency to grind out and costs more money to unlock, which has been the real issue. I’ve only used it for my endurance and running proficiencies. I just unlocked the healing and strengthening potion mix before buying the skill creation method for [Solar Flare]. That’s what I did with the money you brought. I… okay, that’s kind of it for real this time.”

Matt smiled, but his mind was racing the entire time.

Tim’s Talent was stronger than he expected. Much stronger if it was just able to create entirely new recipes or learn a simplified method of skill creation.