The Path of Ascension Chapter 438

Chapter 438

Exploring chaotic space was dangerous. Exploring chaotic space blindly was suicidal.

Which is why no one did it.

No one.

Seekers were both a finder of all things rare and shiny and a compass back home.

A seeker, more than any other role on a ship, was indispensable, which was why they were usually the only member of a team to get a personal share of the loot most of the time.

A large portion of that reason was the Seekers Guild, which was how Matt spent a majority of his free time examining their history on their latest leg of travel between training sessions. He was happy enough for the years of downtime to keep fiddling with his various projects, as were all of their group. They stood in stark comparison to the crew members who, if not on duty or doing something, spent their time in their cabins with their perception half as slow as a normal unAwakened perception. It was the lower limit most people could reach, thus making time pass as fast as possible.

Even with everything on his plate, Matt didn’t want to always work, and so spent some of his free time looking into the exploration of the Realm with Liz as a fun thing to do together when they were both free.

Mainly, they focused on its history. They wanted to get a feel for how exploration was handled by each Great Power and the events that shaped each decision. Liz also wanted to know a little more on the individual players like Lila’s guild and other independents, which was a good call.

The first thing that caught his eye was something he hadn’t considered, given how expected it was. Seekers took a part of the cut because that’s what they did; it was in every show, movie, play, tale, and story, even the ones Lila told, that Seekers got a part of the cut. That was just how it was and Matt simply accepted that was how things worked. So when he started looking into the histories, he delved deeper, wanting to question that level of ingrained fact, which was when he realized just how vital a Seekers job was.

That led him to the Seekers Guild, another entity he never really questioned; the existence of a singular guild representing all seekers everywhere.

Which is how he learned the guild wasn’t really a guild at all.

Legally, it was. But that was only because Agatha needed a legal framework to deal with the unionization of seekers who, since free of their noble contracts thanks to one of her earliest reforms, were eager to band together. With her recent expansion of the guild system to balance out the remaining noble houses, it was deemed a good enough solution to give them an exception charter and wipe her hands of the problem.

In reality, the Seekers Guild was a union.

Because Agatha was still Agatha, she demanded they do so in a manner resembling an actual guild to limit future attempts at a third faction structure forming. So, upon joining the Seekers Guild, everyone was automatically made a vice guild leader, with the acting guild leader spot being vacant.

It had, in fact, been empty since the original guild leader ascended about thirty seconds after Agatha tried to tie him to her political structure more securely when the initial rebellions were put to rest. The guild had kept that tradition alive and well by never being able to pass a vote for an official leader in the time since. They even went as far as to vote to make it harder for a guild leader to be voted in accidentally by raising the percentage required for a leader to a full eighty percent.

Matt was bemused at the annotation mentioning that decision had turned the yearly vote into a rating system for who had the best haul from chaotic space for explorer seekers. The idea of people’s ‘vote for me’ pages being treated more as a rare item showcase made Matt want to mention it to Allie, knowing she’d hack into the system just to see what other people had found in the breach when they got back.

Besides deliberately thumbing their noses at Agatha, the ‘guild’ mainly acted as a collective for backing up contracts with larger organizations. A lot of those times, it was with exploration guilds like Lila’s, but they brokered almost every contract involving a seeker. Technically, every seeker, once tested, even those in full guild member contracts, were also members of the Seekers Guild, which is what gave them assurances that they would be paid at the end of journeys.

The book Matt was reading on the topic was one Lila had made him download, and pointed out that anyone could try to cheat a seeker out of their promised commission, which usually was a minimum ten percent of the exploration resources per seeker. And some even did, as the seekers wouldn’t fight back.

In the early days of Agatha’s reign, when both seekers and guilds were new, more than one team or guild looked at the mountain of resources they had to hand over upon getting home safely and decided they didn’t want to. They would leave their seeker high and dry, if they were left alive at all.

The Seekers Guild had stomped the murder part out fairly early by hiring Corporations Mercenary groups to hunt down the exploration teams who did so, but they were far more lenient for those who just robbed their seekers.

Technically, they would rarely even have to force the other group to pay, either. They generally had the legal ability to seek retribution with the local noble whose territory the contract was signed in, but they rarely needed to do so.

Instead, they just blacklisted the crew, or even every member of the guild the crew was a part of, until they paid back ten times the promised remuneration.

That would have been bad enough, but they wouldn’t simply accept mana stones. Instead, they demanded the exact items owed along with ten times the value in mana stones. If the original items were already sold, they demanded ten times the number items originally owed be returned. All of a similar value and to be paid to the guild and the seeker. Only then were they able to buy the guilds services again which stopped most established guilds from not paying.

Some teams tried to scam the Seekers Guild on their last voyage or if they got a particularly large haul but the guild usually sued the group into paying the agreed upon ten times value anyway. Being the largest collection of seekers in the Empire they were unsurprisingly good at knowing which approach was needed for any particular situation.

Such methods had been tested time and time again, but none more so than when a ducal house got into the exploration business early in Georgios’ reign.

Matt thoroughly enjoyed reading Liz the excerpt about the noble family who decided to unilaterally change the contracts of their employed seekers to not only reduce their portion of the rewards, but remove it all together, trying to make them paid vassals of the house. At the time, it seemed to come out of nowhere, according to the book he was reading. But with hindsight, they knew that the family had only done so after they created a better way to parse chaotic space currents with a new type of scanner.

The seekers cited breach of contract and uniformly withdrew.

The noble family thought they could wait them out and continued to stay with the few exiled seekers or pseudo seekers they had remaining.

It didn’t work out for them at all, and the losses were devastating.

Even with their new technology advantage, more than half of their ships which exited settled space never returned. Worst of all, the worlds they did find were often already looted, or of generally lower Tiers.

After almost two centuries of devastating losses, they tried to re-offer contracts at a slightly higher rate than before, but the Seekers Guild refused, citing their repayment clauses.

The noble house then tried complaining to Emperor Georgios when their liege Queen backed the Seekers Guild. He also backed the guild by ignoring the endless petitions the family sent out.

The noble house broke before the guild, and to afford the repayment clauses, they ended up selling their new scanner technology to the Seekers Guild, who then licensed it out to every ship manufacturer they could. It was still one of the main passive incomes the Seekers Guild had to this day and one of the reasons there were so many independent exploration groups. Ships were generally affordable with enough savings for someone at the same Tier with how available the formerly most expensive component was.

The house crumbled not long after the spat. The book then speculated the guild had never been worried as they had the power to ensure things progressed the way they desired, and they were ready to hire Corporation Mercenaries once more if they needed to. Whatever the truth of the incident, the capitulation of the noble house left the Seekers Guild a threat to be reckoned with.

The story also served as a good reminder as to why their pair of seekers were worth almost as much as the ship and crew combined.

That five percent they owed the two was a steal, given that even normal seekers didn’t often take a contract for less than five percent. The good ones, like the two they hired, normally didn’t take jobs for less than ten percent, and they never worked with another seeker as a matter of pride.

Few teams could afford the additional expenditure of a second seeker, but most would still pay it if it would actually get them another. Despite that, it rarely happened, with the notable exception of Ascenders having their pick of as many as they wanted.

That was mainly because seekers, despite being fiercely loyal to each other through the Guild, were also competitive. Each expedition was a battle to see who could find the most valuable items. The rarest natural treasures. The newest wonder that would get their names in high-Tier gossip. Hauls that could let them get an even higher percentage from the next team they chose to go into chaotic space with. And most importantly, according to the book he was reading, votes on their haul showcases for the exploration-inclined seekers.

That price tag did come with expectations. Any seeker verified by the guild could reliably navigate through chaotic space— at least the first layer— and back to settled space. That was why they were paid so much.

Exploration seekers mainly relied on Talents. The best of them had both a Talent and an applicable Domain, but that was about all they had in common. All of their Talents worked differently, and it was up to the person in question to figure out how they could best find planets as they drifted through chaotic space.

Lured away from higher contracts, their ship’s seekers were two of the very best Tier 30 seekers the Capital guild headquarters had to offer on short notice.

Lura Hope was a mousy woman with a ‘please don’t bother me’ aura Matt had immediately noticed when she put her name forward during their hiring.

Floating behind her was a book that looked like any other normal diary. According to her records, it only contained ever shifting gibberish with a library’s worth of pages to flip through.

It wasn’t her Talent; rather, it was the growth item the Seekers Guild had commissioned for her at Tier 10, when she made her Concept. Like the seeker they had met during an exploration of what would end up being the planet the vassal war was fought on…

Matt had to think but couldn’t remember his name.

Steven or something.

Not able to remember himself, Matt and Liz lost a few days going back through their AI recordings of that time and it was a blast of nostalgia.

Malcolm had been there because his Talent and the Seekers guild had sent him there, and that history was part of the reason they wanted to see such an item fully matured in action.

It was something of a tradition for the guild to build, make, or find the perfect growth item for new members, and Lura’s was her book.

If it was to be found, the seeker went on a quest as soon as possible, while if it was to be made, it was usually done at Tier 15 when the guild was sure it would make its investment back. But they did make exceptions for those who had a fully formed Concept and were guaranteed to reach Tier 15.

Together with her Talent and Domain, what looked like shifting gibberish to everyone else started to contain glimpses into the future for Lura.

Near the heart of the Unsparing, in one of the few non-spatially expanded rooms, was a complicated array where Lura floated, suspended in front of her book like a puppet with its strings cut.

The formation was a product of the Seekers Guild, and amplified most types of seeker powers. Not all, because Talents were weird, but enough that most serious exploration ships had a dedicated room to house the formation, and those whose Talents didn’t mesh well tended to stay in settled space.

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There was a fairly serious level of diminishing returns with the size of the formation, but Lila had maximized it for the size of the ship, which was why the room was only large enough to hold ten of them watching.

Everyone else, with the notable exception of Allie, was there to watch the show. They had all heard tales of such seekers and their odd personalized rituals.

Energy started to flood the chamber and the runes enchanted into the spherical walls started to glow as they began channeling nearly a million mana a second.

Typically, a seeker had about fifteen seconds before a ship’s reserves were drained below a safe threshold, but Matt had already topped not only the ship up, but the crew too with his Concept. That ensured few complained about them doubling the length of both tests, as more information would only give them better results, which would make them all wealthier.

Just as the energy in the room reached its peak, Lura snapped to life, quickly shuffling through pages, her finger tips starting to glow blue as the formation’s power spilled into her.

Her fingers traced ever shifting gibberish as her lips rapidly moved, each word nearly tripping over the one before it as they rushed to exit her.

Thankfully, they were all Tier 28 or higher and could follow along.

While some Talents gave simple directions, and they could be incredibly strong while ensuring a high margin of safety, the seven of them had unanimously decided to take information-type seekers instead.

In general such seekers weren’t as useful as a ‘fly in that direction’ type seeker, because their Talents didn’t work that way but the best seekers were often that type. Those like Lura and Magnus Bergh, their second seeker, were able to figure out ways to get directions amongst their more esoteric information reliably, which is why they were so ridiculously expensive to employ. Both of their normal rates hovered around fifteen percent and they had teams lined up and ready to accept them.

It was easy for them to forgo a higher percentage to team up with each other given what Ascenders typically pulled out of explorations.

Lila famously had her pick and usually took three or four seekers on her large-scale guild voyages or personal deep adventures and they hoped to follow in her footsteps.

Thirty seconds later, when the energies had crept all the way up Lura’s neck, she fell to the padded floor, her book quickly mirroring her.

Gasping, she nodded in thanks as one of the healers carefully cradled her and poured a potion down the woman’s spasming throat.

After a few more seconds, the shakes started to settle down and Lura could speak.

“Three planets within a month travel. Two are probably contested. One is definitely not going to be found unless we hit it, but I’m not sure on the Tier. I didn’t get anything about wealth at all. Within a year’s travel there are at least nine planets. Nine I could identify, at least. I’m uploading information about them now. What is more interesting is that through it all, there was a single message. I thought it was interference until right at the end where it snapped into place. ‘Gathering’ is the word I’m getting, but I’m not sure what context that’s in, besides it involving all of us; the ship, myself, everyone. I suspect that includes you all, but I can’t actually tell because of your divination wards.”

Liz smirked at Aster as she replied, “That’s so cool.” in revenge for Aster making fun of some of their style choices in the AI saved memories they had gone through.

Aster glared back before sagely nodding. “Quite impressive. How vague can you get? Is there maybe a page about how a particular fox might find herself a level five mana type that isn’t violently unstable?”

Lura shook her head, chuckling weakly. “Even if you didn’t have anti-divination wards plastered all over you, no that’s not really how my Talent works. I get information about my future and mine alone.”

Matt looked at the book and disbelieved that final statement. It was only his gut and he wouldn’t call her out on it, but he’d bet a decade’s worth of mana generation that her Talent was stronger than that.