The Path of Ascension Chapter 44

Chapter 44

The following day, Matt hand-fed Aster a select package of rabbit that Aunt Helen had prepared. She would be coming out of her stupor soon, and he wanted to see what changes she would experience.

Once his bond was fed, he knocked on Liz’s door, and they made their way up to the train car with a breakfast bar. They sat down and watched the plains turn into deserts. The hills slowly transitioned to more sand than dirt.

It made a nice addition to their breakfast view. His relaxed state of mind was short lived, as Matt felt a hovering presence a few moments later. When he looked, he found Camilla standing there with a plate of her own food.

To give an overture of peace, he kneed the swivel chair next to him, causing it to spin toward her. She sat but perched at the edge as if ready to defend herself at any moment.

Matt played with his omelet. The cook must have been drunk because the omelet was nearly burnt on the outside and close to raw on the inside, while also heavily under-seasoned. If it had been intentional, it might have been good, but it was mostly just disappointing. Still, he plopped a forkful into his mouth. At least it was hard to mess up pre-cooked ham and mushrooms.

“I’m sorry.”

The apology was abrupt, and he and Liz turned to face their breakfast companion.

“I have been staying with Aiden for the last few years, but I couldn’t sit around anymore. So, I made a deal with him. If I wanted to come out, I needed to stay with you guys or have a bodyguard. And I really don’t want that.” Camilla swallowed hard and squeaked out, “Or go back, but I need to get out and stretch my legs.”

She finished with a half-hearted shrug. “I’m sorry for being curt with you two yesterday. I just have a hard time not seeing someone else in you.” She nodded to Matt as she finished.

Liz spoke up, “Thank you for apologizing. If you want to” –the blood mage twirled her spoon around—“join us, even if it’s just for a while. But we don’t know you or anything about you.”

Camilla opened her mouth to say something, but Liz spoke up first, “So, we figure we should try and spend time together. At least while we travel. We can all make a better decision when we reach the vassal kingdom. What my uncle wants is irrelevant.”

That ended the conversation, and they finished up their food in a more companionable silence. Camilla walked to the front of the train, while Matt and Liz returned to their rooms. They needed to start the process of learning their new skills as they had a short window to do it if they wanted to expand the skill before the end of this train ride.

Matt sat with Aster as the veil of grogginess started to lift away from their bond. He threw Liz a message saying that Aster was waking up. A moment later, she entered the room, only to find the fox scratching at her neck where the AI was implanted.

From their bond, Matt got much more feedback. More emotion, and even the start of what almost felt like words. It was like a thin pipe had been replaced with a much larger one, letting more of who Aster was in. Her small form repeated what she did when she had first hatched and explored everything around her.

Matt got the sense that new ideas were forming from the old scents and objects. Liz talked to her in the yips and clicks that made the beast language, which made Aster flick her ears, and her tail poofed as if she was startled.

Matt patted her and ran her tail through a hand until she defluffed.

It’s not like she hasn’t heard this before. She uses Liz to ask for ice cream all the time.

The idle thought was the wrong thing to say, as the fox perked back up when he thought the words ice cream. The fox was at the door in a flash after a moment of stillness. Matt felt her push ‘Ice cream!’ through their bond.

Liz simply laughed while he sat there and contemplated pounding his head against the wall.

“The first thought you have is of ice cream? I feel betrayed.”

Aster cocked her head and yipped at him. Liz’s giggle continued while a picture of a heart and a questioning color was pushed through to him from his bond.

“I don’t have a heart for you to eat either. You’re a glutton. But, okay, let’s go see what they have.”

They made their way back to the food car. Walking through the halls made Matt feel exposed, as though someone would try to steal the skill shard in its bracelet. He knew it was locked down tight, but the lingering fear remained. The skill was worth too much for him to be comfortable until it was absorbed properly.

When they arrived at the food car, they found Camilla sitting at a table on her own. She didn’t have a plate, so Matt wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she glanced at the opening door and smiled at the bounding white fox. The look of happiness at the sight of Aster bounding toward the ice cream was a look he never expected on her cold face. Camilla’s gaze rose from the small fox, up to the accompanying humans, but when she saw Matt, her face froze, and the smile became brittle.

At Aster’s insistence, they all got bars of various kinds of ice cream. On a whim, Matt snagged a bar for Camilla. She took it but was clearly more entertained at Aster’s antics than the snack.

The fox in question devoured her own bar, then tried to steal pieces of Matt and Liz’s ice cream, too.

They let her have a bite or two, but Camilla’s slow pace was her undoing. Aster saw the bar with only one nibble and gave the dark-haired woman a pleading look.

To Matt’s surprise, it won the woman over, and she offered up the bar after looking to him and Liz for confirmation that it was okay. As Aster ate, Camilla ran her hand over the fox’s fluff, clearly enjoying the silken fur.

The smile Camilla gave Aster made Matt feel like she wasn’t all that bad. She clearly had some trauma to work through. He had seen similar sights growing up, but he had no idea what her issue was from their brief interactions and didn’t want to presume to know until he got her story from her.

Aster was no help in that endeavor, as she just discovered a new best friend, and didn’t seem at all biased when pushing Matt to keep the woman around. He probed their bond, and found the fox thought she smelled nice.

As he thought over the information she was sending to him, he mulled it over. Nice wasn’t the right word. Kind was closer but even then, he wasn’t sure it was right. Aster liked Camilla, and that was all she needed to know to want to keep the woman around.

Having Aster seemed to break the tension, and Matt felt Camilla open up slightly during the time they sat around. She even chimed in with a few interjections of her own while he and Liz bickered about random things.

It wasn’t much but it was progress.

***

Two days later, as the train was approaching the station, Matt and Liz sat next to each other in their room. Their [Endurance] skills were about to breach their core spirits and fill the third and final skill slot. They would then be immediately removing the skill and putting it back to their Inner spirits to free up the slot, but they needed the skill in the Core spirit for the modifications they wanted to do.

Matt also wanted to improve [Mage’s Retreat] but as it was already settled into his spirit it would be a much slower process. According to Madam Delver’s guide, he could improve the Durability boost to half as strong as the Strength boost with the right changes to the skill’s structure. It was a nice adaptation that could make him harder to kill, which was something he very much wanted.

He wasn’t that happy with being forced into a pure tank and support role, but he didn’t have a viable ranged attack skill that he could use.

At Tier 10, I’ll potentially be a better mage than Liz and Aster. Let’s see how they like it when I kill everything in the rifts myself, and they’re the ones left trying to scramble and catch up.

Matt brought his attention back into his spirit after daydreaming about the distant future. [Endurance] was about to cross the dividing line, and when it did, he acted.

He had practiced this so many times that it was second nature, but he was still nervous.

The skill structure was an incredibly complex 3D lattice formation that interwove itself in hundreds of places, but Matt didn’t hesitate as he started grabbing and expanding spots of the skill with strands that channeled mana.

In his mind’s eye, they were pipes that handled water and the junctions where more than one pipe met up had incredibly complex functions, so he was extra careful when manipulating the skill near them.

It was hard work, and he nearly messed up a few times, but his practice paid off. Without knowing exactly what the final result was meant to be, and without hours of repetition, he knew he would have ruined the skill. He would have either crippled its functionality or shattered the skill completely by adjusting the wrong part.

Matt tweaked the pipes, and while his muscle memory took over, he examined the skill as a whole.

Skills came in four main categories.

The first were skills where the mana cost was up front. Those were where the skill was instantly formed in the mana pool and immediately cast. That instant forming was why he couldn’t trickle feed a normal skill, like [Fireball], the 10 mana it needed to cast. It was the same reason he needed to fill his mana pool to cast [Hail].

Channel skills were the second type of skill. They came in two different versions, one was like [Mage’s Retreat] and functioned like an expanding balloon. The cost scaled exponentially to increase the size of the balloon, though because Matt’s mana regeneration would also scale exponentially, he expected those channel skills to remain a core part of his fighting style.

The other type of channel skills was like [Hail]. Those typically had an initial cost but needed a continuous mana input to maintain the effect. They had malleable ‘pipes’ that could expand to handle more mana. They couldn’t expand infinitely, but they typically scaled linearly which made them more popular uses for large amounts of mana. It also made them much more flexible, since the effect could be scaled to the current threat, unlike a standard [Fireball] which needed months of work to change significantly.

The third type of skills were reserve skills. They took a chunk of mana, and locked it away, though some percent of it was expended in order to instantiate the skill. They generally created fake essence to improve an aspect of cultivation, or some other effect with the locked down mana. The normal [Mana Strength] that melee fighters used worked like that and it was hugely popular.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

[Phantom Amor] also worked like that third type. Mana was reserved to protect the caster against one strike. His [Cracked Phantom armor] was a cracked skill and had more of the properties of the second type of reserve skill. The pipes could expand, but they weren’t like [Hail]’s where they expanded freely. The pipes of [Cracked Phantom Armor] were instead like steel. He had to slowly expand them through long meditation, advancing his cultivation, and pushing the skill through practice.

The final type of skills was the entirety of manipulation skills. They were similar to the second type of channel skills but were considered a distinct category. In addition to the fact, they could expand infinitely, the vast majority of enchantments, skills, Talents, and similar effects treated them as separate from other channel skills. A staff that improved lightning skills wouldn’t affect [Lightning Manipulation] unless that effect was separately added in.

As the final moment came, Matt brought his attention back to the task at hand.

With a mental effort, he mentally ‘blew’ into the skill, expanding all the pipes. That final bit was at Aunt Helen’s suggestion and would help the skill handle more mana from the onset. She figured that he’d be spending a lot of time getting his type two channel skills to handle his absurd mana input especially at the higher Tiers, and if he helped [Endurance] now he could be a step ahead.

It only took a moment for [Endurance] to settle down after the agitation caused by the manipulation, and he opened his eyes. When he pushed mana through the newly adjusted skill, he felt rejuvenated. All his aches and pains disappeared with a cool, refreshing wave.

The original skill was only good for muscle fatigue, as that was a subset of the cultivation aspect, Regeneration. The skill [Regeneration] could regrow limbs with enough mana, and when upgraded, wouldn’t cause strain on the body like normal healing spells but [Endurance] wasn’t nearly that strong even after their modifications.

Overhealth was amazing like that, and [Endurance] didn’t get that effect even when using an upgrade orb on it. Not that he had an upgrade orb to use.

That didn’t mean the modifications he had done were useless. When the skill was expanded upon like he and Liz had, [Endurance] bolstered the body’s natural healing. Meaning it was the best self-heal that was available at Tier 8. Traditional healing spells didn’t start dropping until Tier 14, after all, and were incredibly rare at that. This was still amazing, and with Matt keeping them full of mana, they could in theory go for days without sleep. It wasn’t recommended, but it could be done, giving them one extra tool in their toolbox.

Liz finally opened her eyes, and from her sitting position, lunged into a hug, knocking the napping fox off her lap.

“Ha! [Endurance] changed with my Talent into [Blood Endurance]. HA!”

From over her shoulder, he asked, “How can you figure out what that does?”

She let go and scooped up the fox and fell back on the bed, wrapping her up in another hug. “Uncle Manny had a message queued for me. I got a report of what it does from him. I get all the normal benefits from the expanded [Endurance], but it also boosts my blood regeneration through the roof.”

Matt was going to ask how she knew that but realized that the Emperor must have taken her Talent and tested many skills for compatibility issues.

“Did he test other skills?”

“Yup! He said he tested anything that could change and thought I would get my hands on. Apparently, some skills just won’t change at all, some will become non-functional, and there’s others that could actively harm me. He said that he updated my AI with preloaded messages for skills that will hurt me which is helpful.”