The Path of Ascension Chapter 448

Chapter 448

 

Matt finally let himself feel the elation and triumph as they safely escaped into chaotic space and he saw they weren’t being chased. They had feared they would be targeted, but the Corporations ship hadn’t sought a final vengeance and turned their blades to them. The other team wouldn’t have won, unless for some reason they hadn’t brought their best fighters into the strange realm, but it might have started a dog pile, everyone hoping to be the lucky last group standing.

Instead, the ones angry enough to fight turned their blades to each other, letting the Unsparing slip out of the system uncontested.

When their scanners couldn’t detect the previous world, everyone finally let out the breath they had been holding.

Matt was happy to hear that several of the crew had used [Home] on the previous world, so they could track it down again if they wanted to.

After what felt like an eternity, the crew’s attention turned to wondering what kind of rewards could make them believe they were going to be attacked.

Liz spoke, knowing everyone on the crew could hear but were also watching. “We are going to need the harvest crew and possibly a bigger space. We might need to wait until we settle down to properly look at the loot.”

Her words were slightly contradictory, given her yellow gem identical to the ones they all held, but the crew still hung onto every word she said as she explained the strange realm and its challenges.

As she did so, Matt probed his gem.

At first he thought it was a simple storage item but that idea quickly changed when he saw Liz pull an herb out of her gem.

When she did so, the entire structure of the gem shifted; they all noticed it and hoped the rest of the items wouldn’t be hurt by the oddity.

Liz quickly tested the gem but found she could pull items out but couldn’t return them, which made sense and explained the gem’s uniqueness.

Or it did for most people.

Everyone else was far more interested in scanning the gems to see what they had gotten but Matt studied the phenomenon more.

He was used to crystalline mana structures but he had never seen one like this. Where he would expect consistent patterns in the atomic structure of the gem, instead, each gem reminded Matt more of a cluttered junk drawer than any gem structures he knew; nothing he did could make sense of the internals.

It wasn’t until he saw the crystal’s inner structures shift chaotically, as Liz pulled another herb out for their gathering experts’ appraisal, that he understood what was going on inside the gems.

As it turned out, the Natural Treasure that were herbs weren’t totally preserved and would need to be put away in better containers.

Matt almost laughed as he watched the crew members realize how many Natural Treasures they had returned with. The size of the haul became their own biggest enemy and the crew worked at their best speeds, not wanting to lose any of the items due to their negligence.

However that wasn’t Matt’s problem to solve and if he tried to help, he’d only get in the actual experts’ way. Not that they needed to stress that much, the gems were preserving the Natural Treasures, it just wasn’t a fully-permanent preservation. Matt let himself tune everyone else out for a few moments.

The inside of the gem was fascinating.

It was similar to an irrational number like pi, with there being no repeating structure for everything else to crystalize and form around despite looking like a typical gem. Even his [AI] couldn’t find a whiff of a pattern. Its internal structure looked chaotic because when an herb was removed, the pattern shifted chaotically. But it wasn’t transforming as he originally suspected, rather it was comparable to looking up and down a string of pi spelled out. The pattern, if it could be called that, didn’t change but the portion one could see might be widely different with each item removed.

How that had the effect of storing items, Matt had no idea, but he toyed with the premise behind it.

Non-standard crystalline structures weren’t unique but Matt made a note to play around and see if he could copy this pattern when he practiced his mana control later.

Instead of such deep contemplation, Matt was distracted by finally being able to see the loot they had gathered.

A quick count later, the crew had the numbers.

They had gathered a little over fifty thousand Tier 25 and lower herbs from the beginning of the pocket spaces in the months they spent inside alone.

Above Tier 25, they earned correspondingly fewer items but they were also the most valuable and important items out of the rewards. The seven thousand Tier 25 or higher Natural Treasures were enough to make even the veteran explorers excited.

It was an enormous haul.

A good number of the items were ores, already dead items like various woods, or were otherwise fine to be stored in a simple storage box, so that was exactly what the crew did. They only checked to ensure the Natural Treasures were inherently stable and wouldn’t have an issue being mixed with other Natural Treasures before moving on.

Aster and Allie salivated over the box scanning, constantly looking for anything truly interesting in the low-Tier stuff, speculating widely on what some of the weirder Natural Treasures might do based on the item’s energy signature.

Matt made his own quick scan, seeing a decent amount of weapon upgrades treasures he knew would sell for a fortune back in settled space and grinning, knowing that even with others pulling similar items out of the breach, the market was so large the prices wouldn’t crash but go higher. People had to keep up or be left behind and that alone could create a market frenzy.

That was how he noticed the sheer amount of dual elemental items, created during the transitory periods, that would need further investigation before anyone risked using them.

He did however see several interesting items that caught his attention.

He personally hoped they would keep access to the Tier 25 Essence Fig Tree. Each fig produced was the equivalent of a monster kill. The Natural Treasure didn’t do anything more than convert ambient essence into rift-compressed essence, but that was all it needed to do to be worth a fortune as the tree didn’t have stringent living conditions or essence requirements.

They could stick it on Palustris and create fire essence figs and sell them Empire-wide for a massive profit for practically zero effort with the tree.

Fire cultivators unable to make it to their ducal capital would buy the figs to refine their own fire cores, or those who needed to leave and didn’t want to slow down their cultivation would buy them before they left.

The next items that caught Matt’s eye were a series of general bloodline-enhancing items. Always valuable, they were a little too low Tier for any of them to use, but if they had a child with Manny’s heir’s generation, the Tier 20 to Tier 25 items would help their kids along their own path enormously.

The others would undoubtedly be picked up by the crew members for their own families or sold on the open market.

Amusingly enough, Rah knew what one of the Natural Treasures was when everyone else was stumped.

“I know this one well. It is an herb that, when burned as an incense, lets a cultivator enter a slightly psychedelic state that makes skill creation safe. I’ve been fortunate enough to use two before. I will say the skills you create can sometimes be… More eccentric than intended. If used, it is good to already be in the midst of a project because the mental state lends itself to… strange tangents.”

Seeing he knew of it, the harvesting crew asked how best it should be stored.

Tapping his chair, Rah said, “In my Realm, I would dry it out and powder it but with your Realm’s alchemical abilities, it might make a better potion fresh. That in mind, I would suggest keeping it alive as best as you can.”

Taking his advice to heart, they did exactly that, with the alchemists in the crew each reaching out for what Rah knew of the Natural Treasure and seeing if they could detect anything obvious.

Because of their mana type choices in the strange realm, they even had hundreds of valuable healing and divination-affecting Natural Treasures.

At their insistence, both of the Seekers took the Natural Treasures that fit them best. Magnus took a Tier 27 Infinity Splinter that, once infused into his sacrificial dagger, would boost all divination powers channeled through it. The effect would have been even stronger but the Tier gap meant that unless Magnus wanted to spend even more to nurture the effect, it would remain a minor but noticeable boon.

Given that even the best Seekers struggled to find, let alone buy, divination Natural Treasures, he was over the moon and profusely thanked them while clearly calculating over how many such Natural Treasure’s his cut would allow him to directly take.

Lura, like Magnus, took the treasures her powers told her to. With their permission, she took an unnamed Natural Treasure, being willing to go into debt using an item that wasn’t yet truly appraised but wanting the associated power boost. After she absorbed the wisp of muddy light, she relayed the effect.

If she chose to undersell the effect to pay less, she didn’t do a good job as she reported that now, once a year, she could increase the power of her next divination twofold, leaving Magnus looking for another similar item.

Not that he could complain too much, given that he found a Natural Treasure that he believed would have an inheritable effect and gave to his immortal goat pet. If his efforts paid off his goats would soon be more inclined to divination mana, making them better Talent targets.

One of the weirdest items they got were skill upgrade orbs. Them dropping in place of Natural Treasures wasn’t unusual in and of itself, as upgrade orbs were technically Natural Treasures, but with the elemental transitions, the strange realm had created seemingly-unique elemental skill upgrade orbs.

Or at least that was what the general consensus was after inspecting the upgrade orbs infused with elemental energies.

Sadly, despite the sheer number of skill upgrade orbs, they didn’t get any Tier 38 orbs, instead getting three Tier 26 orbs and a plethora of Tier 14s. Two were ordinary but the final upgrade orb pulsed with a soft green healing energy.

They had no idea if their speculation was correct but the unique Tier 26 upgrade orb was so valuable, it was put in special storage that could be kept under lock and key.

In fact, all of the elementally-tainted upgrade orbs were put away for further testing once they returned to settled space.

Matt’s attention was then grabbed by the rarer and usually organic Natural Treasures that needed special handling to ensure they would survive the trip back to settled space as they reached the Tier 25 and higher items.

One that caught his eye was what looked like a Phoenix Lifeblood Lily, except it was made out of Ichor instead. The normal lily had enough of a baseline Rank 2 phoenix bloodline for a bloodline cultivator to swap bloodlines. For the incredibly profligate, they were also fantastic nourishments for a phoenix, being an incredibly easy to absorb energy to refine their bloodline.

And they seemingly had one for ichor.

The issue, if it could be called that, was that the typical fire Phoenix Lifeblood Lily was a Tier 25 Natural Treasure with higher-Tier variants being simply improved versions, giving more and better energies. There were other variants for the other popular phoenix elements but those were also all normally only found at higher Tiers, relative to their complexity. He knew for a fact that the Ice Phoenix variant was only ever found at Tier 34 or higher.

Ichor, being even more complex, should be a higher Tier than Tier 34, let alone Tier 27, which was the Tier of the herb they had.

In the midst of that, Matt was distracted as one of the other team members brought out a pair of flowers entwined together, shouting in excitement for additional help.

One flower was ice blue while the remaining one was fire red.

Matt didn’t know what the item was by sight but one of the crewmembers shared the information, letting everyone else appreciate it.

It was called World Straddler by most because it took two types of directly opposing mana for the Natural Treasures to form.

Normally, the need for extreme opposite elements next to each other made the formation conditions near impossible but the rift had made them easy.

The reason the harvester reacted so much was the Natural Treasure before them could add a secondary element to a cultivator’s mana pool without merging or interacting with the original aspecting as one would expect. The only requirement to use the Natural Treasure was the cultivator had to have one of the two mana types.

Fire and ice was a classic combination that would sell at a premium.

Matt watched as one of the crew members carefully mimicked its normal formation conditions in one of the storage containers and carefully put the Natural Treasure away once he confirmed it was stable.

His attention was pulled back to Liz, who was still busy helping set up a storage container for ichor items, when the next item was slightly horrifying enough to grab everyone’s attention. That seemed to be something of a running theme with the ichor Natural Treasures.

The Tier 30 Natural Treasure looked like an Elemental Bonsai Tree, which was a priceless Natural Treasure that produced fairly regular batches of product, making it a near literal money tree.

A typical Elemental Bonsai was a miniature fruit-bearing apple tree, whose apples varied in type and element. The fruit each tree produced never changed but they could impart various effects depending on the fruit. The only downside of the tree, if it could be called that, was its lifespan was usually only a few dozen generations before it would wither and die.

This Ichor Bonsai Tree might or might not follow that rule. It was not normal.

Matt recognized it.

It was the heart of one wearboar which had given them such a hard time.

Except the wereboar’s circulatory system was now bent and twisted into the shape of a bonsai apple tree. The trunk of the tree, a massive fleshy pulsating vein, its branches, smaller capillaries, with a thin layer of golden flesh serving as leaves, almost similar to a bat’s wing.

The apples were instead orbs of light floating beneath the vein branches.

Even as the harvesting team did their best to settle the Ichor Bonsai Tree in an environment that wouldn’t cause it to deteriorate, Matt, along with everyone else, tried to probe it and see if they could feel what it did.

Liz, being the resident ichor expert, spent a few extra moments inspecting the harvest but shrugged saying, “I don’t have the faintest clue what this does but I know it does something powerful. That’s for sure. I wanna eat one so badly.”

Matt rolled his eyes but the official appraisers couldn’t tell them much more than that, so he had to give Liz the point. Anyone could tell the super unique Natural Treasure was powerful. The question ultimately depended on if it was powerful for them.

He suspected it wasn’t only valuable, but priceless. Once the tree was in a proper ichor environment, the tree pulsed with energy in a steady cadence, like a monster contented to stay in its new home.

Not that either of them were sad about not being able to tell what the item did. That generally meant the item was uniquely powerful, or at least unique in some capacity.

If the energy wasn’t ichor, Matt would almost have called it a regeneration type of Natural Treasure, but thanks to the fire and lighting aspects making ichor inherently volatile, eating one of the orbs raw like one normally ate the Elemental Bonsai Tree apples seemed like a particularly bad idea.

In the end, they couldn’t figure out what it did and could only preserve it and wait until better appraisers got their hands on the objects in settled space.

Liz shook Matt slightly, unable to contain her excitement as she leaned in for a kiss before saying, “We made out like bandits. We could turn back around to settled space right now and I wouldn’t feel bad at all.”

Matt grinned back, knowing exactly how she felt, multiplied by his excitement for her to finally have some Natural Treasures of her own manat type to look over. Natural Treasures were, by their nature, mystical and sometimes people learned things from studying them. Sometimes it was as ‘simple’ as replicating its effect, but other times, it was as rare as creating new skills or bloodline abilities.

It wasn’t often, but Liz hadn’t even been able to try her luck before now, let alone actually have a Natural Treasure she might find personally useful.

Not that she was the only one to make out well in their excursion.

They all saw items they liked or wanted.

Best of all for Matt and Liz, they even found several ichor items they believed would protect any children they had from most of the worst effects of ichor. Or that was their observation based on the energies. Most likely that was a secondary or tertiary effect, but it was more than enough reason for them to be put aside carefully by the crew without Matt or Liz needing to say more than a word.

Another notable item they found was a Tier 20 Natural Treasure allowing anyone to enter a Legacy Obelisk another time, so long as they aren’t past the Treasure’s Tier. It was too low for them to use but the Imperial government would pay handily for it.

Matt’s personal vote for coolest item was the Dragon’s Tears Susanne pulled out of her personal project pocket spaces.

A honeydew-type Natural Treasure, Dragon’s Tears nectar was one of the original inspirations for the second set of Tier 10 bottled Concepts, allowing mass production of more complex artificial Concepts.

It, like a few other Natural Treasures, could grant whoever ate the single drop of nectar a Domain stage relative to its Tier. If Tier 25 or over, a Dragon’s Tear would give an Intent. It was one of the few types of Natural Treasure that could be found with such vastly different effects given its Tier. Being able to compare the difference in the artificial Domains the Dragon’s Tears gave out as Concepts and Intents had been what allowed the original teams to create both variations of bottled Concepts.

Susanne didn’t particularly need an Intent of a mana type based entirely on her own energies, but the plant reacted to her.

So long as she was near the now-potted plant, the Dragon Tear would flourish and dance for hours on end even without a special environment; but if she didn’t visit often enough, the Dragon’s Tear would start to wilt. That ended the testing process as they didn’t want to harm the Dragon’s Tear and she put it in a pot and kept it with her, only placing it in long-term storage when they neared another ship or world.

That oddity made it Matt’s favorite item, hands down, and he wanted to know what a proper Talented appraiser would say about the item.

That was how Matt felt about most of their items. With the elemental ratios being in flux, the Natural Treasures produced were hard to identify but fun to speculate on.

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Matt personally grabbed a Tier 30 ore that, when refined and properly treated, could be added to make bladed growth weapons sharper on a Tier up. It didn’t replace the items needed to evolve the growth item, instead absorbed alongside them.

That type of item was incredibly rare and valuable, to the degree they were normally used upon acquisition or shortly thereafter, not even making it to market, and better yet the variant he had was a neutral mana Natural Treasure, making it a perfect fit for him.

Every exploration group handled loot distribution and allocation differently.

Most smaller groups allowed crew members to take what they wanted for the item’s estimated value so long as it was a known item, while others didn’t allow anyone to touch even the most common Natural Treasure without them going through an appraiser’s hands.

Massive hauls from strange realms were one of the general exceptions where all but the closest teams would rather have the items inspected for oddities before use, hoping one of the items would be subtly different and hyper valuable.

It was rare but there were always teams popping up who made a fortune selling what looked like a normal Natural Treasure but was actually a rare variant.

Matt didn’t mind the resolution that everyone, crew and the seven of them alike, came up with. Once everything was inspected, anyone could take anything they wanted out of the bulk Natural Treasures below Tier 25, but everything over that, or anything that looked unique or special, was kept aside.

As the leaders of the expedition and the ones who hired the crew, as well as being the ones who had put in the hard work to get the Natural Treasures, the seven of them each got to take items within the estimated value they had. Following custom, one was entirely free, while the others would be paid for according to their estimated value.

They insisted the crew all take at least one item as well but most of the crew genuinely seemed to want to wait until after the appraisal so they could ensure they got the best item.

The seven of them had no such patience.

Matt’s first choice was obvious and he grabbed the Tier 30 ore. It was an easy pick and even going after Susanne, she didn’t need it and so didn’t take it. A strange realm might let him upgrade his sword out there and he didn’t want to miss that opportunity, which was why he was carrying his neutronium ingot with them.

Sadly, despite the plethora of arcane Natural Treasures, none of them were known mana-aspecting Natural Treasures. He didn’t give up hope entirely yet, as there’d be a flood of Natural Treasures entering the market, including from people going even deeper than them, but it was still unfortunate on an otherwise spectacular haul.

As his second choice, Matt picked up a Tier 30 Arcane Life Scale. They had never seen the exact Natural Treasures before but the energy signature was clear. Anyone who consumed it would have their spirit strengthened, more than fulfilling the requirements for all three crafters who could modify his sword to add the neutronium ingot should he not find a strange realm to do it in the breach.

Such strange realms weren’t exactly common but they weren’t rare either.