The Path of Ascension Chapter 459

Chapter 459

Having been given a warning on such behavior, Matt didn’t immediately return to working on his mana project, no matter how much he wanted to. He still had plenty of ideas he wanted to test thanks to the information packs Titan’s Torch had been able to pass back to him during Allie’s trips back to settled space.

He would have loved nothing more than to dive back in and see if there was any way he could copy the strange realm’s mana storage device’s ability to store more inside than should fit.

Instead, he forced himself to sit with the group and eat the dinner Captain Stenson and Katya had made earlier.

There were a few inquisitive looks from everyone else when they returned to their camp, but no one was crass enough to ask what they had been talking about.

Not that it should have been that hard to figure out what Rah wanted to talk to them about, given none of them went back to their personal projects when they returned. Instead, they spent the evening chatting with Evander’s group, with their own people, and amongst themselves.

The famous explorer was surprisingly congenial and, once he saw they were fully paying attention, he excused himself from his conversation with Stenson to face them directly.

“I must say I do appreciate the lead over everyone else. I see no downsides to this at all.”

His easy smile turned the words from insulting to light banter.

Liz shot right back, not hesitating for an instant. “As if you wouldn’t have gotten into trouble in some way without us. Please, if even half of what goes on in your movies is correct, you find trouble well enough on your own.”

Instead of getting angry, as his own crew agreed with Liz, Evander laughed at himself. “That’s why I’m so miffed. I’m bad enough on my own, but with you guys adding on more fuel to the fire, well, even I’m afraid of getting burnt.”

The comment pulled Aster from her conversation with Allie and Gan Le, and she smirked as she shot back. “Do you need something cool to help settle you down?”

Matt expected Aster to pull out one of the prank ice creams she kept in her spirit space. Instead, she withdrew a batch he knew actually tasted good, despite its dubious origins.

After being split so many times, the little ice cream Aster had brought along didn’t last too long, but it ended their dinner nicely.

Matt was tempted to use everyone’s conversation and chatter winding down as an excuse to work on his own projects but he pushed that feeling away, not letting it pull him right back into the habit he was trying to curb. Instead, he kept himself in the moment and enjoyed Rah and Evander sharing stories from their adventures.

The two older men’s stories prompted Allie to add her own. It was fanciful and not at all grounded in reality like the earlier stories. It was apparently so inaccurate the moment she finished telling the story, Zack launched into his own retelling of the story. His version came out so differently it almost felt like a different story, but it kicked off everyone sharing and let them spend the planet’s short night in laughter.

By unspoken agreement, everyone kept the topics light.

After one of Evander’s harvesters told a story about how his first expedition managed to break their engines three times on its test flight, Aster shared a story about their early days on the Path. According to her, shortly after Tier 10, they managed to get lost in a trap maze. In her retelling, it was mostly Matt and Liz’s fault for getting them lost, which wasn’t how he recalled the incident at all.

He distinctly remembered a particularly energetic fox’s nose leading them in circles for hours, where in her story she was trying to lead them out of the trap.

Instead of correcting her, Matt shot back with a story about Aster biting a fire fox’s tail when she was younger the moment she finished her story.

Ears and tail fully puffed, Aster mock complained. “It’s not my fault! All I knew was that he was the same but bad. Not cool. I was basically a hatchling at that age.”

Aster tried to pout her way through the story but her tail’s not-so-subtle movents gave her away.

Turning, she grinned at Liz the moment Matt finished. “Hey, at least my learning how to fly didn’t end up in the ocean more times than not.”

Liz, who had kept out of most of the squabbling by virtue of fiddling with the fire, looked up and struck right back. “Hey, it was a new body.” Sticking her nose in the air she finished with a laugh, “I needed to learn how to fly with wings and not magic. Something you ground-based creatures would never understand. Pathetic, needing magic to fly.”

Gan Le, who had been mostly silent beyond a few quiet comments, spoke to the group for the first time since they had returned. “I remember my flying lessons. Without question my worst topic. I hit the ground so many times I swear there was an imprint of my body shape at the training yard before I figured it out.”

Matt could tell there was probably more to the story than trying to learn how to fly, but none of them pushed Gan Le for more information.

Instead, Captain Stenson raised a finger while lowering his head in mock shame. “Same here actually. I had really bad motion sickness when I learned to fly. For me, getting in the air was the easy part, staying there not so much. I spent over a year practicing, and the first time I succeeded in not emptying my guts, I flew directly into my neighbor’s kitchen wall. Nearly took down the whole building and spent months paying off the damages, but the motion sickness was the worst part. It lingered for hours.”

One of Evander’s crafters then launched into a story about her time at a prestigious Academy. The hard-edged woman didn’t seem like the type to go to such a vaunted institution. As she retold it, she hadn’t remained there long, with even her parents realizing she wasn’t cut out for the academics they taught there.

Growing restless and unwilling to leave, Matt pulled out some of their cooking supplies and after quickly harvesting some local ingredients, started making things as everyone else chatted.

He didn’t aim for pleasant or even scientific, instead going off his tastebuds, instincts, and suggestions from everyone else, serving up small portions of whatever he thought might work.

Some of his creations came out surprisingly well. Liz and Susanne both really liked a specific spice he made from what reminded him visually of underwater celery. When dried and powered, it had a vibrant smoky flavor that paired well with the grilled mushrooms he had picked out of a cave.

Not minding the flavor himself, Matt happily picked a few samples and handed them over to Katya who had most of their spatial items on her. When they got back to their ship, Matt would have Liz transfer the spices into her terrarium growth item where they would be able to accelerate their growth speed.

The low-Tier herb wouldn’t be valuable unless it found market success, and given how few of the others cared for it, he doubted he’d ever need to plant more than a bushel when they got back to the ship, so the small space it took up wasn’t any real loss.

Matt only stopped cooking at close to local midnight, when Evander pulled himself away from a conversation with Captain Stenson and Zack long enough to realize how little remaining time there was before morning, when they wanted to leave.

Having learned what they needed from Rah, both teams wanted to get some true downtime before they separated and ventured deeper into the breach.

They had a small but important lead they didn’t intend to lose because they got lazy. Unless someone with a ship capable of flying into the third layer of chaotic space had chosen to enter the bubble first, they had the place all to themselves.

With hundreds, possibly thousands, of worlds pulled in from places only Tier 36 exploration groups could enter, they wanted to cover as much ground as possible before the bubble broke and the worlds were sent flying in random directions.

Once that happened, everyone who hadn’t risked their lives would swoop in and collect the spoils, and competition would become fierce.

It would be much better if they had already visited most of the Tier 25 and higher worlds, and that was their goal.

At least once the sun rose.

While everyone else either found a spot to nap or work on their own projects, Matt and Liz slipped off to a nearby cliff to watch the sunrise. Best of all, because they weren’t in settled space and planetary day night cycles weren’t standardized, they got to watch the event at a slightly accelerated speed. The change was small but impactful enough that it transformed something commonplace, into a novel experience.

By the time they returned to their camp a few minutes later, Evander and his team were already prepared to leave.

The moment they arrived, they started saying their goodbyes with the ones they were chatting with.

Matt wouldn’t have minded them staying slightly longer but the other team voluntarily splitting off, rather than trying to linger, was the best outcome they could hope for. It was also the main reason why they hadn’t brought more groups along.

With three suspected breachpoints and the estimated size of the breach, they could each go their own way with minimal chance of overlap. They were likely to run into other teams before they ran into each other unless they happened to be unlucky and aim for the same world.

Evander smiled as he shook Liz’s hand, then Matt’s, before he ended on Aster where he lingered. “Thank you all for both the additional information as well as the head start. We are going to try and loot the Tier 30 world along the edge before we move deeper. If luck shines on us, we will see each other back in the Empire. I still owe you a dinner after all.”

Matt half expected Gan Le to react, given Evander’s obvious flirting, but he was disappointed as Aster replied, “I never forget someone who owes me a meal. You won’t escape that easily. We’ll figure something out when we are both in Empire space.”

After a few more rounds of pleasantries, both teams headed to their respective sky bridges and stepped onto them.

Their lead wouldn’t last forever. The best way to extend it was to put distance between themselves and the breachpoint, to head deeper into the pocket of worlds.

With a stabilizer on an already stable tether, there were zero spatial fissures to hurt them, making the walk almost pleasant. If it wasn’t for the resistance that fought against their every move, it would have been downright enjoyable.

Seeing there was nothing to do other than walk, Matt dedicated a portion of his attention to his mana tests.

He agreed with everything Rah said about living in the moment, but he still needed to advance and this was a good time to think over what he had read.

Maybe it was because of the training under Luna, who shaped a lot of his formative years, but Matt enjoyed improving himself. It was fun and something he genuinely enjoyed doing, especially when things were as interesting as the strange realm mana storage device.

Originally, thanks to the storage mana stone, he had great visions of storing items in simple mana stones and changing the Realm’s storage systems as he had with aura rifts. Unfortunately, the data dump Allie picked up when she was dropping off their loot ruined his dreams of a simple win, though it did prove useful.

While rare as anything from a strange realm ever was, the mana storage stones were not unique. Only as the Empire’s collective research efforts made abundantly clear, they could hardly understand what the strange realms had done to the mana, let alone copy the effect.

Matt didn’t think he was different, but he had a different objective than most of the people or groups who researched strange realm storage devices. They usually did so trying to improve one of two things.

The first was rechargeable mana storage devices. Any improvement there would be worth a fortune, and as such every related company had tried their hand at some point to copy the strange realm’s storage gems.

The second reason groups investigated was even simpler. Storage items.

While they hadn’t been able to test it, the strange realm gems had no Tier restriction for their use, unlike storage rings, which had requirements on the Tier of the user and crafter.

Neither group had ever had much success and Matt was going to write the endeavor off, but had a glimmer of inspiration as he reviewed everything sent over by his guild.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Most of the success in the mana storage stones research led to minor refinements in how rechargeable mana stones were made as well as their size compression but those contributions had always been secondary to the success of the industry to his disappointment.

His largest advantage was that he wanted a different end result and as such didn’t care about all of their failures.

He liked the ideas presented and had his own thoughts about the topics but none of them were his focus. Rather, he zeroed in on one fairly notable research project Titan’s Torch had been able to collect information on as it was far more prevalent to what he actually wanted out of his experiments.

The patent’s notoriety came from their lead researcher publicly bankrupting himself in his efforts to understand strange realms mana storage devices, always believing he was close to a breakthrough that never materialized. A common enough story but when his creditors came knocking, they liquidated his assets, which included one unrelated but working invention that was bandied around in an attempt to mitigate some of the losses, which had made the ordeal more headline worthy than it would have otherwise been.

Reading between the lines, Matt thought he saw some not-so-subtle hints the publicity was manufactured, but he’d never know the truth. The incident happened under the old dynasty’s watch, and no one remained alive or in the Realm from the incident according to Titan’s Torch’s findings.

Despite only being a footnote in the larger report, the guild’s information gathering department was meticulous and provided a copy of the patent along with the top five related academic findings on the topic saving Matt from a lot of guess work.

While commercially unsuccessful, the researcher and their team had run into the same problem everyone discovered: when mana was flowing at high enough rates, it wanted to destabilize. In trying to improve mana throughput without higher-Tier materials, the team had dabbled in alternative mana flow patterns and had struck on some minor success.

Looking at the patent and seeing the reported minimal usability rating given by the Empire’s Patent Office, he understood why the patent had been a flop on the market.

The additional infrastructure needed to forcibly control the flow of mana had proven bulky, prone to fatigue and failure, still required expensive higher-Tier materials to shape the mana into the desired flow, and worst of all only worked when the conduit itself was made out of pure mana. All of that could have been forgiven had the improvement in mana flow been substantial, but its cumulative effect was a fraction of a percent more efficient.

A description of the original patent had been ‘like trying to make a water hose out of water’ and they weren’t wrong.

Matt was simply inspired by their ideas rather than put off.

Raising his hands as they jogged along the sky bridge, Matt started sending out a small stream of mana from one to the other.

Keeping external control over his mana increased the difficulty compared to doing this inside his body or mana pool, but Matt didn’t want to risk himself, or rather his spirit, with experiments, so he accepted the difficulty.

As he tried to braid the mana into the pattern described in the patent, he found it was both unnatural and unwieldy; his mana did not want to move in those patterns, but they did with enough control.

Seeing how much trouble he was having being able to work with his own mana, Matt revised his opinion of the original researcher. The method was genius found in insanity.

The method split the stream of mana into two portions. The smaller portion took some of the mana and wove it into a braided tube for the rest of mana to flow through. The mana barrier, against the accepted understanding of mana flow dynamics, allowed for observably more mana to pass through the tunnel than should have fit.

Slowly, letting the strands of mana weave themselves into a tunnel, Matt tried to recreate the patent. It took a few false starts as he started getting used to the particular control needed, but he managed it.

The largest issue was something the patent failed to solve, the inherent instability of using mana to guide mana.