The Path of Ascension Chapter 473

Chapter 473

Upon coming back from their exploration, Matt experienced time in a way he hadn’t before.

The ten years they spent taking over for their seneschal’s was as easy as continuing the tasks already underway. While he and Liz had their own thoughts and plans, they needed their own breaks. As such, they implemented things with their seneschal’s identities, not officially letting their vassals know they had returned.

Both the smart and deceitful ones got the word, as they hadn’t taken steps to hide their return, while the dumb ones continued flouting whatever commands they didn’t like, believing they were Cato and Isabella. Learning who was who, now that their vassals had real time to exist without their presence, was a benefit to their trip all its own, but not the point.

After a decade off themselves, Cato and Isabella returned positively chipper, almost eager to take the rein’s back over, finally giving them an uninterrupted block of time where they could escape from most of their responsibilities.

Aster had originally planned to join them, but now that she learned about Tim, she only intended to take a break after she finished learning everything about a control Concept destruction.

While Matt and Liz weren’t happy Luna allowed Tim to go through years of torment, even if ultimately successful, his journey had inadvertently shined a light on something important. A Concept breaking without fully disintegrating was rare but far from unheard of. Repairing it was even rarer, but the very nature of the trauma and the plentiful amnesia it brought usually meant it was exceedingly difficult to pin down what caused it. As for how to recreate the effects deliberately, that was a dream even for those who’d lived through it.

Tim’s Talent, however, had no such restrictions and was able to restore a lot of his memories after the fact. Coached by Luna, he was able to quantify his experiences. While still far from easy, especially without his Talent doing the heavy lifting, it gave other people a starting point.

Using that starting point, a test trial was conducted using volunteers who were planning to break their Concept anyway, mostly because they were aura based and felt they didn’t fully fit. The majority failed, but there were a handful of successes where volunteers were able to preserve some specific ability or trick of their old concept.

While Matt and Liz didn’t need such information, Aster was deeply interested after she was informed.

Given how close Aster’s Concept came to breaking the last time she changed her bloodline, there was basically no chance of it surviving when she made the jump to a Level 5 mana type. The instinctive Concept of an ice fox just wasn’t in line with who she was now, let alone who she would be whenever she figured out her ‘Space Ice’ element.

Another problem lay in that with the Concept broken, the Intent that built upon it was likely to crumble with it. Given the resources available to her and her own abilities Aster was unlikely to have trouble making a new Domain, one more fitting for her current skillset, that wasn’t her concern.

She didn’t necessarily want to preserve her former work, so much as the various enhancements to her Domain via Minkalla and the strange realms they’d visited. Before returning she resigned herself to losing some of them, but Tim’s notes gave her a glimmer of hope that she may be able to do a controlled destruction and preserve those abilities, letting her have the best of both worlds.

Or, that was how Aster described it.

Matt knew it might be more accurate to describe the situation as her being Luna’s lab rat, testing what Tim had discovered and how higher Tiers could apply it. Given that was exactly what Aster needed, he didn’t feel too bad for her.

At her request, he dropped in on exactly a single lesson before scheduling important tasks at the same time going forward, warning Liz to do the same. He knew what that look in Luna’s eye meant, and he wanted no part in it. Instead they ignored the pleading looks and reminded Aster to catch up with them on vacation when she finished working with them.

Free of their own responsibilities as their seneschals returned, Matt and Liz delighted Allie by asking her to drop them off in a random location in the Empire. Without looking up where they were, they spent two weeks traveling as fate and teleportation schedules directed them. Sometimes they stayed on a planet for a single day, while other times they got to explore for up to a month before the next teleportation off the planet.

They spent three months in vacation mode, taking advantage of various catered experiences. Neither of them wanted to think about or deal with anything more intensive than choosing their next meals or activity, if they bothered to leave their rooms at all some days.

When they inevitably reached a high Tier world and learned where they were, a Marquess’s capital in Harper’s Kingdom, they allowed themselves to spend three weeks exploring the fully settled star system from a lower Tier perspective. If they had arrived in their main identities, everything would have ground to a halt. Worst of all, they would have needed to be ‘on’ the entire time.

Instead, they got to play tourists, pretending to be newly advanced Tier 15’s.

While walking through a skyscraper’s shopping and entertainment districts, a display caught Liz’s eye, which was how they ended up on a luxury ‘honeymoon tour’ to Manny’s secondary kingdom.

While nominally its own kingdom, one of Manny’s seneschals operated as the day-to-day ruler and he made little effort to make his presence known. Combined with the kingdom being one of the oldest, along with the most settled interests, it had a thriving tourist and service industry. With nothing else to do, the two of them decided to rent a suite only slightly outside their identities’ wealth bracket and enjoy.

Matt was tickled to see the ship used a variation of a travel mana engine. Even if it wasn’t one of the designs his guild had released, he was just happy to see the technology be put to practical use, and the large, always moving cruise ships were a good choice.

While between worlds, Matt chatted his way into the engine room, getting a good look after mentioning he’d studied travel mana engines to a crewmember who just so happened to work there. Tour secured, he enjoyed hearing a review from a seasoned immortal chaotic space traveler about the new engines.

Two years into the cruise, both he and Liz lost interest and voluntarily withdrew at a Viscount’s fief, desperately needing a change of pace. The round the clock service had begun to grate, even with it being faceless and not directed to them in particular.

Forging Tier 6 identities, Matt and Liz went and got an apartment in the nearest Tier 10 world, merging with the general population.

Unlike their normal identity forgery, they didn’t need any complicated processes or rare permissions. They were hardly the first immortals to wish to live incognito among mortals for a time, and the Empire had long since implemented systems to facilitate such things.

With such ease came corresponding restrictions, but they were hardly burdensome, mainly aiming to keep immortals from causing issues with the mortals they blended into. Not intending to stay too long, they used masks to change their appearances rather than make the changes themselves.

Their new identities made getting residency permits, as well as jobs, a breeze, but both came with stipulations. The Empire officially had no problems with immortals mingling with mortals, but they weren’t supposed to negatively impact mortal society at all, and that included taking a job from someone trying to climb their way up. As such, their identities came with a hidden flag that would inform any employer of their special status, which would officially put them on the bottom of any hiring list.

Not that such restrictions made getting a job difficult. In fact, they did the opposite.

Any immortal, being Tier 15, could learn and then outperform any job a Tier 6 could be expected to perform, let alone Tier 29’s like Matt and Liz. That was why they didn’t aim for jobs people wanted.

Instead they gladly perused the lists of positions companies couldn’t fill with a qualified person of the appropriate Tier and skill set. Taking a job from the provided list was by far the easiest way to find employment, as the planetary AI would rubber stamp such requests, unlike more typical jobs which would come under manual review.

Officially, the same thing held true for their housing, both rented and purchased. But with the planet still in its expansion phase and with plenty of land, the ordinance was being waived, which gave them the discretion to live wherever they wanted. Wanting to blend in, they avoided the problem altogether by renting a slightly nicer condo in a building that was struggling to keep tenants during the economic downturn, being over an hour away from the city via train.

Not that Matt or Liz minded. In fact they rarely skipped the trip most days, instead they used the hour commute to relax while going to and from their day jobs.

Following Luna’s advice to make back up plans for his growth item in case his idea turned out impossible, he didn’t hesitate when he saw a job for a Tier 8 circuit board repair team leader. He jumped at the chance to interact with a form of enchanting he’d never bothered delving into beyond the absolute basics covered in most textbooks.

One of the company’s Tier 15 owners was splitting their time and attention to cover the position, and they were ecstatic when Matt offered to take the role, even before seeing his identity flag.

Liz, on the other hand, took up a job as a teacher for Tier 4 alchemists who wanted to specialize in cultivation assistance potions. While lucrative, the discipline was considered a brutal specialization not for the faint of heart, given the difficulty and costs of such potions. Many up and coming alchemists had driven themselves into debt trying to create the finicky concoctions.

Its problem was that it was a job that rarely had qualified teachers. Anyone who was skilled enough to teach the method to craft cultivation potions could make far more money by doing rather than teaching.

Without her stepping in to teach the young professionals, they would have needed to travel to a higher Tier world like so many others. That was the case for many of the more lucrative sub-professions, as skilled youths fled upstream. With so many worlds under them, ducal capitals never lacked skilled and ambitious people, rather they often had too many people to compete for too few spots.

While good for the capital world, as only the best remained, those lured away rarely returned home, rather settling closer to the higher Tier worlds.

Liz’s sudden appearance helped those who wanted to give the more specialized alchemy discipline a try without risking everything to travel to the local capital. Best of all, Liz herself enjoyed the work and used it as an excuse to brush up on her own low level alchemy skills, which she hadn’t bothered with in centuries.

Her new cauldron hadn’t been forgotten, but to run the tests she wanted, Liz needed access to rarer high Tier herbs, and her orders wouldn’t be fulfilled for several decades, given the scales she was looking at.

Instead, Liz used her position to buy locally grown ingredients for cultivation enhancing potions and turned each batch into an open lesson. She then turned around and sold the potions at-cost via a raffle. For the observant, her actions would have confirmed Liz was a higher Tier in disguise, given that her methods were nothing new. But they weren’t trying to hide that they were higher Tier, just their identities.

With that in mind, Matt followed in Liz’s footsteps.

The job he took was circuit repair for the local board manufacturer and it fell into somewhat of the same issue Liz’s position did. Servicing most of the baronies connected to the viscount, the company was barely solvent most years and his job was to lead the teams who tested the Tier 5 or higher circuitry.

Far from the disposable nature of lower Tier products that could be mass produced, Tier 5 and higher boards were made by hand at great expense. That meant there was an attempt to salvage or repair them in all but the most severe cases, where they were either recycled for materials or repurposed for a lower Tier application that wouldn’t mind any existing faults.

Matt’s job, while being a manager, was more of a final inspector, ensuring equipment tagged as salvageable by the floor workers was actually worth the following effort, which meant scanning every delicate circuit board item.

The Tier 15 owner, while more than competent even in the enchanting field, simply didn’t have the spiritual strength to wholesale scan the minute runic circuitry. Whereas Matt could turn a tedious job that took a Tier 15 minutes into something he could do with a glance. Given that Liz wasn’t hiding that she was a higher Tier, he didn’t bother blending in too deeply either.

Not that he lounged around while at work.

He had quite a lot of turnover in his workers, and he did his best to exacerbate the issue from day one. Specialized work was always in high demand, and circuit board crafting was no exception, even if profit margins weren’t quite as high as cultivation assistants. For Tier 5 enchanters who might be looking to specialize, it was a solid choice with one fatal flaw.

Money.

Enchanting wasn’t cheap, but creating runic circuitry was more expensive by orders of magnitude, which is why Matt had never bothered learning about it in depth, preferring to tie even his non-combat items enchantments directly into his [AI] or use simple on and off switches. He never had issues with such upkeep, but he was distinctly alone. Other people still wanted the detailed control possible, which was where circuit boards came into play. Though without military level investment, they weren’t dependable in serious combat unless they wanted to pay for higher Tier boards.

A desirable job, Matt’s employees were competent enchanters and deliberately fell into two broad categories: the ambitious and the settled.

The former used the position to get their foot in the more specialized door, and got hands-on experience using equipment they could never afford themselves. They didn’t stay long, and Matt’s goal was to teach them what they needed to take the next step in their careers as quickly as possible.

Taking a page from Luna’s book, he sent private emails to them at the end of every week highlighting things they could improve on. For those that made mistakes he caught, he gave detailed feedback on why he thought they might have made the mistake, as well as ways to improve.

The most ambitious and the most skilled took his feedback and rapidly mastered everything they could in their jobs. In turn, Matt happily gave them references when they were ready to move on. A number didn’t even leave the company, being hired on for more long term employment, but that was rare from the ambitious employees.

Most of the people who stayed on long term did so because they were in the second category of worker, the settled. Far from bad workers, they were the most technically proficient in their limited skill sets, being older and having worked in their positions for years.

The age also meant their situations were far more varied.

A few were slightly older professionals who were working between delving blocks or wanted a simple job while raising children. He didn’t push any of them without an indication they were looking to take on more work.

Instead, he aimed for the majority of the settled workers, the ones who had simply lost their ambition and settled into the rut of daily living. While they also got emails, that group got them at the start of the week, and they were tailored to making the person’s jobs easier, rather than pushing their skills to the next Tier.

Matt could sometimes hear the workers swearing he’d already reviewed all of the circuitry, given that they seemed to have near real time feedback on their submissions. But in truth, they severely underestimated his Tier. What seemed instantaneous for them was a few subjective seconds for his natural mental speed, when combined with his spiritual sense being strong enough to see every atom on the circuit board.

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That, and he used the opportunity to push his mental training in splitting his mind. He had no intentions of going to Max’s level, but being able to operate multiple independent trains of thought would be critical after she returned. Having made the skill modifications, Matt was more than ready to finish that project, but he wasn’t in so much of a rush he’d risk doing it himself without supervision.

Instead, he spent most of his free time at work theorizing about the exact shape and form his growth item might best take, iterating on his designs until he was happy with the results. With near limitless possibilities, Matt went wild and dreamt large, but at Luna’s advice, not too deeply.

He also used his plethora of free time to catch up on a lot of things he’d pushed onto the back burner, such as his fine tune mana control as well as working on the skills he wanted to merge.

Liz and he intended to merge some of their skills, which let them help each other through the process, though neither of them truly ran into an issue. But doing it together was nice and enough reason for them. While Liz worked on modifying her blood spells into ichor, she also merged her upgraded [Blood Cunning] into [Legion’s Insight], keeping the former’s name. Along with a stronger mental boost, she managed to improve the skills detail processing speed, better fitting her multiple minds.

After five years they moved on, changing their identities and appearances before anyone became reliant on them.

In their second round they even rented separate apartments, wanting to ensure they kept a healthy balance between themselves as individuals and as a couple, and weren’t only with each other out of habit. Any fear of that was dispelled when they kept breaking the spirit of their rules by sleeping with each other and then falling asleep, freeing themselves from the guilt with the knowledge that they were following the letter of their agreement.

After a torturous year they moved on early, going to visit Leon at his capital, where they met up with Aster and a Mara clone and spent five years helping Leon and generally spending time together. Then, because it would only be fair, they spent just as much time at Mara’s place with a Leon clone, before they went around visiting everyone they knew who hadn’t ventured into the breach for a few months.

With Aster returning to her own work with trying to make her Level 5 ‘Space Ice’, Matt and Liz continued their living among mortals as his willpower slowly recovered.

A destination already in mind, they changed identities to Tier 10’s and visited Rah who, as he’d said he would, spent time on low Tier worlds that had thriving Tier 0 skill scenes, acting as a lower Tier guide for the freshly awakened.

Given the open nature surrounding Tier 0 skills and their accessibility, there had been serious growth in the fields while they were gone. Including several small refinements to the skill creation methods that reduced the average time to create skills by a few months. Tim hadn’t wanted credit for his and his Talent’s assistance, happy to quietly collect Titan’s Torch’s bounties on helpful information when he could without attaching his name to the work.