The Path of Ascension Chapter 474

Chapter 474

Opening a [Portal] for Liz, the two of them stepped through his second [Portal], arriving next to the luxury yacht that was now orbiting Palustris.

Through their physical contact, Liz privately commented, “Well, aren’t they the definition inconspicuous.”

Knowing what Liz really meant, he replied the same way as a hatch opened up. “It’s not forcing our hand, but if we end up disagreeing with them or not working together, it won’t be as quiet as if they’d arrived incognito. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t love them starting us out like this.”

As Matt and Liz floated into the ship, they found their peers already gathered and waiting.

Dominus, in his draconic humanoid form, skipped any semblance of formalities and asked, “Can we go somewhere more secure to have this conversation?”

Not bothering to argue with expedience, Matt cast [Portal] for a third time. Liz led the way while he allowed the ten most influential hereditary dukes and duchesses to pass through before he followed, leaving their servants and staff behind.

Once they were inside, they silently went through a thorough round of scans to ensure they weren’t bringing in bugs or other spying devices.

When he finished, Matt took a place at the table and spent a few seconds inspecting their visitors as they finished and joined him.

Despite being their noble peers, neither Matt or Liz had interacted with most of the current group beyond casual conversation at parties they both happened to attend. Knowing their plans, trying to gather an Ascender or two for their cause wasn’t too surprising, and he wouldn’t have questioned one or two of the nobles coming to visit him. But all of them at once…

Unless.

Matt smiled and asked as Silvia sat down last, “So, did you all explore together? Any noteworthy rewards?”

Dominus raised a scaly eyebrow at the question but shook his head. “No, though I understand why you might think that. Our cooperation is much more recent, as we settled back into our roles as leaders of our respective fiefs. I can’t speak for the others, but house Maniakes made out well enough during the breach, though it pales in comparison to the rumors that surround you two. However, to get us back on topic, let me explain how we ended up joined at the hip.”

Gesturing to Ingrid Öberg, an Ice Bear bloodline and only Tier 24, Dominus explained, “To make a complicated story short, Ingrid complained to Silvia about how her personal plans for developing the aura business to help supply her capital were being stymied by the overly complicated web of exclusivity clauses. Silvia, in turn, mentioned it to Sciath because she was experiencing the same thing, who informed me. Given that all four of us were dealing with the same issue, I reached out to every peer I personally know and most were also suffering from a staggering level of bureaucracy and politicking that got in the way of getting a well rounded aura world off the ground.”

The Tier 28 looked between Matt and Liz before he continued. “Once aware, I started digging deeper and then learned how these same restrictions are harming Concept diversity in the general population. That’s when I first reported the issue to Queen Mara. She was… less than helpful. All of the Royals have been the same, but I don’t believe we can sit around and wait for the Emperor to return. Who knows how long until he returns? In ideal circumstances he could be back tomorrow, if public perception of Ascenders Shadow’s Talent is accurate, but we can’t depend on that. Having gathered the core of the younger generation of nobles, we decided to come to you with our plans and hope that we can count on your assistance.”

Dominus took a deep breath before sighing. “If we can’t break this deadlock and allow our worlds to actually use the plethora of aura types that have been developed, we will find our duchies at the mercy of these factions. Either indirectly for the imports required to have a diverse catalog of aura potions available, or directly for any aura types we’d have access to. Before long, each of our duchies will slowly turn into limited producers beholden to a few aura catalogs.”

Tufa Hamman, one of the nobles Matt had little impression of beyond a polite conversationalist at parties, tapped the table with a serious expression instead of her usual easy smile. “It’s a repeat of the trainer monopoly, but no one seems willing to talk reason this time around.”

Matt almost nodded as he heard that, feeling he better understood the nobles’ reasons for coming to him, as well as why the Royals weren’t interfering. It wasn’t only a trial for the newest generation of nobility, but he suspected it was also a commentary on the results the Royals, or possibly Manny, found acceptable.

While the Emperor still hadn’t returned, no one expected him or the other Tier 50’s back for at least another two hundred years, unless they delved exceptionally fast or up past Tier 48. However, the Royals weren’t foolish enough to assist the nobility if their ideas went against Manny’s interests, just because the Emperor wasn’t there. Any decision made to such an end would be repealed the moment he returned.

Having gone out the farthest, everyone expected the Tier 50s to be the last to return. Though everyone, Matt included, was eagerly awaiting the main wave of Tier 45 explorers that delved into the third layer, who they expected to return in the next decade or two.

Matt was feeling smug about having identified everyone’s very selfish motives for acting, when Boutaje leaned forward so he could see Tufa. “People’s interests are far too entwined with local powers. We’d be fighting our own rank and file should we simply sign edicts from on high as you are suggesting we handle it. We need a solution that doesn’t hinder the very industry we seek to support.”

As the reply kicked off clearly well trodden arguments, he looked to Liz, wanting to see what her reaction to everything was, but she only smiled back at him. He didn’t like the deadlock any more than anyone else, but his solution had been to wait for Manny’s return. Not because he wanted to wait, but rather because his own skills alone were far from enough to break the current deadlock.

Trying and failing would mean the various factions banding together against an outside threat, which was why he’d intended to wait. However, with the nobles before him, they had the political power to push through almost anything. At least in theory, politics was far more than raw numbers and comparing resources and it wouldn’t be smart to underestimate his opponents.

Or his allies.

Matt mentally reigned in his assumptions and leaned back to listen.

Liz nodded uncommittedly to a comment Winiata made, “A trend we noticed, though our response was more local. Are you interested in copying our solution?”

Boutaje Daoud was a renowned strategist who’d come into his own during the war helping guide overall tactics, but he still winced at Liz’s suggestion. “Sadly, we believe that the opportunity to use such a… rigorous option, has passed us by. Now, the remaining groups that are both able and willing to sell aura related methods are both strong and connected, making widespread legislation risky. Now it’s about limiting damage when pulling the weeds out. Ideally, we can do so without damaging the flowers, but if we must cause damage, we desire to do as little as possible.”

Matt indicated he understood, but Silvia Dobrescu, one of the people he knew best from using her family’s shipping network to bypass the Cabal’s harassment, spoke instead.

“We are hoping to leverage your position, Ascender Titan, as the one who published the original aura methods, to use public opinion to reduce the exclusivity clauses in existing and future contracts. As a group, we’ve concluded this is the easiest method with the greatest chance of success, though we’d love to hear both of your thoughts, and we do have contingencies prepared for everything we could think of.”

Matt looked to Liz, who silently raised an eyebrow, fobbing his question back on himself.

Seeing no reason to hold back from doing something he’d want to do anyway, Matt replied with a smile.

“I’m very interested in your ideas and I appreciate you all taking the time to come in person.” Before the other nobles could respond, he continued, determined to dig out the largest nugget of contention first, “First, let’s start from the top. What are your goals in this endeavor? Your perfect outcomes? I know mine, but I’m open to hearing what you guys have in mind and it would be best to make everything clear before we discover the differences later.”

Dominus took back the floor and returned Matt’s smile with one of his own. “We aren’t malicious in our intent and our proposal is for sincere cooperation from all sides. We aren’t looking to interfere too deeply, we simply wish to crack the existing strangle hold, not shatter the market entirely. Nor do I think we could gain your support if we sought to pull the profits of such patents entirely under our control. We all have our own reasons to be here, but we are equally willing to put aside our personal interests to work with the two of you to resolve the crises that looms before us. We believe we have a realistic and acceptable outcome here. In fact, we’ve already had good feedback from some of the smaller patent holders we’ve reached out to. Several have tentatively agreed to a reform based on this framework, so we aren’t coming empty handed.”

Scanning the information the dragon sent over, he found everything was exactly as Dominus had said it was. If Matt cared about the welfare of the highest Tier corporations and research guilds, who were trying their best to extract all the profit out of aura production, he might have agreed with only a few edits. But he felt their proposal didn’t go far enough to really solve the aura potion’s Concept diversity problem.

Why bother to go through so much effort only to throw it all away by accepting a middleground deal?

One of the largest problems lay in that rift recipes were surprisingly hard to ‘steal’.

Successful aperology created very similar rifts and entering a rift would, more often than not, expose which creation method was used. That meant creating illicit rifts and claiming to use a secret third party patent wouldn’t work, even if no one simply asked the owner to make a second rift. Even if the methods did work, most companies as part of their contracts demanded the ability to perform local inspections to prevent unauthorized aura farming, making illicit rifts not worth the effort.

There were undoubtedly bootleg aura rifts spread through the Empire, but the scale of delving required to make the initial material investments of creating the illegal rift worth their efforts dwarfed anything return that could be extracted quietly from hidden rifts.

That meant when the rarer aura types were sold, as well as their composite alchemy and rift recipes, which were both expensive to discover and create, they did so for fortunes along with profit shares per unit of aura extracted. While the aura recipes Titan’s Torch had published and launched free of charge were still valuable, once planets started producing aura en masse, the more valuable aura potions became focal points due to the higher possible profit margins.

After all, anyone could produce the aura types Matt’s guild published, where the exclusive ones were harder to buy and came with massive markups due to their artificial scarcity. As more and more aura farms started chasing the higher profits, they found that all of the various aura groups demanded exclusivity contracts either to themselves, or the small partnerships they’d worked out. Similar to many other hyper-expensive products, but none of the companies had a deep enough catalog to allow for the clause to be truly acceptable.

If the various counts and barons involved had been purely logical in their decision making, they would have realized the trap and withdrew as a whole, demanding better, looser exclusivity contracts, or ideally none at all. But human nature ensured many saw the trap and jumped in anyway. Being the first and only producer of a product was valuable, and in their scrabble to not be left behind, the various lower Tier nobles had tied themselves into a perfectly legal gridlock.

Believing he understood why the nobles had come to him and seeing their plan, Matt shattered any hopes they might have had of him simply agreeing without his own thoughts and ideas.

“Ladies, gentleman, I want to thank you for coming this far, but if this is your plan, I don’t think you want my help.” As various looks of confusion flickered across the various nobles’ expressions, Matt continued, “There is a very simple solution that you don’t seem willing to consider. Follow our lead. Outlaw the exclusivity contracts wholesale and let the various factions whine and complain. If they don’t like it, they can rebel. At that point you call your parents or the Royals into the equation and solve the problem permanently, once and for all.”

Opening his mouth as if Matt had just realized that his proposed solution might be the very thing they were trying to avoid, he paused, realizing why they might have come to him and Liz.

They’d probably been told by their own parents that they wouldn’t get involved. Added with Leon’s messages, Matt was confident that if the nobles did force through any workable solution and the various factions were foolish enough to do anything more than protest loudly, their parents would swoop in, hard. From every report he’d seen on their parents, they’d be happy to use the pretext of rebellion to permanently remove a potential problem for their heirs. Georgios had not rewarded his nobles for their kindness and soft hearts, though he had cared about their self control.

However, what he saw as a useful backup plan, the nobles saw as a failure condition. Understanding they wanted to prove themselves independent, he didn’t push that angle any further, knowing it would be futile.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Dominus tried to deflect, confirming Matt’s hunch. “As Boutaje said earlier, we don’t wish to destroy the very companies our duchies have spent so much effort nurturing. Our goal is to solve the problem diplomatically, with force of any sort being a last resort. If you can’t agree to that, Ascender Titan, then maybe we have misjudged.”