The Path of Ascension Chapter 475

Chapter 475

After agreeing to work together, Matt and Liz spent a few days preparing before they grabbed a few of their people and joined the nobles on their way to the Capital.

One of those preparations was Matt trying to get Aster to join them. However, she was mid-experiment trying to formulate a stable Level five ‘Space Ice’ mana, and didn’t want to waste the travel time actually traveling. He, along with Zack and Titan’s Torch, helped as much as they could, but similar to when Liz went through the process, a lot of the hard work was reliant on repetition and perseverance.

Allie and Zack both offered their help to his own cause as needed, but Matt temporarily declined. While he knew that he wasn’t solely responsible for creating the aura diversity problem, now that he’d seen a path towards a solution, he didn’t expect others to sacrifice their limited time.

He offered the same to Liz when they stood before the [Portal] he’d opened to the noble’s ship. “You know you don’t have to come with us. I know you planned to boil yourself again soon and I don’t want to delay that.”

Phoenix Liz, who’d been napping on human Liz’s shoulder, cocked her head hearing what Matt said, but she didn’t comment.

Instead human Liz shook her head. “It’s fine, the herbs won’t go bad and Aster agreed to get Allie to drop them off. Given how everyone is already starting to congregate in anticipation of the higher Tier explorers arriving, I figure I might be able to buy a few additional ingredients. Then it’s an upgrade to what I was already going to do.”

Catching and squeezing her hand, Matt was silently remembering her sacrifice when Liz grinned. “That, and I want to be there when we solve this problem to rub it in mom and dad’s faces.”

Rolling eyes, Matt moved to step through the [Portal]. “You know they will just be happy for us?”

“So? That just means we all get to celebrate. Best kind of win.” Liz sniped right back and he didn’t have a response, giving her the win.

Which she gloated on even as they started traveling to the Capital.

They spent nearly half of the journey refining their plan, their demands, and what things they were willing to compromise on, as well as how far they were willing to in each case. None of them were under any delusion that ninety nine percent wouldn’t be thrown out by the end, but everyone was determined to succeed. He was fairly sure several cared more about the success itself than their cause, but he didn’t hold it against them as they were still earnest in their efforts.

Their first plan was to leak their plans. Plans that culminated in an official Imperial Petition where they could force their changes through. They’d either need the Royal in charge to agree and force the issue, or eighty percent of the affected parties on their side. The nobles hadn’t been willing to announce that from the outset as they couldn’t or wouldn’t risk the backlash of a failed Imperial Petition might cause where Matt and Liz didn’t really care too much.

Which was why they started stacking the deck.

Using spies and various news contacts, they deliberately spread the news that they were worried about the trends relating to aura exclusivity. For the well informed, this was nothing new when coming from Palustris. But when news spread that Matt and Liz were teaming up with the Empire’s strongest hereditary noble families to address the issue, the various factions started taking notice.

Their next steps were to once more ‘leak’ several key pieces of information. The most important leak was a still image of Matt presenting before the nobles with a projection conveniently listing out his key points for convincing Manny to not hold back when solving the problem. Having already agreed to not use his original plan, the nobles had far too much fun carefully tweaking Matt’s presentation to have the most abrasive language possible without tipping their hands.

When that leak was ‘verified’ by Matt and Liz firing the staff member who’d taken the picture, every faction with a vested interest in aura took notice. Having remotely made their plans, they had to trust that no one found out that the person who’d taken the picture was one of the Empire’s undercover agents who needed to cycle out anyway.

Once the information spread, they ceased their stirring and waited for a reaction even as they rushed to the Capital on what he learned was one of the Dobrescu family’s yachts. While traveling, Matt specifically took time to study their opposition in detail now that he had access to the nobles’ various channels. Alone, none of their information impressed him. But combined, it was a step above anything less than a directed Imperial probe.

Unlike a lot of business types, aura rifts were wide instead of tall. While everyone involved was at least a Tier 30 organization by the required start-up capital, the newness of the underlying industry meant that instead of a few high Tier factions dominating, there were hundreds of similar strength businesses with a few outliers who were larger.

Matt, along with most independent economists, considered it semi-inevitable that once the easy pickings dried up, the most affluent of the factions in the aura space would start to gobble up the lower Tier and smaller organizations who only had a patent or two under their belts. There hadn’t been an entirely new industry in a long enough time that no one was entirely confident in those guesses, usually it was about offshoots developments, but it seemed likely with the current trends.

And if there were going to be entities left standing, it wasn’t hard to see who would come out on top. Between the corporations, guilds, and noble families who’d decided to try their hands at aperology, there were three main pillars when looking solely from a quantity of aura related patents. He was personally peeved that two of the three were Talented organizations, led or primarily staffed by those with a related Talent, but he was also aware enough to know having a one third being purely science driven group was a rarity at the highest Tiers.

Sadly, he also disliked the New Horizons Institute of Applied Aperology more than any of the other aperology organizations, thanks to their overly aggressive and predatory contracts. Currently, they were the fastest growing thanks to their catalog, which had the most specialized aura type recipes out of any faction. It didn’t help they’d copied his guilds general reward structure and found massive success.

In the end it boiled down to a few simple truths.

Aura was complicated.

Aura related products were a magnitude more complicated.

Aura potions and their resulting Concepts were even more complicated than most potions, given their life altering implications.

While he hadn’t paid much attention at the time, he did remember as alchemy companies started releasing aura potion variations with slightly more targeted effects. It hadn’t caused too much of a stir back then because the more specific potions’ abysmal success rates made them uneconomical. However, with profit on the line, New Horizons had bridged the gap by creating more specific variants of aura from the outset.

It was also the long term solution for the problem Matt envisioned, as it meant a cultivator could slant their Domain from the bottle instead of having to put in decades of work to bring their Concept away from a baseline elemental effect. Theoretically any Tier 15 had the time, but as was becoming more and more apparent with every passing day, most people found that even breaking their Domains wasn’t enough to fully erase the after effects. When they tried to make their own Domain, they found it much harder as they tried to deviate from what had been nestled in the core of their very being for hundreds of years.

On the other hand, starting with a fire-heat, or fire-burning, or an even more specific effect such fire-lingering didn’t sound like much of a change, the additional starting focus gave cultivators another lever to push, which was all most people needed. With more targeted starting potions, not only was breaking a Concept and reforming it into something less elementally related easier, fewer people felt the need to break their Concepts at all, making it the best of both worlds.

Or it would have been, if everyone had a wide catalog of more specific potions to purchase from, but reality wasn’t as accommodating as he would have liked. Developing the more specific aura potion recipes was hard, but creating a rift that produced a specific and repeatable secondary effect was more luck than science at this stage in aperology.

The mountains of mana stones Titan’s Torch’s burned through daily could attest to that, but that was where the Talented aperologist came in.

When potential vast fortunes were on the table, the stodgy aperologists climbed down from their self made thrones and started companies, guilds, or any other organizational structure they felt best suited them and got to work trying to leverage their Talents into making something repeatable.

Few were truly successful, and those that were were generously rewarded as they sold their recipes. But they quickly realized they didn’t necessarily need to create a repeatable recipe if the client was wealthy enough. By partnering with people who had a method to copy a rift, even a partial success could be copied every few months and turned into a profit, which was why there were so many variant potions. Without their Talents, creating the original rifts would have proven impossible in the first place.

Matt was actually happy to see Talented aperologists assisting the field instead of hindering it. He was less happy with their decisions to limit how many base versions of the aura rifts they made as a way to limit how many copies were able to be distributed. That kept the price of each copy high as well as its resultant aura.

However, that same ease of creation was why there were so many factions in the Empire with entangled interests when they’d discovered less than a hundred base types of aura available at all.

Once more, the Talented led the field when it came to pushing into more complicated aura types. That was how the other two corporations were able to stand up to the juggernaut that was the New Horizons Institute of Applied Aperology.

By abusing the control their Talent’s gave them, the aperologists of Aura Sky and the alchemists of Killian’s Tankard took two different approaches to aura potions aperology, letting them stand tall with smaller catalogs than New Horizons.

Killian’s Tankard tackled the more specific aura potion variants via their targeted alchemy recipes. Originally an alchemy business of little repute, Killian developed a separation function that allowed his company to extract specific variants of aura out of the whole. It was stupidly wasteful and ultimately proved more academically interesting than practical, but once his foot was in the door, Killian leveraged his position to merge with an aperology corporation and dove in leveraging his alchemy skills.

They hadn’t seen quite as much success with aperology as they did alchemy, but they had two base aura rift patents, seven variations rift patents, and dozens of potions patents competing with several of the Tier 40 alchemy companies.

The Aura Sky corporation, on the other hand, was a bit more traditional in that they were led by Mackenzie Harrington. Who, despite being a Tier 45 and able to ascend, had jumped into the aura fad like anyone else. She was also the person they suspected was going to be their largest problem going forward.

A first generation noble by her own right, as well as being a staunch supporter of the academic system, Mackenzie had long since been on Matt’s shit list, given her propensity to protect her monopoly on higher Tier rift creation. To her credit, credit he didn’t want to give her, there was zero evidence or even an indication she was part of any secret society, or even the Cabal.

Having either would have made everything they were about to go through, much much easier. Even though he didn’t like her or her business practices, she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Which was exactly why they’d spread rumors and waited to see everyone’s reactions. Sadly, their reactions were to pretend like the news didn’t exist, which propelled them to start phase two of their plan.

One by one, half a dozen companies and guilds tried to reach out to them, wanting to ‘talk about the future’. But none of them were from the larger guilds, so they continued to wait.

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