The Path of Ascension - Chapter 309

Liz took a careful sip of tea as she reclined in her chair. Across from her, Judith Kanakas set her own cup down and sighed.

“You’re still struggling, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know if I’d say that, personally,” Liz responded, “I’m adjusting, it’s just weird, going from one body to… well, this.” Her phoenix body, sitting on the back of her chair, chirped in agreement. “I’m definitely past the worst of the dysmorphia, and I almost never have sensation bleed-over anymore. Sure, it can get a bit fuzzy if communication is interrupted, so I can’t cross-reference my assessment as to what body a feeling originates from, but there were only three times I misjudged it in the last fight.”

“I don’t doubt your technical prowess, Legion. Ascenders know you’re probably better than we are for such things. I mean emotionally. For one, you still think of yourself in terms of having a ‘true self,’ don’t you?”

She flinched. “I’ve been trying to not, and I’m getting better at it, but… I guess.”

“It’s entirely understandable. You were talking to Xares last time, and he has a tendency to… well, not look outside himself very much. Ironic, I know.”

“No, it makes sense. He’s quite introspective,” Liz nodded. “It’s why I was working with him, after all. Out of all of you, he has the most experience grappling with your existence and all that.”

“That is true. But as a result, he’s very fixated on our experience as a gestalt, so he overlooked the key difference that makes you different from us. He’s apologizing for that, by the way.”

Liz frowned. “How so? If anything, you’ve got so many more… bodies than I do, and they’re even more different… how does that make it less relevant?”

“Because the nature of our multiple personhood was reversed. When we first developed our human form, we were like any other hydra, all squabbling for control over a single body. Our clones, therefore, were a welcome release from overwhelming pressure, each of us finally being freed from our petty design-by-committee approach to everything before then.”

That… that made sense. Hydras were a fairly rare bloodline, but percentage-wise, more hydras had children in beast form than even dragons. It wasn’t for their native Talents- innate [Regrow Limb] was good, especially for hydras, but not truly exceptional. No, it was because their Rank 2 bloodline ability, responsible for growing additional heads in beast form, didn’t stop working if they were born a human. Instead, it simply manifested as an additional personality and mind within a singular body and spirit.

Different hydras had all sorts of ways of managing their particular split personalities, but the Kanakas had been fortunate enough to gain a Tier 25 Talent which innately gave every head their own human body while they were transformed. The only real limiter was that they had to all be within the same material universe. Because a few of them were already working with Project Breach through Group Chatter, they’d been an obvious first contact for Liz as she’d been working on developing her own identity as a multi-bodied gestalt.

She shared a glance with her phoenix body and asked, “So basically, whereas I’m having to stretch myself to maintain multiple bodies, you wanted them naturally?”

“More or less. But what I was mostly going for was the fact that there was never any question about which of us was the main Kanakas. We all were, but that didn’t make us interchangeable. You, meanwhile, are used to having a single human body, and for all of your truly remarkable ability to pilot multiple bodies, in different forms no less, you don’t have the same relationship with them that we have with one another.”

“I guess?”

The woman made eye contact with phoenix Liz, “What do you call this body, when thinking to yourself?”

Liz was taken aback. “Um, it’s my phoenix body.”

“Hmmm,” Judith grabbed her teacup and took another sip from it, then looked Liz dead in the eye and spoke again. “And what about this body?”

“That’s my body. Or, my human body I suppose.”

“But your first instinct is to just call that ‘my body,’ I see. And what about when you have multiple human bodies?”

“That… depends, I guess. Usually I’ll think about me in terms of where I am. Or what I’m doing.”

“And there’s the problem.”

Liz cocked her head slightly, “Sorry, I’m missing something. What’s the problem, and why is it a problem?”

“It’s possible you might disagree with me, but I think that part of why you’re having trouble adjusting to permanently having multiple bodies is because you lack a sense of identity. Part of that you can blame on us, because we told you to divorce yourself from attachment to any given body, but it’s also because you assign temporary identifiers to portions of yourself. Imagine if you called your head ‘the topmost part’ and your feet ‘the bottommost part,’ but if you stood on your hands, you then called your feet ‘the topmost part’ and your hands ‘the bottommost part.’ It becomes confusing, both when speaking to others and thinking to yourself.”

“But my bodies are interchangeable,” Liz protested. “Unless I’m in a different form, all of my bodies are equally capable, have the same buffs, everything. They’re not like you, with different mana pools and skills and everything.”

“No two things are truly interchangeable,” Judith countered. “But if you disagree, you disagree. Something like this is truly up to what you find most convenient. But, as you said, you still think of yourself as having a ‘main body,’ even just out of convenience.”

“Well sure, but that’s because I actually have changes to that one which change my capabilities and… huh.”

Judith didn’t say anything, taking another sip from her tea instead, and Liz mirrored the action.

After a moment of silence, Liz spoke up again. “Well, I’m not doing what you do, running a bunch of parallel minds and giving them all different first names while using Elizabeth as just a last name.”

“You have plenty of names to choose between. Immortal Legion, Torch, Elizabeth Moore, and I assume more beyond that,” Judith shot back at her.

Liz frowned slightly. “So like, you think I should call one body Legion, another Immortal, or Liz, or Elizabeth, or…”

“If you think that would be a good idea. It may also benefit you to distinguish yourselves visually, for ease of communication with others.”

She wasn’t quite sure she liked that idea. Her other bodies and minds didn’t exist perpetually, and it felt weird to assign one of her names to a specific ‘instance’ of her personhood. It wasn’t like they were actually different, and doing so felt almost counterproductive.

“Using different permutations of my names is probably a bad idea then. If I have to specify that oh no, this body is actually Elizabeth, Liz is over there, but it doesn’t actually matter because we’re still the same person.”

Judith gave a perfectly measured shrug.

“I do see what you’re saying about having discrete ways to refer to bodies. It could probably help me embrace my nature more easily,” she noted, taking another sip of tea as she thought.

I wonder if there are any skill mods or abilities I might be able to do if I start making a continuous distinction between bodies. If I designate one body as mostly a spear-fighter, could I somehow actually make that one better at fighting with a spear then transfer that power back to the collective? That might be an easy way to let me dabble in other specializations if I can figure something out.

She didn’t know, but it might be interesting to try. Perhaps she could try and tie it in with her bloodline tree and general ability to maintain multiple subsidiary bloodlines, then connect that to her Aspect in some form… Yeah, that had potential. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea overall, but she wouldn’t say no to an additional avenue to power.

“I can’t do your level of customization,” she eventually said. “How do you think I should try and identify different bodies?”

“Well, that partially depends on how you plan to distinguish them,” Judith replied. “My mother had a skill to change her hair color and style for each of her heads, my father had a morphic outfit which changed for each of his heads, and we used to change our eyes accordingly. But you could also go with voices, tattoos, jewelry, spell effects, skin color, even nametags. If you don’t mind having them be misidentified by mortals, you could just use body language, freckle patterns, breathing habits, that sort of thing.”

“Hmm,” Phoenix-Liz jumped down to the chair of the arm, and Liz began to ruffle her feathers as she thought. “I don’t think I want to do anything too drastic, and most of the time when I use a bunch of bodies I’m fighting, so I can’t do outfits…”

Tattoos though…

Now that had some possibilities.

Liz finished her conversation with Judith, but most of what they spoke about was less interesting. Once she bade her farewell, she began returning to her home, thinking about possibly giving herself tattoos.

She had a couple of runic tattoos already, of course, but they’d been designed to be invisible. Everyone on Team Zero had at least a few, but only Ai’la and Sebastian had any that could actually be seen without actively looking for them, and that was because they’d developed their Domains to support them. She wasn’t that opposed to the idea, but broadly speaking, invisible tattoos were considered superior to normal ones. At least for anything other than pure decoration.

One concept that One Step Behind had spoken about was the idea of truly embodying your Domain, or Power. The more your entire identity was wrapped up in a singular direction, the more powerful, or at least the more directed, you would be. Matt was constantly embodying Endlessness simply by existing and creating millions of mana per second, and it paid off in the power which his Domain held.

That made her wonder how Uncle Waters was so strong, when he hardly came across as some kind of water-crazed villain obsessed with drowning people. How was he absolutely shattering people four Tiers above him, and yet seem to function by using an almost mutually exclusive strategy with wholesale embodying a singular Domain?

Now that she thought about that question, she intended to ask him, but she was sure his answer would be jumbled nonsense that no one else but him would understand.

Well, regardless of that. It was still an interesting idea, and while she didn’t know if she actually thought what the Kanakas were suggesting would help, it might not be a bad idea to at least investigate the possibility of different tattoos.

Oh, perhaps tattoos were the wrong framing device. What about war paint? There were several disciplines which used topical potions to protect the face and intimidate their enemies. And if she used blood as her paint, then it would still be in-line with her overall ‘blood warrior’ direction.

She’d have to experiment a bit. Her [False Wound] skill, the result of her Talent converting [Gossamer Outfit], allowed her to either make herself look more or less wounded than she actually was, and she could absolutely use that for cosmetic effect. A sheen of blood, either wet or dried, could help her figure out some good looks on her different bodies, and from there she might see about making them a permanent part of her appearance.

…well, only if Matt approved. Though she knew he would. He was great like that.

For the meantime, she’d do some style experiments and reference what war-paint potions and styles she could replicate with her blood alchemy. For something like this, there had to be pre-existing records, and she intended to take full advantage of everything she had at her disposal.

Before too long they would be back in the war, and if she could get this to work it would be incredibly useful.

Not could.

Liz corrected herself.

She would.

***

Matt was practically bouncing with excitement when he finally returned to Camp Lightfoot with his latest shiny toy in tow. He sent off excited messages to Zack, Erwin, and Colonel Galanodel, then blasted into the sky under the full effect of his speed buffs, racing towards Group Firmament’s complex. He swooped into the open hangar on a rush of wind, sending papers and tools alike scattering across the workbenches.

They didn’t even have enough time to settle before he touched down and tore off into the back workshop, where the sub-project to get his mana stones to function in talismans was making progress. By his standards, the project had stalled, but the impossibly stifling procedures and regulations were there for good reason… or so they told him. To someone with a rational perspective,they were actually making perfectly reasonable progress.

But that didn’t matter!

He eagerly snatched some of his most critical talisman-making tools and pinged all of the crafters present about where they should meet him, then dashed out again before some of the lower-Tiers present even realized he was there.

Instead of just using a testing room, Matt wanted to go big with this first demonstration, so he set up in the nearest undeveloped valley. Amusingly, Colonel Galanodel had already beaten him there, and while she gave him a faint glare, she did have the materials he had requested with her.

His message could have been a bit more polite, but he didn’t let that bother him. He also didn’t blurt out why he had called her there, which only made her annoyance grow. Knowing how she would react to an item personally made by JR which did something not considered possible made her current irritation all the more amusing.

Still, he wasn’t Allie, so he didn’t thrive in the chaos he made.

He had only nodded to Colonel Galanodel when Erwin and Zack arrived, almost in unison. If they hadn’t come from slightly different directions, he would have assumed they were working together, but Zack must have been in his house if the direction he came from was any indication.

Nodding to them, Matt continued to wait until the main crafter on his talismans project, Alex, arrived.

Clapping, he rubbed his hands together. “Today, I come bearing gifts. Or well, really like last week. I got this almost as soon as we left the rift for our little press tour, but I couldn’t come back until now, and it’s been eating me from the inside.”

Seeing the growing irritation on Colonel Galanodel’s face, wonder on Erwin’s, placid calm on Zack’s, and nervous trepidation on Alex’s, Matt summoned the Bifate Pair-Linker to his upraised palm.

Colonel Galanodel’s face went hard. “That’s just a Bifate Pair-Linker. Captain Titan, if you brought me over here to show me a pint-sized BPL, I will be filing a formal complaint about wasting a superior officer’s time on frivolous things.”

Not letting Colonel Galanodel bother him, Matt said, “I did bring you all here to look at a BPL. A Tier 25 BPL personally made by the Managing Director of the Corporations, JR.”

The anger that was visibly building on Colonel Galanodel’s face froze, and she began to speak, but was pre-empted by Erwin moving to be directly next to Matt’s hand. His glasses suddenly shone like a miniature sun to Matt’s mana sight, and the researcher peered at the tiny device with almost reverent awe.

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

He wasn’t even actively probing it with his spiritual sense, just looking at it with an intensity that almost made Matt uncomfortable.

Zack and Alex joined the crowd a moment later, but the two Tier 30s were too enraptured with the device to give them any particular room. Matt grinned widely as everyone was justifiably enamored with his newest toy.

“The Emperor said, and I quote the person who quoted him, ‘It should allow for multi-material pair-linkages along with allowing for nearly any base material to be used as a talisman.’ As for whether or not it actually works, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to try it yet.”

For the first time since he met her, Colonel Galanodel didn’t have her normal expression of irritation, boredom, feigned politeness, or interest in a crafting idea. Instead, her expression was one of pure excitement.

“May I?”

When Matt nodded to her question, she, along with everyone else, sent their spiritual perceptions into the device. Erwin, for his part, erupted with just about every divination spell Matt knew of, and a few he didn’t recognize. At Tier 32, he had a bit of an advantage over Matt, Zack, and Alex, and Matt quickly found himself almost crowded out of the device he himself was holding. Colonel Galanodel held herself back somewhat, but still infiltrated the device as best as she could without interrupting the other three.

Still, he knew what they were seeing, or at least the basics of it, as he had studied it between interviews.

The internals were impossibly complex. Somehow, JR had managed to enchant not just individual atoms, but individual electrons, and that was only the start. Single-atom gears fed into cogs made out of water, shadow, and even a miniature star. A tiny solar system spun back and forth madly, reversing course thousands of times per second, where it lay adjacent to a section that could best be described as an hourglass running in reverse. Runes more complex than entire enchantments Matt had seen studded every mote of space within the device. Literally, as it was the fabric of space itself which was enchanted in some locations. Every direction you looked at changed the view, and the internals slowly moved over time in ways which hurt the brain to try and track.

And all of it was only using Tier 25 materials. Somehow.

Matt had only barely scratched the surface himself. But he’d cut off the last time he looked, when the entire device suddenly began looking like a raven egg, which hatched a spectral bird made of shadows and flitted around in the corner of his eye, cawing hauntingly.

“I don’t… understand,” Alex seemed to find his words first. “How is it doing any of this? There have to be at least a hundred spatial fields in here alone, and they should be tearing one another apart, but instead, they’re acting like some sort of… clockwork gear system, and that’s what’s driving the main part of the BPL? And that… is that making force out of shadow? What is any of this doing, and why is it inside a linker?”

Matt shrugged. He had had the same questions and had come to a single conclusion. “Only one way to know for sure. Let’s test it.”

There was zero pushback from anyone, and they looked at Matt, who looked to Alex. “Do you have any of the talisman plates y—”

Before he could finish, Alex fanned out a dozen metal plates in the air.

Because they were still in the early stages of research, Firmament had been working on simply familiarizing themselves with the ways in which his mana stone mana behaved when it was extracted. As a result, they weren’t trying anything too complicated, but just utilizing his slabs as the power sources they were. Unfortunately, they hadn’t had any success yet, as Matt’s crystal didn’t like to be carefully withdrawn from along predefined channels. It preferred to explode with power.

Still, the idea was that they could first practice making talismans on something more workable and familiar to them, then iterate and slowly reduce how much of the structure would be on the plate, versus on the mana stone, until none or almost none of the structure itself was on the metal. And then they’d have an entirely mana stone talisman.

It was horribly inefficient to draw mana for a talisman from anywhere outside of its own materials and enchantments, but they didn’t care about that. This was just proof of concept, albeit one they were still proving. The normal inefficiencies of an external power-source had been magnified a hundredfold with his mana.

But a multi-material BPL could bypass their difficulties entirely.

A Bifate Pair-Linker wasn’t too dissimilar from a welder for mana and object spirits, to vastly oversimplify its function. Except, instead of joining a plate of steel to another plate of steel, a BPL linked the innate magic and object spirit of two different substances together. It was most commonly used when joining pieces of wood, or different scraps of hide, to ensure that the magic would flow smoothly between two pieces. It was essential for any talisman arrays that didn’t only use hide from a single monster, for example. Of course, a normal BPL still required you to use hides from the same species of monster, the same kind of tree, or whatever else you may have.

Well, most BPLs only worked on a single type of material, but the good ones could do a few. And a bit of flex could also be expected, but much like how it was easier to weld steel to steel than steel to copper, so too was it harder to pair-link the hide of a rhino to the hide of a lion, or harder still to pair-link the hide of a lion to the hide of a wyvern.

But something that promised to pair-link any two materials? Something like that could be used to pair-link ink to the parchment it was written on, or link wood, hides, and metal all together to take advantage of their respective strengths. Sure, there were literally hundreds if not thousands of ways to do similar things, each with their own benefits and drawbacks, but being able to directly link two materials would be like trying to use only a welder to connect metal and wood together. Wood just didn’t melt on its own, and didn’t bind with most metals. You’d end up with just a burnt chunk of wood and a contaminated block of metal, unless there was additional magic involved.

Similarly, there were skills and enchantments which could further facilitate longer-range pair-linkage, but they weren’t usable in every situation, and had their own influence on the outcome, let alone requiring their own skill to use…

Having a single tool which Matt could use to instantly link, say, a newly-made block of mana stone to a metal plate, and have them be a single material magically, and therefore not subject to any of the efficiency loss which normally would accompany an external power source? Matt could possibly be able to on-the-fly connect some modular plates together, link them all to a mana stone, and let loose.

And if JR’s BPL was as impressive as it claimed to be, that was just the start of potential uses for it. Sure, it was a tool with an outsized amount of use in talismans, which needed to all be a single piece of material, magically speaking, but there were plenty of crafting styles which could benefit from the device.

Matt intellectually knew the maker of the item was a Tier 50 crafter that had no reason to lie, and that the Emperor himself had tested the item. But if the specifications were to be trusted, he had been handed the equivalent of a welder that could weld a broken finger to a cotton shirt.

It just shouldn’t be possible, and definitely not at Tier 25. There was a forge on the capital which could do something similar, but it was an entire facility built upon the precipice of a volcano that was constantly erupting and spewing lava into a bog, whose plants broke up the cooled stone and fused them into their trunks. It wasn’t something you just held in your hand, it was the kind of unique advantage which a high-Tier guild could be based around.

Picking up a random plate from the arrayAlex was levitating, Matt quickly scanned the runes to see what the talisman would do. And when he saw that it was a simple directional acid attack, he created a similarly sized slab of mana. Pressing them together, Matt grabbed the BPL and activated it, half expecting to have the BPL, the talisman slab, or the mana stone explode, but nothing happened.

That was a distinct possibility if he tried this same thing with a normal BPL, if it worked at all.

Matt looked at the mana stone and metal talisman in his hands and scanned them with his spiritual sense. He shouldn’t have been, but he was still shocked to find only the tiniest of seams where the crystal definitely ended and the metal definitely started. Even that, he could tell, was user error rather than anything inherent to the device, and it still managed to have even better mana-flow compatibility than anything he’d done before.

Matt was going to say something when Erwin let out a soft ‘ah’.

The man hadn’t stopped staring at the device in Matt’s hand, and his divinations had been so all-pervasive around him that Matt only now realized that interference itself should have messed up the crafting more than it had. The sound was the first expression Erwin had made beyond a general impression of hunger at the device in action, but that wasn’t what really caught Matt’s attention.

Erwin’s spirit was rippling, his cores beginning to spin faster and faster, and began to resonate with the man’s Domain. With every passing moment, the resonance built and built, and while he got the distinct impression that it was muted, the signs were unmistakable.

Erwin was having an inspiration.

But unlike Matt’s clumsy and novice inspiration more than a century ago, Erwin was actively fighting his spirit, keeping it from connecting to the realm and preventing essence from flooding in.

“I see…” he began, then forcibly screwed his eyes shut and wrenched his glasses off his face, throwing them into the distance. “Water.”

His eyes shot open. “I need water! Or herbs! Food! Materials! High-tier! Now, nownownownownownow. Lessgo!”

He vanished in a rush of wind back towards the camp, and Colonel Galanodel popped out of existence a moment later. Matt blinked, then once again took off at top speed back towards the camp, followed by Zack and Alex, following a faint trail of ecological destruction. Flowers and grasses had been uprooted, trees had their branches stripped bare of leaves, and generally anything which could vaguely be considered ‘edible’ was notably missing.

By the time Matt reached the camp, Erwin had made it to Group Cornucopia, where he was downing a glass of Tier 38 water like he was dying of dehydration. Matt didn’t know every detail of the man’s Talent, but he knew that the alchemist could absorb mana and essence from the things he consumed. Generally, that was potions, and it was put back out just as fast as it was taken in to raise the tier of natural materials he worked with, or to create copies of things he’d eaten. But he also used it to cultivate sometimes.

It was how he was 95% of the way through Tier 32, though he never delved, and why he was desperately trying to get the final 5% before his inspiration hit. Erwin rarely kept up a veil, so Matt could usually get a decent idea of the man’s cultivation, but even with a veil it seemed like Matt would be able to feel just how… haphazard this essence cultivation was becoming with every passing ingested item.

It was light and airy, like mist instead of the concrete that Matt’s own core was made out of, but Erwin didn’t care about that. All he was trying to do was to reach the peak of his Tier as quickly as possible. There was no finesse or guidance involved, just a man desperately trying to pour as much essence as possible into his cores as fast as possible.

It took him almost a full day, and he nearly ripped his spirit apart with the effort of rapidly processing the essence from the Tier 35 consumables while his Domain struggled to hold back the Inspiration.

Matt couldn’t do anything to help, but he still stayed with Erwin, wanting to be there for his friend. He wasn’t the only one. It felt like half the camp stopped by at some point or another, and while most didn’t stay the entire time, even Allie popped by for a couple hours complete with snacks, marking the first time he’d seen her in a few weeks. Melinda did stay nearly the entire time, taking notes and muttering about medical stuff with one of her mentors.

Matt even noticed Luna lounging around a few times. While others might not be able to tell, he knew his manager, and could read the flat expression which told him as clearly as any words she was getting ready to step in, regardless of the repercussions if Erwin failed to hold back the Inspiration. Not that Matt thought even Luna could stop a Tier 32’s Inspiration, but she seemed willing to throw her best into the effort.

Nor did he miss the fact that at least three Tier 35s were present at any given time, and often more.

Thankfully, none of it proved necessary.

Erwin guzzled gallons of high Tier materials, but in the end, he managed to gather enough essence, even as loosely compressed as it was, to reach the peak of Tier 32 and break through in just a little less than a day.

Erwin dropped onto the floor with a sigh of relief, and the stuttering back-and-forth of his Domain and essence cores gave way. He stared blankly at the ceiling, and the resonance of his spirit quickly spread out into the surroundings, vibrating the rift’s reality and even getting Matt’s own cores to join in at one point. The spiritual pressure grew and grew, and then… it released, and like a dam had broken, essence began to flood in.

The power of the realm swirled around Erwin before it started to pour into him.

Matt watched as Erwin’s damaged spirit was almost magically healed by the resonance between it and the realm, while the essence rushed into his cores and compressed the essence he had used to reach Tier 33. Reaching into the compressed, allocated essence in a previous Tier was something only possible with an inspiration, but in seconds, the volume of essence that had been filled with mist like essence was now just as compressed as the rest of Erwin’s advancements.

Perfect in every way, like the labor of love it was.

Only once his foundation was compressed did the essence start to fill the area that would be his Tier 33 cores until they were full, and he broke through once more.

The flood of essence illuminated the building, and Erwin simply looked blankly into empty space, a look of wonderment on his face. Then, the light faded, the flow of essence stopped, and reality lost several shades of color.

Laughing, Erwin pulled himself to his feet, then looked down and poked himself in the abdomen. “I can’t believe I was able to game it! You hear all those stories about people getting two inspirations back-to-back, but no sirree, two Tiers for the price of one thank you very much! Oh man that felt good!”

Luna vanished, but Matt was pretty sure he saw her roll her eyes before she did so.

The crowd present for the very end gave a polite round of applause, then trickled out as they returned to either their time off or their duties.

Erwin was no exception, as the moment he was freed from his boss giving him some congratulations, the newly-minted Tier 34 bounded over to Matt like an eager little puppy. “Are we ready now?”

“We were waiting for you. Someone felt it necessary to have an Inspiration. Speaking of which, do you mind sharing what the actual Inspiration was about?”

It was a question that most people would consider rude, but Matt knew Erwin well enough that worst-case scenario he’d just decline. The man never thought that a genuine attempt to learn something would be offensive.

As they made their way back to the valley at a more sedate pace that even Alex could easily keep up with, Erwin tried to explain. “I mean, it was an inspiration. They’re pretty much impossible to describe. Such a wonderful feeling, peeking behind the curtain. Just wish I could remember most of it.” Everyone looked to Erwin, but he wasn’t Allie or Matt, and didn’t keep them waiting. “But what triggered it… well, the fact that the BPL is understandable. It’s profoundly, incredibly advanced, but it’s replicable. There was a Talent involved in making it, for sure. Multiple, even, and maybe from multiple people at that. But it still runs on logic, somewhere at its core. What that logic is, I don’t know. I think it might actually require multiple different forms of logic, but it can all make sense. It’s replicable. Repicatable? I’m not sure which is the proper word.”

Colonel Galanodel nodded even as her fingers rapidly tapped the air. “Once you settle, I would appreciate a full write up for my own people to study when we have the time to examine the BPL in more detail.”

A small, childish part of Matt wanted to say that she wouldn’t be getting time to study this BPL. After all, it was a personal gift to him from a Tier 50 for completing the Path of Ascension, but he squished it. He knew that if he wanted to, he could claim it fully for his own, but that was beyond selfish, and it was dangerous to him and everyone on his team.

Plenty of them wouldn’t benefit from it, sure, but the lower-Tier crafters in the rift had a once-in-a-lifetime chance at studying the effects that such a sophisticated device could have. Even some of the crafters in their tier. Matt could only regard the tool with hunger, wishing that it had been something just a bit more broadly useful, but he squashed those feelings down deep. He needed to be grateful for what he had gotten, but he couldn’t hoard that gift all to himself.

That said, he would absolutely be getting first dibs on the device every time he wanted to use it.

Matt still wanted to finish this testing though. To that end, he lifted the talisman and proffered it for everyone to inspect it in more detail.

It took Erwin a few seconds to get used to his new, stronger, spiritual perception, but none of them were able to see any difference to the metal talisman plate and the mana stone. They were spiritually merged, but the BPL hadn’t made any other changes that could help Matt in making his own talismans.

Activating the talismans by carving a few lines into the metal plate, Matt tossed the plate and the mana stone into the valley together while watching everything with his spiritual perception.

As the rune activated, Matt nodded as the mana stone was almost instantly turned to dust as the runes absorbed its power to unleash a jet of acid across the valley and caused some of the stones to hiss and pop.

Alex tapped at the air. “That was good. A full fifty-seven percent faster than our control group activations and almost no power loss.”

Matt nodded along but wasn’t as excited as the crafter. “It’s useful, but still almost twice as slow to activate when compared to a normal talisman. Is there any way to reduce this further with the current design, or will we be returning to the basics?”

Before Alex could respond, Zack nodded to Matt. “Thank you for inviting me to see such a unique item, and while I believe it might even be useful for some of our tests on mana stones, I can’t stand to be around such mana waste. It physically pains me to see millions of mana wasted so.”

Having said his piece, Zack started walking back to the camp. Matt didn’t take it personally, as he had expected Zack to do exactly what he did. His fellow Ascender hated waste, and talismans were inherently wasteful. That went double for the talismans Matt liked to throw around.

Colonel Galanodel sighed. “I suppose Alex and the other talisman-making teams will get plenty of use from it, and I believe there are a few places where this can help us with repairs if nothing else. Still it’s a remarkable item to even just study. I apologize for my earlier rudeness, Ascender Titan.”

Matt waved off her apology. “I was being needlessly mysterious. The rebuke was valid and I promise the next time I get a crafting device from a Tier 50, I will inform you first.”

Galanodel snorted. “If you get another item like this, you are more than welcome to pull a similar prank again. I’m still not sure that what it does is possible, but it’s a good thing for us. If nothing else, this will make repairing your armor far less of a hassle next time you come back with it in pieces.”

No bothering to hold back his grin Matt asked, “So… does that mean it’s not as bad next time I wreck it?”

“Don’t push your luck, Ascender.”

She vanished a moment later, and Matt turned to where Alex and Erwin were making small adjustments to both the BPL and the metal talisman plates.

Rubbing his hands together, Matt learned forward. “What if we change the trigger runes? I think we can reduce the time to activate by usi—”

They worked on the designs for another two days before they ran out of premade talisman plates, and they all turned to other projects. True to his mental word, he gave the BPL to Alex, leaving the crafter looking like he had been given a cross between a bomb that might blow up any seconds, the most fragile glass figurine, and a holy relic of ages past all bundled into one.

Even before he fully left, Colonel Galanodel arrived and took the item from the stunned man before vanishing.

Matt was excited to see what they would cook up with it.

He had another ten or so years rift time before Aster would be back in top condition and they could take missions outside without revealing Melinda’s talent. But now that he had been off the Path for a significant amount of time, he no longer felt like he needed to rush everywhere.

A decade?

That was nothing.

The war had just started a hundred years ago, and at its fastest, might end in another hundred years. More likely it would stretch for another two or three hundred years. Time was the one thing that Matt had in spades. He just needed to make good use of said time, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

He had a wife he hadn’t seen in a few days now, and despite having all the time in the world, that had been too long.

Before he could find her, he received a message on his [AI].

“Oh.”