The Path of Ascension 3: A LitRPG Adventure

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Seeing Matt’s look of incredulity, she nodded. “It was a new backwater world. Tier 3, and no one there was strong enough to scan the whole place, so it took a while. Either way, they apparently became fast friends, and when they were to be separated, Juni said he would follow his friend. Five or so years later, Juni shows up at the prince’s birthday celebration after crashing the event by climbing down a chimney. Right in front of the king and everything. He swore his allegiance to the prince in front of everyone and was granted a knight title by the king himself. Lifted his family right out of peasant status with one move. They’ve never been separated since.”

Matt wasn’t sure how much of that he believed but nodded along with the woman. It just sounded too fantastical. A prince without a Tier 25 bodyguard? Or one so incompetent that it took days to search an area that an unawakened child could escape into? No, he didn’t believe any of that.

It was an interesting look into Juni’s history, or reported history, if nothing else. He made a note to relay it all to Liz later. She was more likely to be able to weed out the good information than he was.

Jessica’s head jerked away from him, and she said over her shoulder, “Gotta work. If you have any questions, find me once I put out these fires.”

Matt walked over to the huge map and inspected it. It seemed to be a larger version of the one he had seen with Juni when they had checked in with the man.

There were five continents with a city each. Two of them on nearly connected landmasses were red, with the surrounding forts colored in a similar shade. The map clearly showed a series of large forts surrounded by a ring of medium forts, with the walls of smaller forts creating something akin to border walls around the cities.

Little resource icons flashed, but any in the queendom’s territory were dim, with not much information provided. He could only see what the resource was, and its expected value in both points and material yield. Though it was just an estimation based on the information gathered before the queendom took over the land. Quickly swiping over to a kingdom-controlled area, he found a Tier 6 iron mine that was producing two tons of material a day. The mine wasn’t simulated, as he expected. Instead he saw that there were upgrade paths in the map where automated miners could be purchased. But the kingdom seemed to have invested in actual miners.

After some spinning of the globe, he found a virtual mine by finding the medium fort his team had taken over. It produced aluminum; or it would have, if it was a real mine. Instead, it was simulated, and produced a set amount of virtual aluminum, which could be converted to real aluminum for free, or converted into points.

That mine was creating points at an astonishing rate. Three thousand points a day as it was now. If they upgraded it, they could double that. It seemed incredibly unfair when you considered that it was one of the thousands of medium forts, but two things still caught his ire.

The first was that they were kingdom level points, and not normal points. They weren’t the same, and couldn’t be converted except at a pretty massive loss. Even when converted, it couldn’t be done without the army’s approval. Matt suspected that it was the reason why Colonel Thorne was there for the meeting.

The second was that upgrading everything was absurdly expensive. It cost thirty thousand points to upgrade the fake aluminum mine to the next level of production. Ten days of production wasn’t bad in and of itself to double the mine’s output, but that was nothing when looking at the cost for fort upgrades.

For a small fort to have the cheapest upgrade, which was to improve the gate to a Tier 7 metal banded wood, cost eighty thousand points. To raise the wall another five feet taller and increase its stone to Tier 7 cost two hundred thousand points. Adding a set of mini defensive ballista on each side of the front gate cost half a million points. Upgrading them to mana cannons was another million points on top of that.

And those prices were all for the smallest of forts. The prices only scaled further for each level of defensive structure.

Increasing the defensive rating of the wall around a city cost fifteen million points per section of wall. That meant one hundred and fifty million points for the smallest city, and two hundred million for the larger cities.

The cities were the only structure that could increase the Tier of their defenses to Tier 8, but the cost was so absurd, it was nigh unreachable. Upgrades for each section cost half a billion points.

Still in shock, Matt flicked to the other defensive upgrades that various places could get. True magical shielding was on the list, but it was only available for medium forts or larger. He didn’t even feel that the price was all that high, at least for the initial price. Two hundred thousand points was relatively cheap, until he looked at the specs for the shields. It cost 15 MPS as a standing price, and had a battery of half a million mana, which would be drained to sustain itself when absorbing damage.

That wasn’t bad. The king was Tier 35, and clearly invested in the prize for winning the war. A Tier 35 mana stone had two hundred fifty billion mana, and the man had, or at least should have, the ability to get them quickly. There had to be a few nobles he could shake down, if nothing else. One stone could power everything itself.

That was his perspective on things until he looked at the outgoing costs that the kingdom was incurring. Nearly two-thirds of their income was being spent on mana. A little searching showed that the Empire had realized that a single, higher Tier mana stone could turn the tides, so they forced the kingdom to buy mana with points.

A single point bought 10 mana. That meant that it would cost fifty thousand points to fill up a shield’s reserves. That wasn’t a small investment. It changed the light in which he viewed the mana stones he pilfered. That wasn’t a small investment, though he doubted that the army was handing out lower Tier mana stones. It would make more sense if they had a few Tier 45 mana stones, and just slowly drained them. At five hundred trillion mana, a single one might fund the entire war a few times over.

That would be a fortune to everyone in the vassal kingdoms, of which the strongest weren’t even Tier 36. But it would be nothing to the Emperor, who had Tier 47 rifts to delve.

It made sense to limit the outside materials that could be brought in, as it rendered the various mines on the planet actually valuable to the war effort.