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1225 Words
That was too much, and everyone started to laugh. Aster just sat in confusion as her friends guffawed.
Sam lost it to the point that she snorted out the wine she had taken a sip of.
That just reset everyone else’s humor, and even got Aster to laugh.
When they finally started to calm down, Matt picked up his bond and hugged her while asking her if she had understood what savory ice cream was when it was on the menu.
She had distinctly not, and pouted about no one explaining it to her, until Liz said there was sherbet on the dessert menu. Liz assured the fox that she would probably like it.
The rest of the meal was delicious despite Aster eating Matt’s steak in retribution for not warning her. He took his punishment with grace, having had a bite of it from Liz’s plate to taste it.
As it turned out, Aster did enjoy the sherbet.
While she rated it as lower than ice cream, she enjoyed the denser and fruity flavors that she was able to sample.
They ended the night by strolling through a light garden as the three moons rose in a dancing orbit.
The next day, they picked up their armor and weapons from the couple and thanked them before jumping planets back to their continent.
They found Erwin watering a garden in a floating glass orb that had seemingly drained a good portion of the lake, as the waterline was at least a foot lower than it had been when they left.
Erwin gave them no downtime before pulling Matt into more rift crafting experiments.
They actually went to a new continent, where they met a Tier 5 team who was going to delve into the Tier 5 rifts that they created. They were contracted by Erwin from one of the local guilds that were in good standing with The Empire. He had only said that Matt was his apprentice, and that he was trying to create specialized rifts with growth items.
Having seen more of the records, Matt understood that it wasn’t unheard of, though most guilds didn’t bother with trying for specific elemental mana rifts. They usually just delved randomly generated ones. If it gave out a half-decent number of growth items when fully charged, that was good enough for them.
Erwin was apparently known as an eccentric enough scientist that no one questioned his being willing to waste millions of mana, even though it could be better spent on other endeavors.
That was the real reason that no one tried to create rifts.
Matt had suspected it before, but after having tested it himself, he understood why no one bothered. No guild would be willing to throw away hundreds of millions of otherwise valuable mana. Even the most delving-oriented guilds had crafting divisions, which consumed buckets of mana to craft the simplest of weapons.
Then, the guild had to afford the spatial expansion that they used. Guilds, unlike apartment complexes and other spatially expanded mass housing, had to cover all the mana cost for their building, or pay double the price for drawing in ambient mana.
That was why the guild was happy to agree to Erwin’s request of providing teams to delve the rifts, as long as they reported everything they received from the delves.
The guild was Madeleine’s Marauders, named after the guild’s founder, a Tier 26 melee fighter. It was actually a feeder guild to the stronger Darknorth Delvers, a Tier 35 guild that wanted to get a foothold in a new region of space to find promising youths.
She was actually quite nice. When they first arrived, she met them personally to introduce herself and discuss the location where they wanted the rifts created. The location was in a secure area, situated deep inside the guild’s compounds and hidden under layers of restrictions, both magical and mundane.
Matt and Erwin intended to create a few hundred rifts to test out the potential growth items and how they changed with mana types. On the other hand, the guild only needed and wanted the best five. They intended to keep those rifts fully charged and restricted to Tier 5, which wouldn’t be cheap. Only the fact that they were getting growth items worth Tier 14 prices made the investment worth it.
That, and they weren’t going to reimburse Erwin for the mana he used at all. If Matt wasn’t able to produce millions of mana a day, the deal would have been incredibly unfair, but neither of them cared about the cost as much as the guild would. The official story was that the Empire was funding the research at Erwin’s request and would be buying any growth items the guild didn’t keep for themselves.
The first thing they did was set up privacy formations that could keep spiritual senses out of the area. If someone stronger than the formation poked their nose inside, it would set off alarms and warn them.
Matt got the feeling that either Luna or Kurt was watching over them, making sure no one spied on them. For all her grumblings about wanting them off The Path, Luna gave her all to training them, and he was sure that she cared about their wellbeing. She had said so on their train rides. She kept her own spiritual sense wrapped around them to prevent others from spying, more so than to watch them herself.
They started with creating random rifts with no elemental mana or essence restrictions. As expected, it only yielded normal rifts. Even when fully charged, they had no chance to produce a growth item.
Their next tests turned into making rifts with the simplest of single element mana allocations. These rifts were a little more of a challenge to Tier up successfully, but none of them created growth items regularly.
Another result in line with their predictions.
In the next round of testing, they tried to craft rifts with at least three variations of elements, to a slightly higher success rate. One in fifteen of the rifts they created produced a single growth item drop out of one hundred delves.
Not even close to the numbers of a good growth item producing rift, but it was a start.
The delving groups were ecstatic, and when Matt spent time in their lounge, he got to listen to them wax poetic about how much money they were pulling in from delving full rifts five or six times a day.
The guild was paying to have their mana topped up, while also letting them keep all the non-growth items they found. The guilders also had first claim on any growth items that they found while delving, up to one item per person.
As the days ticked by, and the amount of rifts he and Erwin created increased, it became almost amusing how many of the guild’s Tier 5s were tasked with delving their rifts. Even with the guild providing mana, the teams were becoming overworked and sloppy, leading to injuries mounting.
It was a stark contrast to Luna’s training, where they were delving a dozen or more rifts at higher Tiers than themselves in a day.
Erwin and Matt were eventually asked to slow down their testing, so that the teams wouldn’t be in danger of being overwhelmed.
- Writer
