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During the downtime, Matt met some of the teams, and had to stifle a snicker when they asked what it was like apprenticing under such a rich high Tier master. Especially who was willing to throw mana around for testing rifts. A portion of him wanted to see how their heads would explode if they knew it was him producing all the mana they were using.
One of the women was a tailor on the side, and repeatedly sighed at the flagrant use of mana. She had said ‘wasted’ once, only to get dogpiled on by her team. After that, she made a point to say ‘used,’ instead of ‘wasted.’
They couldn’t complain about getting good items and mana stones from even the failed rifts.
Her complaining actually inspired him to order a set of casual clothes with enchantments embedded in the fabric. They were more for comfort than combat, but they would self-clean and repair small holes. After wearing them for a few days, he knew they were worth every mana crystal.
Some of the guilders even took Matt to tour the less secretive areas of the guild when he said that he almost joined a guild himself. He gave them the short version of his awakening, and how Erwin picked him up during one of the times the man was off getting supplies.
A small, but necessary lie to keep their cover.
It was an eye-opening tour.
The guild was reminiscent of the PlayPen in some ways, but vastly different in others.
They both had spatially expanded apartments, but the guild’s were significantly better, with more creature comforts. The dining hall was staffed by people who actually knew monster cooking. He spent an hour chatting with the cooks after the dinner service.
Even the head chef, a Tier 19 man, was happy to hear Matt out and answer his questions. Especially after he name-dropped Aunt Helen, and how he had a signed cookbook from her.
After that, he was invited back anytime he wanted during his time working with the guild.
The real areas where the guild outshone the PlayPen were their rifts and the crafting sector. They had half a dozen Tier 1 through Tier 6 rifts, all being kept from Tiering up, with instructors who knew each rift inside and out. They would follow the younger fighters through during their first few delves in their assigned rift, to ensure their safety.
That was in stark contrast to the PlayPen letting anyone rated as combat-ready into the rifts with no watchers or guardians.
Personally, Matt thought the PlayPen could do with such a method as well, but he wasn’t in a position to tell The Empire something that they already knew. He just felt that some help early on would prevent the unnecessary loss of many. He still remembered how the PlayPen lost more than one of the non-sponsored teams a year, due to more lax rules.
It just seemed like such a waste of life.
The guild also had lessons from higher Tier members of the guild who were on break from delving duties or had simply wanted to get out of delving for a while and raise a family.
While the instructors were good, Matt felt that their individual skill was lesser than the cultivators at the PlayPen. But they were adequate for the safer style of delving that the guild subscribed to.
It was a fascinating glimpse into what could have been.
In the lounge, there was a sense of comradery and shared purpose that he could only gaze at from afar.
Still, it didn’t last long; Erwin soon returned, and the rift creating process continued.
They started creating rifts with more complex mana types, then proceeded to charge them up to Tier 5. The odds were horrendous because of their complexity, but they saw a marginal improvement in the success rate of the growth items pulled.
It still wasn’t good enough for either of them.
They wanted to figure out the underlying mechanic that produced growth items in rifts.
Through test after test, they were able to get the rate of growth item pulls from a complex rift with at least four elemental mana types to about two percent. Unfortunately, they were unable to increase the yield any further despite their constant tinkering with the variables.
Once they hit that wall, they moved onto phase two of the testing— creating Tier 5 rifts with mundane items at the base of the construction.
They didn’t use growth items as the seeds of the rifts. That was their third and final phase, which they hoped to avoid resorting to. Rifts still unaspected far too often for their liking to risk growth items being sucked into the rifts during an unsuccessful Tier up.
They spent two weeks testing these phase two rifts and having the delver teams report their findings. Despite all their attempts to isolate a single variable that would produce growth items, they were completely unable to do so.
One of their baseline rifts was nearly perfect— when fully charged with mana, it had an unheard-of ten percent chance to produce a random growth item. That tidbit of news made the guild leader Madeleine ecstatic, as she now had a way to print money, simply by charging the rift. If her wife and second in command wasn’t there to receive the exuberant kiss, Matt was afraid that he and Erwin would have been on the business end of her affections instead.
Matt and Erwin were far less ecstatic with the results. The rift had been a simple rift with a dagger as the base. Half the mana used was unaspected earth mana, along with an even split of fire, water, wind, and pure mana. They hadn’t even used an essence filter to ensure that the rift was scrubbed of rogue essence types.
They recreated the rift half a dozen times, to no success.
Finally, they started testing their other theories.
The item used to seed the rift didn’t seem to have much of an influence on the reward if the reward was a growth item. Normal items usually mirrored the item used to seed the rift, but growth items seemed to be random in nature.
They also confirmed that growth items could come from any Tier 5 rift if it was fully charged and delved enough. They hypothesized that there was something intrinsic in all Tier 5 rifts that made them different from other Tier rifts, but they were still unable to isolate the contributing factor.
Rifts also seemed to deaspect at a higher rate if they had more than five mana types used in their creation. But the success rate in getting growth items equally increased with the number of mana types used.
Before they moved on to seeding rifts with growth items, they tried less combat-oriented items such as furniture, art, books, and even building a rift around a plate of dinner.
Matt insisted on testing the last idea, if only to see whether they could actually make an ice cream rabbit rift for Aster or not. But they predictably had no success.
The rifts made from furniture had a tendency toward creating mimic monsters, but the theme always leaned more to urban environments. It vaguely reminded him of the drain monster rift he delved at Tier 4.
The rifts made from books usually were set in libraries and chock full of mimics, and oddly enough, mummies.
Neither of them understood why the book rifts produced those specific types of monsters so frequently, but the books inside were always gibberish. Erwin said that it was normal, but they still cleaned out two dozen instances of the libraries so they could run the books through their AIs later.
When they gave up on cracking the secret of why Tier 5 rifts created growth items on their own, they moved on to the final phase of their testing.
Using other growth items to seed rifts.
It actually worked enough to be the solution to their problems…almost.
- Writer
