The Path of Ascension 4: A LitRPG Adventure

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The examples they were currently testing during their rest were the most normal elemental types of wind, water, fire, and earth. Those rifts didn’t seem to have any problems in reaching Tier 4 or 5 without losing their aspects.

They also learned that by completely draining the mana from the spot where they were forming the rift, they had increased the chances of the rift keeping the mana type they wanted. Their largest problem was that they didn’t always know if the rift truly lost the elemental aspect it had.

It was only after Erwin insisted on a more thorough examination of their latest rift that they discovered something to the contrary. The rift seemingly had no relation to the element they were using to form it. In that instance, it was a water mana charged rift that had a typical forest setup. But when they Tiered it up, the rift transitioned into a water beach.

That wasn’t the only oddity. Afterwards, they discovered that when a rift absorbed an item, it was almost always going to have a theme based around the item. But that wasn’t always true if the area where the rift had formed contained ambient mana. It only held true if they had cleared the location of ambient mana and used the exact same mana types to Tier the rift up every time.

Together, they created hundreds of Tier 1 through 6 rifts. They attacked their experimentation on the rifts and the effects of the mana used to create them from every angle.

Some things seemed to remain consistent.

If a weapon was used to make the rift, the monsters inside would usually use that weapon, or it would be dropped from the reward distortion. If the items were a higher Tier than the rifts, the rewards were always bent or broken in some way, but it led them to their next series of tests.

Rift-made weapons were perfectly identical. Or the closest anyone could get to identical without atomic levels of precision.

If the item used to seed a rift was absorbed by Tiering up the rift, they had another chance at seeding the rift with an exact copy of the same item. That chance was low, at only one in fifteen, but it meant that rift rewards were better to seed rifts with. The problem was that rifts seemed to absorb items if their Tier was higher than the item’s Tier. Items of the same Tier were fine, but if the rift was a higher Tier, it was guaranteed to absorb the item, and could still potentially unaspect.

Their measuring equipment picked up minute fluctuations in the rifts. They theorized that the fluctuations might indicate that the rift was unstable or would unaspect. But after combing through the data, their findings were wide ranging and inconsistent from element to element. The data was largely useless if they wanted to draw any concrete conclusions.

After over a month of testing single elemental rifts, they started testing combination rifts with even splits of two of the elements.

Some combinations worked well, and others…not so much. Fire and wind nearly always worked well, when constructed with a fifty-fifty split in mana types.

The rifts it created were usually hot and dry climates with either wind or fire monsters, but in a few rifts, they discovered that dual-element monsters were possible. The most normal were lava or mud creatures. The more esoteric ones, like steam, were practically harmless if they stayed away from them, as the monsters didn’t really move.

They also found out that a rift with two monster types nearly always had both elements present. But at Tier 6, rifts with two monster types were rarer than singular elements, and Erwin refused to rush them past the rifts that were easy for Matt to create.

Fire and air. Earth and fire. Earth and water. Water and wind. They all created simple combinations that were easy to make and Tier up.

They learned that opposing elemental mana rifts like fire and water were possible, if highly finicky. They were only able to get two out of hundreds of attempts to stabilize and actually form the rift. Only one of the two reached Tier 2 before deaspecting.

The rift was incredibly hard to stabilize, and the resulting aspect could only be described as…odd. It was a jagged landscape with no shrubbery that they could see. At random intervals, exploding jets of superheated water blasted out of the ground. Erwin and Matt spent hours afterwards clearing the grotesque salamanders out of the rift so they could examine the mineral content and temperature of the water.

It was also filled with bacteria that prompted Erwin to disappear for two days. Matt didn’t understand half of what the man said about them, but he used the time to test his own theories.

Despite Erwin’s insistence that they were rushing, Matt hypothesized and tested that if they used unequal amounts of opposing mana types, they would be able to create more stable rifts.

He was right, or mostly so. With a seventy-five to twenty-five percent ratio, the rifts were stable, even with the opposing mana types. The issue was that they almost always presented only the majority mana type.

After Erwin’s return from his bacteria study, they found that if they used a forty-five, forty-five split of opposing mana types, with a neutral mana type as the remaining ten percent, they could get the opposing mana-type rifts that were far more stable.

During that same time, Kurt had them delving Tier 7 and Tier 8 rifts with their original teams. They were taking the rifts exceptionally slowly, as it was dangerous to delve without knowing the ins and outs of the rift. That was a larger issue for Melinda’s team than Matt’s team, who were more used to the unknown. However, they didn’t have Melinda’s Overhealth to fall back on. At least, not during the delve itself.

As they got used to Tier 7 rifts and got comfortable, Kurt pushed them to begin delving Tier 8 rifts. The difference was only one Tier, but it was a massive spike in difficulty.

Tier 8 rifts were larger, and every monster had their own Concepts and skills. The terrains were also more varied, with a minimum of two monster types for them to deal with.

Matt, at Kurt’s request, created a new basic Tier 8 rift every day for them to delve blind. The skills they got were mostly common ones, but they started to pile in. Being under the Tier of the rift and, having the rifts bursting at the seams with mana, helped with their drops as well.

It took a lot of convincing to get Melinda’s team to accept the skill shard drops, but they eventually did when they saw the pure amount of wealth Matt was able to generate with a single rift.