The Path of Ascension 4: A LitRPG Adventure

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She pulled back, and they walked hand in hand to her alchemy area, which was now under a gazebo. She said, “Luna did imply that if we passed this test, she’d find ways to not let you go without the stuff you need.”

Matt didn’t quite follow that logic and asked, “When did she do that?”

“She said that she won’t bring it back up and look at her. She’s a perfectionist. I don’t think she can let what she sees as inefficiencies go unfixed. Think of her training. I think she needs to fix anything she sees as less than efficient, but it will just be harder to do while on The Path.”

With Luna back, their magic control classes came back with new added twists. If they weren’t training with Kurt, delving, or practicing some constructive hobby, she had them using an elemental manipulation skill.

With the skills they had been pulling from the rift and the cities on the nearby continents, they had all traded for enough skills to round out their Tier 8 wants. Kurt had told them that they should all get at least one elemental manipulation skill for practice, so everyone on Melinda’s team had saved up for them. Matt and Erwin hadn’t progressed to making rifts to delve for specific skill shards yet, so they had to trade for or purchase them.

Even with Matt making endless rifts for them to delve every day, it still took an argument to get his friends to take skill shards and mana stones. It had finally come down to him refusing to take them, like a child, for them to accept that they meant nothing to him.

He wasn’t sure what Melinda’s team ended up doing with the mana stones and skill shards that they didn’t take, until he found them putting them in a box they refused to talk about. He and Liz ended up adding most of their unneeded skills in there as well, though they set up a bucket next to the box. Despite their prodding, neither Matt nor Liz could get any inkling about the box from any of the six. All they could get was that the group wouldn’t be keeping it.

Matt’s current training was with his manipulation skills and creating complex structures with their element. Luna’s current task involved him creating pillars of earth with swirling ramps on the outer layer, as he and Erwin waited for a rift to finish charging. As of now, he could only make the most basic swirls. Meanwhile, Vinnie had a completely hollow tower made from interweaving, but not touching strands of earth that only met at the tip of the pillar.

Matt sent a pulse of [Earth Manipulation] over to Vinnie’s tower and smirked at his friend, who just stared at the pile of rubble for a long second. In return, Vinnie created a replica of Matt being chewed on by a giant crab. It was well made, if gruesome.

Their good-natured banter ended when Matt’s next rift creation had stabilized, and he and Erwin started going over the details of it.

The rift was one made with only air mana but with the subaspect of weightlessness.

When they entered, Erwin had to catch him as they started to fall, a reminder of why he had been so careful after the tree rift. Falling when you went inside a rift was dangerous. This just happened to be very slow. Matt pulled out his flying sword, and found it was even hard to fly down. That was a good thing because he was quite sure that Luna would have been more than willing to pull him from The Path if his life had been in actual danger.

It was like they were being resisted in their downward momentum, but still falling. It was like falling without the acceleration force that was normally applied by a planet’s gravity.

He and Erwin spent over an hour mapping the Tier 3 rift out. It was a cylinder shape about a mile across, but over fifteen miles tall. If they completed the rift as intended, they would have fallen, and would’ve had to fight various birds until they reached the ground. There, to their surprise, they hovered off the soil by a few inches while fighting a much larger bird.

Matt tried to forcefully touch the ground, but even with his flying sword and Concept, he could not cross the final few hair’s breadths of distance.

Erwin, on the other hand, was able to easily land and scoop up some of the soil for later testing. To both of their dismay, the soil was perfectly normal. Even the reward was subpar, as they were both well above the Tier of the rift.

It was still an interesting enough rift. It was marked to not be destroyed, unlike most other rifts. They had started removing the less interesting rifts once they started having ambient mana issues caused by all the rifts trying to feed themselves.

A month later, or four months after they started training with Kurt, Matt and Liz had completed their preparations to delve the Tier 9 rift.

When they approached Luna, she tossed Matt a bag and said, “Use this with the mana combination listed.”

When he looked inside, he saw a jumble of swords, potion vials half-filled, clothes, and other single-use items that he didn’t recognize.

The mana list was just as odd. Luna wanted nine mana types, all with careful ratios and specific subaspects to be used to create the rift. Thankfully, he had all the mana types, but the combination was odd.

Pausing most of his other experiments, Matt spent the better part of two months making Tier 9 rifts for Luna. A large portion of the rifts unaspected before they hit Tier 9, and the rest, Luna simply entered for a second before dispelling the rift.

Every time that happened, Luna changed the items and mana formula until she found what she wanted.

It was late in the evening when Luna entered the seventeenth Tier 9 rift then called Liz away from her alchemy after exiting. She said, “Not what I was planning for, but it’ll work if you’re ready. Let’s go.”

Matt knew they were very much not ready and went to get Melinda. She was to wait at the entrance in order to honor their earlier agreement. They got her quickly enough for Luna to force them to wait until the instance cycled.

Then, the three of them entered the rift.

The view that met them was picturesque. They were halfway up a mountain on a forested seaside island that overlooked a calm and peaceful bay. It was protected by two arms of shore, giving the appearance of crescent moon edges that almost touched at the tips. The strips of land were crossed by an ornate wooden bridge. Below, they saw a winding dirt path framed by trees with pink leaves. It stretched on into the distance, cutting through the forested mountainside, precariously bordering the shore of the bay. Clean and perfectly round boulders dotted the sides of the path to complete the spectacle.