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After the man planted a few seeds and young plants in soil, mixed with Melinda’s Concept goop, Matt tried to pull him back to their rift experiments and the explosion they had set off.
When the seeds he planted instantly grew green, and then wilted to brown, he ran to drag Melinda back to take a look.
Melinda, who watched the entire process, hunched into herself. She said, “Yeah, my Concept is all about death. I didn’t need to see a plant die in seconds.”
Erwin looked like he wanted to shake her as he said, “No, no… This is amazing! So, I call this stuff Mayfly Grass. Normally, it grows and dies in a single day, with decent soil. But it can be sped up slightly by good soil quality. There are a few simple tests to run once it dies, which we can learn more about the chemical and magical balance of the earth from. Really good soil, even fertilized, might take a few hours. Not…five point seven seconds. Anyway, the stuff your Concept makes is absurdly good at fertilizing for its Tier…”
Erwin peered at Melinda. “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to make me some for my biomes? Actually, would you mind if I got you some attuned monsters to use it on? I’ll need to run some tests, but what I’m hoping is that this stuff might even be Essentially aspected, and that I can use that for a bit of minor terraforming. Let me get some ice-attuned potting soil. Or, I suppose, if it doesn’t impact the soil attunement, then I could just get normal, low-quality stuff. I can use this to bring it up to a much higher grade and get my garden to really…flourish. “
Melinda’s eyes went wide at the realization and mouthed what Matt thought was, ‘only through death can new life flourish,’ a few times, before she pulled herself out of her trance and looked to Matt. She asked, “Is he always like this?”
Matt just grinned. “Yeah. We lost two days after he found a new type of algae. It’s fun, honestly.”
When they finally got back to their rift explosion, they hypothesized that it was the unnatural buildup of mana. When suddenly introduced to a Tier 28 essence stone, it reacted. Badly.
Matt glared at the man for using such a strong essence stone, but he waved it off. “It was the only one I had on me! I didn’t expect any reaction, let alone something like that.”
When they went to investigate the rift, Matt let Erwin go in first. It was the first time he saw the older man don armor. It was sleek, and looked to be made from wood, but Matt could feel the enchantments giving off a feeling of power.
He reappeared after a second and gestured for Matt to enter.
The rift was perfectly ordinary, except for the fact it was Tier 8 from the outset. But other than that, it had no anomalies.
That discovery led them to recreate their initial test, albeit far more carefully. They still pulled most of the mana out, but Erwin redirected the tiniest fraction of essence from a captured rift monster to insert into the rift.
They added greater reinforcement to the newest iteration of the rune plates, but as they were far more careful with the amount of essence they added, there was no explosion.
There was a rift created, which they rushed into immediately. They discovered that there was nothing unique about the rift. It was a simple grass plane rift with rodent monsters.
The next rift they created had a similar general structure, but with different monsters.
They had finally been able to create a rift that had a repeatable feature.
They did the same test again with elemental mana, which proved less predictable, but they were able decrease the variability by forty percent. Still, they were unable to get a rift created through this process to Tier up without unaspecting.
Having run into another roadblock, they simply pulled back, and started to use items with no essence and elemental mana inside of the rift.
That created nearly identical rifts, so long as the rift was created in the same spot, with the same item and mana. If those conditions were met, the rifts were near clones physically. The monsters were usually similar, but not to the same degree as the terrain. The rifts were able to Tier up without unaspecting, but it was a coin flip on whether it remained the aspect that they wanted.
Their next idea was to create an essence filter, to only allow certain essence aspects to remain in the rifts’ creation formations.
Matt knew that cultivators and their Concepts could affect the essence in their cores, but he hadn’t realized that even ambient essence could be aspected. Erwin explained it as the essence that settled around or inside the element in question. Essence that settled in the ground would be earth essence. In water, water essence, and so on.
Matt had no way to filter essence, and even Erwin struggled with it. They spent two weeks getting the first prototype set up, then over a month on improving it, before Erwin gave up and used the one they had cobbled together.
Their success at creating an essence filter was fleeting, as they failed to make any improvements to the rate at which the rifts were deaspecting.
Using the filter, barrier, and the formation’s analyzation function, they got an answer that they should have expected.
They already knew that essence was produced by rifts, but the problem was that the rifts created pure, neutral essence. That led them to their next hypotheses.
The rifts were deaspecting because the non-aspected essence interfered with the Tiering up process.
Even with that knowledge, they currently had no way to prevent rifts from doing exactly what they were meant to do.
Their testing with elemental rifts gave them another glimpse at what was happening. A fire rift didn’t give out pure fire essence, it was about eight parts pure essence to two parts fire essence.
- Writer
