The Path of Ascension 4: A LitRPG Adventure

9

Most of Melinda’s team didn’t have it.

That wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t have the amount of drive needed to truly complete The Path. Anyone who wasn’t Matt needed to be delving up a full Tier by Tier 7 to keep pace with the regular schedule. A team that size would need to be pushing up yet another Tier, until at least Tier 10 rifts, where the essence per monster increased substantially. While Melinda negated the second biggest impediment of being injured, and thus having longer and longer healing cooldowns, Luna didn’t think they had the drive to delve back-to-back. They’d have to do it over and over and would have to delve many Tiers above their own for decades.

Time would always be against them.

That was why the early Tiers were the best place to get ahead. Rifts were plentiful, and the cooldown time wasn’t too long.

Still, Luna believed she could force them to find that drive to advance. They were willing to improve and hadn’t complained too much yet.

That in itself was already a point in their favor. The only one who had complained so far was Aster, and that mainly was grumbling about how it wasn’t fair since she didn’t have hands. Even then, she would cut such a young child a smidgeon of slack there.

Luna wouldn’t admit it, but she had messed up. She had just recreated the last obstacle course she had used, which didn’t have a portion for a beast. A stupid mistake that she had rectified, but it was an embarrassing lapse in judgment. At least the little girl got some basic creative thinking exercises out of it.

She had been out of the game too long. Too much of her focus had been on sending messages and trying to find old friends who owed her favors. That had taken up most of her attention for the travel time, and if she finished the list, the next few weeks as well. But she stopped because, while she demanded everything from her charges, she would give them an equal amount.

Besides, she had the time in which they slept.

She judged their progress and saw they were struggling with the sludge and its slickness while climbing the obstacles.

If they didn’t complete the course at least once in the next hour, she would clean and reset them. That would hopefully let them finish it in a reasonable time. She had fifteen hours of training they needed to get through today. The first weeks would be about carefully breaking them physically and mentally.

It was why she gave out the bracelets. They sped the process up tenfold.

The cultivation suppressing bracelets were a particular type that provided her incredibly detailed biometrics of anyone they were attached to. The design she was using was usually used for prisoner transport, as they prevented the prisoners from making their bodies smaller to remove them, but she didn’t need that function.

She didn’t expect them to be able to push through the restrictions of the bands. While they were weaker versions, the technique to do so usually took someone centuries of practice to even touch on, but they might be able to find the right direction now.

Even if one of them did figure it out, it was only an anti-restraint technique, more so than a boost to cultivation. Without the band, if you moved your essence manually, people maxed out at a five percent increase in power for a short time. Afterwards, they would need to let their essence recover its power. It wouldn’t even be that useful in Minkalla, as the Forge utilized completely different methods of suppression, but it would at least get them marginally prepared for some of its challenges.

She watched as their bodies flagged with the stress they were putting them under and nodded slightly. The training would lose its effectiveness to a degree in the next week or so. But for now, they would make significant gains.

When they went to sleep later, she would deactivate the bands so their bodies could recover faster. Plus, their need for sleep would be reduced, which would give them longer to train.

She debated increasing the strength of Matt’s band but decided against it.

The Tree of Perfection was showing its benefits with Matt’s nearly perfect body. He was doing the best out of all of them, with the fewest minor fractures and stress tears. Melinda, who had the effects transferred over, but hadn’t had the time to fully complete them, was in the next best shape. Liz and her advantage from having Tier 48 parents was a close third.

Luna knew that Melinda would be kicking herself over not finishing that conversion when they had the time, during their three-month travel to this planet.

When this training was over, she wanted to see if Melinda shared that change. If she didn’t, Luna would have Moon suggest it to the girl. If his hypothesis was correct, Liz and Aster might be able to receive the same benefit, even though they had taken another aspect of the tree into themselves.

It was the magical properties that changed the soul, which couldn’t work twice, but Moon believed that Melinda’s Talent could get around that restriction.

That would be a good trade.

She checked her team’s help meter and frowned. Matt would need to pay more mana to counter the amount of help he was getting at this rate, if the growth was as she predicted to keep the path challenging. She hadn’t expected Matt to not be affected by the band, and it meant that his mana was truly unlimited, and effectively worthless to him. The Path was meant to challenge the person traversing it. Matt was giving up something effectively worthless to himself for the help of a Tier 24, which would become invaluable in the coming weeks and months.

She didn’t know how she could make the training feel expensive and didn’t have a ready answer.

Seeing that the kids were only one more obstacle farther in, Luna resisted the urge to sigh. They were going about this in the most complicated way possible, which was precisely why she had removed most of their strength.

When you could lift your body weight with a pinky, you didn’t worry about the fundamentals anymore. It was a rope climb. They should be using their legs to brace themselves, not dirt.