The Path of Ascension 2: A LitRPG Adventure

14

Despite the blows she used her evil whip to great effect, trying to tie down his blade with its clinging effect. She never kept a hold of the blade for more than a moment, after the first time he had simply braced himself and pulled her off her feet, but she still disrupted his attacks more often than not.

She had a more moderate essence allocation into her physical cores, and that, combined with his larger build, meant that she only outmuscled him when [Berserkers Rage] and whatever secondary buff she was using were active.

Matt wasn’t sure but seeing her deflate when he had turned on [Mages Retreat] and easily broke out of her grapple actually made him feel like he had taken something important from her.

It culminated in the fact that they had a lot of work to do if they wanted to get Camilla ready to keep up with them.

Later that night, Matt started working on his second project. He bought every beginner’s enchanting guide he could get his hands on. The price wasn’t so bad, but when he expanded the purchases to every other crafting profession, the total hurt his bank account.

It was worth it though, as he was able to run simulations on his AI whenever they weren’t sparring. The mana was wasted if he didn’t use it after all, so he let it churn away.

The results were slow at first. Even his basic understanding of the professions from his classes at the university was enough to tell him that the AI was off the mark with most of the simulations it came up with.

He tested most of the ‘approved’ results and found them uniformly disastrous. One test had exploded so violently, he needed to channel [Endurance] for the next four days to remove the second-degree burns.

Matt was just happy it didn’t scar, and that he didn’t have to pay a healer for testing something he had been sure wouldn’t work. That was one embarrassment that he didn’t want to have to explain. Liz, and even Camilla, had mocked him for the bandage while Aster just liked to pull at the bandages.

His excuse was that his AI needed practical experiments for its ideas, or it would never get better, which made the injury an acceptable price to pay.

His final large purchase had been the Tier 6 world’s explorer’s guide to natural treasures and other valuable finds. It was just chucked into their AIs, just in case they ran into any of the common types. In the end, they would just be looking for things with a high essence concentration and would rely on appraisers to sort out the trash from the treasures.

The capital of the vassal kingdom, Seven Suns, literally had seven suns in the solar system but Matt was disappointed to learn that six of them simply looked like brighter stars from the distance they orbited the capital planet. He had expected to see large balls of fight fighting for dominance over the planet’s sky but really was far less dramatic.

It was still the first time he was on a Tier 32 world, which was exciting. As this is where they were meeting for the push into the unknown and unexplored planets the city was bursting at the seams with people.

Even the air was rich in essence. It took a lot of self-control to resist sucking it down and advancing his cultivation. He knew it would be slower, considering he would have to process the essence with an extra few step that weren’t required with rift essence, but it was right there, and that was a hard thing to pass up.

Still, the higher ambient essence made everything feel like it was more real which took some getting used to for Matt. From the rocks to the air, everything felt heavy.

Liz and Camilla had experience living on a higher Tier world, and they told him that he’d get used to it quickly, but it was still a novel experience.

What Matt found interesting was that the most mundane things were harder here than anywhere else. Nearly everything that was made from local materials was impossible to break with his strength. He had tried to pick up a spoon, but the Tier 32 metal might as well have been the entire planet itself.

The main culprit was metal which got heavier with Tier and the higher Tiers delighted in using the higher Tier metals as a way to segregate themselves from the lower Tiers.

Liz and Camilla said that planets in the Empire proper imported lesser Tier metals to combat the issue, but the locals used it so they could cater to a certain Tier of people without legally discriminating against the lower Tiers.

The area they stayed at was a moderately upscale hotel chain that catered to Tier 5 through Tier 10s and overlooked the higher Tier section of the city. The entire division of the Tiers gave Matt a desire to get stronger, so he wouldn’t be blocked out of a building simply because he couldn’t open the door. Those portions of the city also had an interesting lack of rules regarding people using skills or their higher Tier physical cultivation, and he really wanted to explore them.

As it was, he could only watch as people blurred past in little more than streaks of colors. The more he watched, the more it started to bother him.

The entire city was built out of local materials, but they purposely made things like doors and utensils out of higher Tier materials, and in particular those which grew substantially heavier with each tier, seemingly to keep the lower Tiers ‘in their place’.

That in and of itself wasn’t a problem. No, it was the fact that the Empire proper had laws against this very thing. But as a vassal kingdom, they had the ability to allow these kinds of…’policies. It wasn’t Tier discrimination, as they claimed that everything was open to all, but if you didn’t have the ability to open a door, which wasn’t their fault.

While walking around the city, Matt continued to find more and more aspects of the vassal kingdom that he didn’t like. For one, the lower Tier districts were treated like slums.

Even if they weren’t dirty, they had noticeably worse infrastructure. It seemed so petty for these districts to be in the condition they were, especially when enchantments could do nearly everything from fixing potholes and crumbling sidewalks with a little effort.

Even his city, on a tiny little Tier 4 world out in the middle of nowhere, had automated vehicles that would repair things like that overnight as a low Tier solution to that problem but here it was just ignored.