The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

16

“Well, there’s how many billions of fire mages for every one blood mage? Most of them never get any notoriety good or bad. But your lives, they were all stronger than you, yes.”

“Exactly. Well, maybe not my researcher life, but in every one, I’d done far more impressive things than I have in reality. Minkalla lies, yes,” she cut off Matt’s next statement, “but history doesn’t. Blood mages are either mediocre or horrible, or both. There’s no way I’m somehow the first blood mage with morals and a drive to succeed. So here I am, a second-rate water mage, does that sentence me to mediocrity? I’m barely dipping into the pool of blood magic, that much is clear, but what if dipping in deeper is going to make me crazy?”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a red water mage, you’ve done more with less.”

“Yes! I’m a second-rate fire mage too! And guess what, I’m damn good at it. I’m a damn good second-rate water mage and fire mage. But I’m not a blood mage. It’s just…” She sighed and covered her face with her hand, slightly muffling her voice, “Veritas says whatever I do, I should decide and commit to it wholly. Do I want to be a knockoff elementalist? Or do I want to be a blood mage? If I can command fire the way I do, and I’ve got the practice of being a red water mage, do I focus more on those? Just stick to the physical manipulation abilities and work around my Talent as much as possible while hopelessly trying to stick it to the Realm for trying to ruin my life?

“Or, do I stick it to the Realm and legitimately go the blood mage route, with blood curses, sacrifices, plagues, and all? Do I want to find out what drove all my predecessors to either abandon the field or go insane? I want to say that I’m better than that, that my other lives have prepared me, but did they really? Every one of my predecessors shared the same fate, am I really better than all of them? I’m good at this Matt, almost too good. What happens if an almost-Ascender or even outright Ascender quality blood mage goes crazy? Is that something I want to risk? Is that blood I want on my hands? “

“Well,” Matt pecked her on the lips. “Whatever you do, I’m sure you’ll do great.”

“Mmm. That’s almost the problem,” she mumbled back, pulling him in close once again with a smile.

Still, difficult conversations aside, Matt couldn’t remember the last time they’d had such a stress-free time together. It was entirely possible they simply hadn’t since they started dating. Perhaps the Pather War, but even then, they still had something they needed to do, as opposed to being consigned to bed rest and movies. It had been decades since Matt had watched some of his favorite movie series as a child, but he had to admit that Liz’s running commentary about all the things they got wrong about Duke Waters in the movies’ ‘about’ him certainly changed the viewing experience. Whether it was better or worse, he couldn’t tell, but he enjoyed it, nonetheless.

Their break eventually came to an end when Susanne’s liaison, Jeremiah, April, and Kurt met them at their next stop in realspace.

It was nice to see the silent man once more, and better yet, to get an update on The Unbroken, his friends from his time at the PlayPen and fellows from his home planet Lilly. They were doing well and were trying to decide if they wanted to do their own run through Minkalla.

That gave Matt some mixed feelings. Melinda’s Talent may have granted her Overhealth, providing perfect healing with no cooldown, but he’d been inside Minkalla and wasn’t sure if that alone would be enough to get them through the planet, especially if it started singling her out like it had with him.

And that didn’t even consider the fact that other delvers were just as dangerous, if not more so. Let alone the possibility of the six of them getting a floor theme that stopped her from using her skills altogether.

After making a note he needed to visit them in the next year or two, Matt and the others turned to their loot.

April looked torn between dismayed and delighted at the literal pile of work they had brought out of Minkalla.

Before they even separated the loot between teams, she and Jeremiah needed to go through all of it and give things at least a tentative value, which took three full days.

Once they had a rough estimate of the total value of the loot, the hard part started.

Divvying it up between the two teams.

Not because they fought over the loot, but because Matt, Liz, and Aster kept trying to give away too much of their loot to Susanne.

The three of them never had money issues since they figured out he could charge rifts, which was a luxury Susanne didn’t have.

But things were never that easy, they couldn’t weigh things too far in her favor without breaking the rules of The Path, and there were rewards they wanted.

In the end, the lesser spoils were divided in an equal half and set aside to be sold off in the general exchange between Great Powers, if only to buy more needed items and useful things like natural treasures.

Though, they had an abundance of Natural Treasures in their own right.

They weren’t sure who they had killed, but one of their victims had dozens of different natural treasures along with many duplicates in his spatial ring, tucked away and untouched.

Some were simple natural treasures like Eternal Embers, only good for replacing firewood in their natural state, but others were much, much rarer.

Susanne ended up taking, at Carol’s advice, a leaf from a Sicklebranch bush, which an alchemist could process into a potion that would aspect one half of her mana to air and even help with sharpening her air spells into honed blades. Combined with the bottle of Mercury’s Might from the challenge room on the seventh floor, she would have a split metal and air mana pool, which would give her plenty of flexibility in the future. The natural treasure she’d be using to split her mana pool would also make it somewhat easier to integrate additional mana types in the future or develop existing mana types into higher-order ones, which made Matt wonder a bit about what they were planning on doing.

It was unlikely to be Void—though the attack power it provided was undeniable, since there were practically no natural treasures that granted the affinity. Those which did exist only tended to show up once every few dozen millennia, and nobody had figured out the right mix of lower-level elements to make the ultimate Nothingness, if it even existed. A seventh floor Blood is Thicker was the only way he’d ever heard of doing so reliably.

Matt already had the Sliver of True Night’s Sight, so he passed on a similar natural treasure that Liz took. He took some Ironsight Salt for himself, which when dissolved into water and dripped into his eyes enhanced his vision by a fair margin, mostly in his ability to track moving targets and notice fine details. It was exactly the kind of thing he was aiming for with his focus in sense cultivation and would help with both combat and enchanting. Ordinarily, the natural treasure would turn his pupils gray, somewhat like Susanne, but his Concept overpowered the effect, leaving him with his white, swirling pupils that bled into his green iris.