The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

19

Luna was known in the Pather manager circles, and April already had three pending offers from other managers once she finished with Matt, Liz, and Aster, all as a fairly senior liaison or as a trainer’s assistant. Considering she was relatively new to the liaison position itself, that was an incredible step forward for her career.

But that all hinged on her successful completion of this assignment.

Which meant the free reign Luna had given her was just as much rope from which she could hang herself.

Many of the items were fairly standard. Skills of various stripes, a few natural treasures, some utility gear, maybe a backup weapon or two. She was instructed to get beneficial cracks when possible, and to keep an eye out for ‘anything which would be particularly impactful,’

It was that last part which really was the issue. There was a truly unlimited number of possible items which had the potential to help her team, and just as many which would look useful, but in truth would not suit them for some subtle reason.

Just about anything could help Matt, but at the same time, there was nothing that would be a perfect fit for the boy. Aster was a fairly typical ice mage but was trying to branch out into some spatial and illusion capabilities for her planned evolution into an Aurora fox and beyond. Accordingly, treasures to help the girl develop her bloodline wouldn’t go amiss but were nigh impossible to find. If there were ever a time to gain an aurora-aspect natural treasure, though, now was the time.

Liz, though, was the trickiest. She was a blood warrior and mage hybrid, boasting a 50/50 essence split thanks to Back to Basics, but wasn’t content as just that. Blood magic, at a minimum, was too distinctive for her to use in public, and that led to her utilizing water-colored blood, or even just fire whenever she was trying to hide her identity. Honestly, the girl was an utterly fantastic kineticist. Her fire magic as a secondary element, one which her mana aspect and Talent actively penalized, was better than many pyromancers fifty times her age. She’d also recently lost her primary source of kinesis material, with her spatial storage glove having been destroyed in Minkalla.

Fortunately, Minkalla served as one of the largest hubs of inter-Power trade in the entire Realm. Desperate Tier 14s spending all their wealth on gear to assist their delves into Minkalla, and successful delvers flush with treasure from the planet all had money and treasure to burn. Hearing that wealth begging to be spent, the Corporations answered.

Massive companies within the Great Power had dedicated their entire existence to catering to those entering and leaving Minkalla, with piles of skill shards and natural treasures being shipped in weekly alongside custom-ordered gear and even growth items. That drew even non-delvers that were in search of rare commodities to the Corporations’ moon, and they were, in turn, catered to with additional valuable goods from the traders’ wares.

It was a massive, mostly-peaceful, thriving hub of trade that drew people from even the furthest reaches of the Great Powers, an action that only further cemented its powerful position as it served as a prime location to make international deals. Tariffs and import treaties prevented it from being outright overrun by guilds and internal companies, but for delvers and their managers, it was a functionally bottomless well of valuable resources.

April and Jeremiah stepped out of their ship onto the Empire’s moon, with the massive, clockwork planet hovering ominously in the sky. The eternal parties of newly-minted Tier 15s raged on in the background, with their choruses carried on distant winds over the din of the spaceport. Delvers jubilant and somber alike loaded onto the ship they’d just left, not wasting a single second in transporting as many as possible in and out of the mana-starved system.

Registering their presence was trivial, and from there, they loaded onto a Corporation’s shuttle branded with the MinKouriers logo and flew to the other Great Power’s ‘moon.’

It wasn’t a proper moon in the truest sense. It was no planet drawn from a high-Tier rift, or even a coreless world from one of their systems. Instead, it was an utterly massive space station, artificial from its core to its surface, and held together through unimaginable amounts of engineering and artifice. The entire structure catered around it being made of Tier 0 materials, so it was never degraded by Minkalla’s habit of eating the essence out of its surroundings. The simple scope of it was difficult to properly visualize, but it held party venues, skill exchanges, auction houses, ship ports, and life habitats that a mortal could spend their entire life in and never see everything.

Their transport ship nestled into a massive missing chunk of the station facing away from the moon, and they joined a line of other visitors seeking much the same as them. The line moved swiftly, as the Corporations knew the value of even an immortal’s time all too keenly, and their procedures were simple and orderly. An AI-backed declaration of presence, affiliation, and intentions, a quick donning of the Empire’s insignia, and they were in. The guards, decked in shining power armor and wielding the glowing rifles that mages in the Corporations favored in place of staves, barely even gave them a glance as they passed, instead constantly vigilant for anyone foolish enough to try something or missing their insignia.

Everyone was required to wear some form of signifier to their affiliation, be it a badge, medal, armband, coat, or as one dwarf in classic plate armor had chosen, full heraldry. Off to the side, an array of stalls and storefronts sold a number of premade items for all the Great Powers, all boasting low prices and quick custom work.

Both she and Jeremiah had known what was coming, of course, and donned their respective signifiers. April used a simple black and white armband with the Empire’s emblem emblazoned on it. Simple, effective, and not too flashy, but more than enough to meet the requirement.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, went with a half-cape with the insignia on his back. She considered it a bit too much but said nothing. The other liaison had been incredibly helpful during their short time together, so as much as she disagreed with his fashion choice, she kept it to herself.

They followed the hallway and the flow of people deep into the bowels of the station. Spatial expansion this close to Minkalla would be exorbitant to try and maintain, with the greedy planet constantly seeking to drain the mana from every last rune. Eventually, the expansive tunnel, lit as much by the gleaming, illusionary advertisements for vendors as by the overhead lights, gave way to a truly massive exchange floor. From above, it looked like a hive of so many ants, teeming with skill traders moving from station to station, buying and selling skills in a bid to earn consistent profit.

As an outside agent, April didn’t much care about all the endless deals and methods that traders used to try and leverage the simple exchange of goods into wealth. All she cared about was turning her rings full of Minkallan loot into Corporation Credits, and those credits into gear for her charges.