The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

20

It was here that she and Jeremiah split off, melding into the human mixing pot of the Great Skill Exchange.

Nearly every skill in existence of Tier 32 or below could be bought and sold here, though April needed a constant stream of translations from her [AI] to understand what was going on. She was certain that [Channeled Projectile FI14-RN] and [Channeled Element OZ14-EL] were perfectly informative to those used to them, but they just weren’t memorable in the same way [Flamethrower] or [Mud Manipulation] were.

They sold just the same, though.

Most combat-relevant Tier 8 skills went for a few Corporation kilocredits, the Tier 14 skills about three to five times that, and the Tier 20 skills three to five times that.

For anything beyond that, prices tended to skyrocket, as various militaries tended to monopolize the majority of skill sales, but they could still be purchased. [Regeneration], or [Self Heal HE26-RG] may be on sale, but it would cost her 25.3401…megacredits to actually buy. The exact price kept fluctuating, but it was stable enough with its low volume.

The reverse was also true: there were high-Tier skills that were so obsolete, they were cheaper than even some Tier 8 skills. [Inventory] was one such skill, a Tier 20 skill that had been on par with [AI] for must-have skills until storage rings were invented, which allowed for nearly all the uses of the skill with none of the exorbitant reserved mana costs.

In contrast, [Bandage] commanded a price just shy of two megacredits, but the price history of the skill showed it was on a steady if slow decline. That told her more of the skills were leaking out of the Empire, but that was both inevitable as people resold for a profit and spies collected them. In the end, it wasn’t her job to stop Realm-wide trade of new and exclusive skills. She just noted that she had a way to earn some more money for the kids if she needed to with the few [Bandage] skill shards they still had.

No matter the odd Tier-agnostic pricing that was everywhere, it made selling off her mountain of skills easy and fairly lucrative. A trip to the nearest exchange broker, a long time next to a skill scanner, and all her basic skills were translated into 39.65 megacredits.

Next on the list were the endless piles of non-skill gear that they’d found in Minkalla. Fifteen sets of armor with a water-resist enchantment, seven swords enchanted with [Fire Weapon], thirty-nine wands with spell accuracy arrays, nine hundred and forty-two swords enchanted with sharpness and durability runes…the list went on. Much of it was ruin-made and while not worthless, wouldn’t command a premium price. Others, like the boots imbued with the ability to walk on any surface, or the throwing knife that would teleport back to the thrower’s hand, were custom-made gear and were where most of the real money was to be made.

There were plenty of low-level auctions going on at all times for just that sort of thing, and plenty of auctioneers ready to take on her commission for a ‘small’ fee. She ended up finding a middleman who promised results with a refund guarantee that also possessed several prestigious certifications and unloaded much of the bulk loot on her. The middleman would run around and sell her payload for a 5% fee. April knew she’d lose far more than that if she tried to navigate the treacherous floors herself, and this way, she could attend the auctions that actually showed promise as a buyer, not a seller.

After that, she stopped by a different middleman to offload most of the houses and spatial items the children had obtained. The houses would take a bit of time to get appraised and sold off at auction, but it would be a large source of credits to translate into more directly usable items. Fortunately, the more numerous spatial items had more static prices per unit of usable space, and it was very nearly painless to sell them to the half-metal spider behind the counter. Spatial rings usable by low Tiers were quite difficult to make, so the rings taken from fallen delvers formed a considerable portion of the final credit tally.

With a mostly-emptied spatial ring and no particularly promising auctions in the near future, April made her way to the skill exchange, now as a buyer. The price of individual skills may have been universal, but the fees associated with getting them weren’t. If she could find a vendor with a given skill in stock, there were far fewer transfer fees involved, and if she could find several of the skills she was looking for as part of a single transaction, so much the better. She may not have come with a massive set of skills that she was tasked to get, but every centicredit she could save was that much more she’d have for the auctions that she had her eye on.

[Shadowstrike], or [Weapon Empowerment DK14-SE] was the first skill she found a good deal on. The vendor she’d tracked down had just gotten a couple from another delver, and so was willing to sell to her for nearly market rate. It created a semi-real illusion of a lengthened blade limned in darkness that could actually cut, and most importantly, carried the enchantments of the underlying blade. Granted, both the copying and the cutting power was lessened due to the quasi-real nature of the projection, but that could be taken care of with some modifications. And if April understood the nature of Matt’s Courtly Warfare boon correctly, he could probably leverage it into projecting the illusion at an angle from the ‘main’ blade, giving him extra flexibility with the skill.

Her next stop was getting medical skills for the team.

[Directed Heal] was technically on her list, but wasn’t actually something she needed to buy, thankfully, as the damn skill was far too expensive. The team had found three shards of it within Minkalla, and while one went to Susanne the other two were earmarked for Liz, one for her inner spirit and one for her outer spirit. She’d passed on them during their initial picking over of loot, but Matt’s ‘abysmal’ mana control made him ill-suited to be a healer, whereas Liz’s blood magic would make her an excellent one. So, she was just keeping the two skill shards unsold and would be presented to the girl along with a pair of other healing skills to get her started as the team’s dedicated healer. Luna was probably planning on literally beating sense into the girl if she kept refusing on principle, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

The first supplementary healing skill for the girl was [Rehydrate], with the hope it would convert to some kind of [Blood Transfusion]. [Medical Scan], meanwhile, was to be her ‘you will become a healer now’ skill and would help Liz become a competent one in years rather than decades. Though by Luna’s standards, it would probably be centuries until she was ‘passable’. But April knew this would make things faster and easier, which justified its insane cost. Especially in the other Great Powers where healing wasn’t free, the skills were always in demand making them sell for a premium at the best of times.