The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

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The Iron Bamboo she had up for auction ended up paying out far more than she had anticipated, and with some of the surplus credits, she got Liz [Create Blueprint] and [Whirling Charge]. The former would help with the blood mage’s internal alchemy, letting her conjure up an entire set of ingredients for a potion using her [Blood Copy], without having the real ingredient on hand. If she could get [Library,] that would be even better to pair with the other two, but that was unlikely. The Tier 32 skill was for sale, but it was in such high demand by organizations and immortals with eons worth of data to efficiently store and categorize that the price was well out of her range.

[Whirling Charge], meanwhile, was a short-range dash that shot out a blade of air right ahead of the caster with enough power to either push back or outright cut through some weaker foes, and she seriously hoped that Liz’s Talent would properly convert the skill. A razor-sharp arc of blood leading a rapid charge would leave quite the impression on anyone foolish enough to get in range of the blood mage.

Similarly on the list of ‘skills that they hoped would survive the transition’ was [Will of the Millennium Oak], whose Clans-exclusive status and generally desirable effect of rooting the caster to the ground in exchange for enhanced vitality, durability, and mana regeneration made it her most expensive skill purchase yet. It was to the point where she wondered if Luna was betting too much on it surviving the conversion, and if the manager should refund Liz if it ended up breaking.

April was more confident in her next two purchases, [Inventory] and [Hypertension], as ways that Liz might be able to partially offset the loss of her glove. The former was a reserved skill that would ideally enable Liz to keep a mass of blood in a dimensional storage space that would hopefully still count as a part of her, as the glove once did. The latter was already a Tier 26 blood skill—with a price tag to match—which compressed more blood into the same space. Most people used it to give them additional energy and resistance to bleeding out, but Liz would be able to leverage it into more blood for her reserved blood skills, her alchemy, and more.

As far as movement skills went, April barely made it to the auction for a [Cracked Air Slide] that sacrificed cost for better speed and cooldown. Matt wouldn’t care at all about the mostly nominal increase in mana cost but would be interested in skating across the ground with the wind at his back at high speeds in the middle of a fight.

She ended up in a bidding war with a young Corporations man who looked like he’d quite recently come out of Minkalla himself over the skill. But she had credits to spare thanks to a bulk sale of lightning-enchanted spears that had just gone through, and once it reached nineteen percent over market value, he backed out. He was a lot more insistent about the subsequent [Tailwind] that empowered all wind spells cast in the area, in addition to its normal effects, albeit for a double mana price. April eventually let him have that one at two and a half times the normal sale price of the skill.

An array of cracked skills that she didn’t care for were up next—a [Cracked Shadow Dagger] that both had a decreased mana cost and could be applied to larger blades without losing potency, a [Cracked Puddle Jumper] that worked on water instead of air for a single-digit mana cost, a [Cracked Rain of Fire] that lingered for hours post-casting, a [Cracked Venom Strike] which transferred lost coordination to the caster, a [Cracked Firebolt] that was more of a siege-class spell than anything practical for delving…

Eventually, [Cracked Shatter], the skill she had her eye on, came up for bidding. This version of the ice-aspected skill, instead of simply breaking ice, detonated it, creating a frozen fragmentary grenade of whatever it targeted. She actually got into a three way bid for that, but she eventually outbid both the Clans man in yellow and Republic woman in a black coat, securing it for herself. Either Aster or Matt could use that skill, and she knew it was worth the sky high price she paid for it.

After leaving the auction, she picked up a non-cracked [Tailwind] to compensate for the cracked variant she didn’t purchase, and from the same vendor—an eager evolved wolf quite willing to make small talk—a [Dispelling Wind], two [Air Body]s and a [Water Body].

That left a single skill remaining on her list- [Dispelling Edge], a simple skill that helped the user cut through a skill and dispel it harmlessly instead of, for example, detonating a fireball. She sent a message to Jeremiah asking if he’d found a good seller, but he replied that he’d gotten a Cracked variant earlier in the week. As such, he hadn’t bothered looking for a good source for the skill. He did send her a list of weapon skill vendors, and April eventually settled on the third person in the list, after the first two stated they were saving their supplies for a projected price increase. She couldn’t imagine why, as the skill was already the second most-expensive one she’d bought this trip. Did they really need to wait for a few more kilocredits?

After she had checked off most of the combat items she had on her list, April made her way over to the crafting and utility item vendor sections. The items they sold may have been less directly combative, though that seemingly didn’t reflect in the attitudes of the people buying there. From what she could see, there didn’t seem to be any actual fighting, but a dwarf woman was screaming at a man until she was red in the face over what seemed to be a substandard grade of copper, and a pair of armadillo men were arguing furiously about some minutia of enchanting that nobody else seemed to care about.

Not wanting to engage with that at the moment, April stepped into a small venue for home goods, and quickly parsed through what was on offer with her [AI]. Three copies of the “homemaker bundle” went into her virtual shopping basket, a collection of skills aimed at making domestic life easy. They were made up of a handful of skills for cleaning, massaging, and generally translating small amounts of mana into a basic but useful task, all for a fairly reasonable price. They had been pushing themselves hard for years now, and they all deserved a taste of the finer things in life.

Also, if she had to watch Matt manually manipulating water and soap to clean the floors one more time, she would drag him to the nearest skill vendor herself so he could get the proper tool for the job. They had too much money not to pay for small luxuries. With that in mind, she put some wheels of good cheese, wine, tea, and coffee into her basket before finalizing the purchase and moving to the next area, casting only a brief glance at two Sect men, one in pure white robes and the other in a red and gold outfit, locked in a shouting match about their ‘honor’ and respective families.