The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

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The two of them then hurried to the opera house, where they were led to their seats and they settled in to watch the performance. They spent the next three hours laughing along with the routine until the end, where the titular bird finally was able to escape and return to its forest home.

Matt made a note to see what Mara had to say about the play when he saw her next. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought the whimsical bird was Mara, but the story was far, far older than she was, so it didn’t check out.

Beyond that, he was more than impressed with the cast and crew’s ability to weave their spells into the play without damaging anything. They all very obviously had better control over their manipulation skills than he did before his rapid doubling of his mana pool, even rivaling Liz in their flame-dances.

Floating lights illuminated the park surrounding the theater, bringing light to the pathways as they wound around, over, and under fish-filled streams and ponds. They found their way to a higher-Tier establishment, allowing them to let their cultivation loose and dance without worrying they might hurt someone who wandered a bit too close, or accidentally crash through the wall when sitting down.

They ordered a lavish, nine-course meal at a Tier 13 restaurant behind a waterfall, with Matt only getting a little distracted by the enchantments keeping the roaring water silenced and away from the patrons. The food was delicious, far beyond anything Matt could make in this life, and left them stuffed and tipsy by the end of it.

Careful balancing of their cultivation suppression kept them functional enough to stumble into a hailed cab, though they giggled the entire flight home and during the subsequent scramble to their bed, only stopping when they fell asleep in one another’s arms.

“Domains are one of your most important tools as cultivators,” Carol began. “They’re the most flexible tool in your arsenal and can do damn near anything. Not everything, of course, but anything. What you can do can be expanded by training, and while the further you push your Domain the less effective it is, there are a few things which any Domain can do, even if you only have a Concept. Flight, for example, can be accomplished with even an internal Concept, though most people wait until they have an Intent. It just requires a slightly different frame of mind. And this kinda stuff is what I excel at teaching.”

The blonde manager then picked up a ball and dropped it from one hand to the other.

“Space, and by that I mean real space and chaotic space, can be visualized like a fabric. Everything is moving along it like an image on a 2D plane.”

Saying that, she brought out a sheet embossed with a grid, then dropped the ball in front of it.

“Everything moves through each square as it normally should.”

Matt nodded, as it made sense and fit with everything he knew of physics and such.

Carol then said, “But a Domain is your bit of the Realm, and you can tell it to do whatever you want. It’s the place where you hold ultimate dominion, and the only thing stopping you is how much you can twist and bend reality to your whim.

She pointed to Matt and Susanne. “How do you two move faster than the air around you, without causing a sonic boom?”

Matt nodded to Susanne, letting her speak first. “I cut through the air with my Concept like it’s my sword. It’s a smooth blade that isn’t affected by wind resistance.”

At Carol’s nod, Matt explained, “I zipper the air around me, making a bubble of no air resistance around me.”

“Those are two common methods, with Matt’s method being the most common, thanks to how general it is. If you can do it to air, why can’t you do it to space?”

After checking their expressions, Carol continued, “There are a few ways to think about this, but they all have basically the same effect, in practice. The first is to choose a point over there, and to pull it over here, then release.”

Carol demonstrated by dropping her ball again, but this time, it simply appeared at the bottom of the sheet rather than falling the intervening distance.

“The second way is by taking the intervening space and compressing it. Think of it as making a tunnel through space, which is shorter than going the long way.”

This time, when she dropped the ball, it still fell the intervening distance, but it did so much faster than the first time. It warped light and the blanket’s grid around it but had an even slower speed at the end of the fall. She nodded to Susanne. “The third way is to visualize ‘cutting’ the intervening space out, where you strike at a point out of your reach with a weapon, then insist that you were in reach for your strike. It’s a bit harder to visualize with a ball, but I’ll do my best.”

This time, the ball itself seemed to stretch out as she dropped it, with the front of the sphere falling at a much faster rate than normal, until it hit the ground, at which point it was instantly a perfect sphere again.

“That leads us to the fourth method. Essentially, it involves visualizing yourself as the center of the universe, completely unmoving. Where you are, is where the universe is. Now, the universe also exists somewhere else, but because you are where the universe exists, you must be over there as well.”

This time, when the ball dropped, for a split-second Matt could see the ball both falling through the air and resting on the ground, before it settled on the ground.

“As you can probably guess, this technique can also be utilized when learning how to create Concept clones.

“The fifth method, and the last one I’m going to cover for now, is by dissociating yourself from your body, and instead saying you are your Domain. Thus, wherever your Domain is it’s a place where you already are, and all you need to do is choose where in your Domain you manifest.”

When she dropped the ball this time, it seemed to expand into an image of vague ball-ness, inflating past any physical existence and passing through the space in front of the blanket as it grew and then shrank, now on the floor.

“Now, all these methods—and a thousand and one other ways to think about it—all have fundamentally the same effect. You compress space between yourself and some other place, whether partially or until they fully overlap. Then, you release your control and simply stay in your new location.”

Carol gestured at Liz. “Methods four and five will also help you with learning to fly without picking yourself up by your blood. Your Domain is internal, so it’s very tied to your presence. By establishing yourself as the center of the universe, you can decree that the center of the universe ought to be in the air. Or, you can decide that your Domain, and thus you, manifests itself unbound by gravity. There’s as many ways to do it as there are cultivators, but those two are some of the most consistent starting points.”

Carol then went on to have each of them try to do one of the methods she previously explained, with Luna appearing from nowhere to add her own advice.