The Path of Ascension 6: A LitRPG Adventure

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The pillar of snow and ice hit the bat in the face hard enough to send it tumbling into the Void Obsidian, impaling it.

Even that didn’t kill it, and it opened its mouth in a silent scream of agony, but Susanne’s [Mana s***h] silenced the beast after just a moment.

The rush of Genesis Energy was like a flowing river as it split four ways and rushed into them.

It was more than ten times the amount they had earned so far in the entire delve.

Liz was the first to ask, “Sub-boss?”

Matt would have agreed if this was a normal rift or ruin, but this was Minkalla, so it was only a guess at best, albeit an educated one.

Still, it was the only answer they had, so they worked under that assumption.

It took another few minutes of Matt frying the small bats before the stream stopped, and they were able to proceed.

Matt had Liz hold him with a tendril of blood, and he very carefully cut the Void Obsidian near them off at the bottom, handing the stalagmites to Susanne, who put them in his spatial backpack.

That backpack was the largest one they could buy that was made only of Tier 14 materials and was especially created to store valuables they found in Minkalla.

It was massive enough to easily hold a five-story building. If they wanted it bigger, they could have done so, but they reduced the size a bit to add on enchantments for preserving materials they gathered.

Everything they gathered would go in there, or one of the five exact replicas sitting in their house where they were stored away.

Liz had a special orb for storing alchemy ingredients that they had made for the same purpose, but so far, they hadn’t found anything fitting the description.

After cutting away several of the Void Obsidians, they had a place to stand, but no path to the hole, as the monster’s impaled corpse was in their way. They paused when they noticed that the bat wyvern was starting to rapidly dissolve, and just watched as Minkalla reclaimed its monster.

That made it easier on them, as they no longer had to cut a way through its hide, but before it completely vanished, Liz managed to grab a tooth and a flap of its skin, which they quickly put away. Curiously, looting the corpse halted the dissolution of the monster until they were done. Sadly, they only earned a Tier 8 skill from the dissipated corpse.

With their path clear, they neared the hole in the center of the pit and inspected it.

Through their spiritual perception, they could feel something moving underneath them rapidly, and one test later with [Water Manipulation], confirmed that there was moving water beneath them that was flowing rapidly.

All of them had underwater breathing amulets crafted by Matt in the last few weeks, so they had no issue with throwing themselves into the raging waters after tying together their armor with Tier 14 spider silk.

The water was unsurprisingly neither warm nor cold, which could be a problem. It was Tier 14 water, and if it was cold and they couldn’t feel it, hypothermia could creep up on them quickly.

Thankfully, Matt’s enchanted amulets worked as intended, and created a little bubble of air around their mouths and noses, feeding them fresh air while rejecting carbon dioxide in its sphere of influence.

Ironically, Matt had the hardest time making the amulet work with [Cracked Phantom Armor], which kept trying to treat it as a foreign enchantment and forced him to iterate the design a dozen times before he got one that worked. Eventually, he was able to find a configuration that worked with his spell.

Thankfully, nothing attacked them as they were carried along in the watery tunnel, and with a little [Water Manipulation] from Matt, they stopped themselves from bouncing around against the rock walls.

Less than ten minutes later, they found their exit in the form of a whirlpool that swirled them around a drain.

Matt and Susanne pulled everyone together, and they huddled together as they were sucked out of the hole.

When they exited the hole, their spiritual perceptions were able to see that they were in the middle of the air, falling rapidly from the faux-waterfall-drain-thing.

This time, they were able to fly, and they caught themselves in the air before spreading their perception out getting a low detail scan of the area within a few miles of them. Above them, they found an un-manipulatable ceiling of stone, but below them spread a jungle of towering trees that had massive foliage draped across their limbs with equally large vines climbing and linking them.

The four of them were settling down into the forest when an ant the size of a horse climbed out of a hole in the ground and lumbered around before clicking its pincers together.

As if it wasn’t affected by the floor theme, it headed right in their direction.

All of them took to the air and watched the ant walk along an unseen path in the forest.

They followed it to find that a beast corpse the size of a large hill was getting picked apart by a swarm of ants.

Susanne turned slightly and asked Liz, “Do we attack? That could be a lot of Genesis Energy.”

Matt interjected before Liz could speak. “The real question is why the monster hasn’t dissolved yet. The bat thing dissolved in only a few minutes. I don’t expect that Minkalla will even allow monsters to harvest other monsters. This feels off.”

That caused all of them to look at the monster again, and they found that it was a monkey of some variety, judging by its tail and what was left of its flesh.

They spent another five minutes watching the ants devour the monkey and bring its meat away, before deciding that they should try to pick off a straggler ant and see how much Genesis Energy came from killing it.

If they got a lot and decided that it might be worth fighting their way through to the nest.

When a lone ant trundled its way under them, Matt and Susanne both struck out with [Mana s***h]es, cutting the ant into three at the thorax.

The rush of Genesis Energy was larger than the small bats, but not as large as the ones from the monsters they had fought in the tunnels.

It was, after all, a single ant out of what had to be hundreds, if not thousands of ants.

Returning to the corpse, they started slaughtering all the ants which seemed scattered and tried to flee.