The Path of Ascension

Chapter 234

Matt really didn’t want to say goodbye to Liz so soon after saying goodbye to Aster, but he understood the necessity of completing missions on their own.

They gave it a week after the first counselors arrived to ensure people were settling into a routine for treatment, and that the nascent dryad was getting the care it needed in the form of a specialist carefully transplanting it to a hidden grove. Once they were satisfied, the two of them flew to space, withdrew their spaceships from their respective storages, and shared one last kiss goodbye.

Matt’s spaceship was substantially larger and nicer than Liz’s, simply because he could power far more than the others could. That translated to a two-section ship rated for mortal occupants, as it was split between a cockpit with four distinct seats, and a storage bay large enough to hold a few full-sized crates. It also had an absolutely tiny galley installed in one wall. It wouldn’t be comfortable for four people to live in it, of course, but each of the four seats could be raised into the ceiling for a small measure of personal space, with the seat doubling as a mattress.

Liz’s ship didn’t even have that, and was only a two-man fighter with no concessions made for people who couldn’t go indefinitely without eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, or really even breathing. The only access point was through the cockpit windshield, which could be raised or even removed if needed. The ship had an atmospheric support system, so technically anyone above Tier 10 that was capable of surviving the half-hour required for the cabin to regenerate its air could utilize it, but was still missing basically everything mortals would need to survive. In a pinch, both of them plus Aster could fit in the fighter, but would require either Liz or Aster to be in their beast forms.

Matt ran through his pre-flight checklist, ensuring he didn’t miss any important steps in his first real flight using the ship. Lights blinked on and off as they should, both of his AIs were coordinating with the ship’s onboard system, and enchantments hummed as the mana crystal powered up each system in turn.

April was Matt’s companion and supervisor for this trip, and Matt swiveled back around to look at the green-haired woman. “That’s the last of it. Ready to go?”

His liaison shot back a couple of questions about his startup, clearly meant to trip him up, but he handled them in stride. When she finally gave him a nod, he turned back to face the stars and engaged the warp drive.

Mana levels dropped, a surge of magic rolled out across the ship, and Matt’s senses twisted as he broke through to chaotic space.

Matt barely noticed as the shields kicked on, pushing back the corrosive reality of chaotic space, with the amount of mana it required so laughably below his mana generation that he needed to trust his monitoring devices to believe it even took any at all. Then, he turned his attention to the outside and felt the battering winds of the otherworld with his own spirit. Below him, or perhaps in front of him, the firefly that represented the world he’d just come from glittered and shone with golden light, with the glimmering strings connecting it to nearby planets stretching off into the distance.

The range of his senses was… odd. Dimensions were unusual in Chaotic Space, and while his spiritual sense could stretch for miles, it didn’t seem like it translated in the same way to this reality. It was pulled along and twisted, swept along in higher-dimensional eddies and currents that he couldn’t quite perceive properly.

Liz’s ship appeared next to his, and he sent her a quick message before they started to pull away. He received a response instantly, and smiled. She must have had it queued up, ready to reply the moment she entered Chaotic Space, and Matt set a reminder for him to look at it later.

Liz’s ship blurred as she pulled away, following one of the strings to her next mission, just as Matt did the same.

The Great Powers were in many ways one unified entity, a massive network of worlds and routes mostly locked in place, drifting like a net cast overboard on a vast ocean. Only hard work kept them moored to one another. Namely, the full suite of enchantments which facilitated the teleport network that ensured the linked worlds stayed locked together. That wasn’t all they did though, they also acted as a beacon for ships to follow, and stabilized chaotic space just enough that travelers wouldn’t be swept away by the currents and winds as they went about their daily business.

Of course, they weren’t truly currents, just ripples in space which could pull you off course or cause backtracking lead you to a completely different place than where you came from. Venturing too far from the great raft that was the Great Powers was a sure-fire way for even a Tier 35 to be swept away, never to be seen again. There wasn’t any data for Tiers above that, but it seemed likely that it was only a matter of distance as well.

In the ‘shallows’ of chaotic space, near known planets and their well-maintained pathways, the currents were weak enough that sufficiently high-tier ships and individuals could navigate the twisting space, resisting their ‘pull’ and take shortcuts between worlds, but Matt was nowhere close to that level yet, and if he tried venturing into the unknowable, he’d be swept away in an instant.

Unlike most people who met such a fate, Matt wouldn’t be doomed if that happened to him. Beyond April being able to pull him out, assuming she reacted quickly enough, his shielding enchantments ran off of his own endless mana, and he could legitimately last the decades, centuries, or even millennia it may take before he was blown back into known space. Regardless, he stayed very firmly next the well-maintained and well-lit path, following the pearlescent white ‘guideline’ demarcating the safety of the teleport tethers.

It took about three hours to reach the next world, passing a handful of ships on his way, and from there, he navigated around the world and the ships spawning and vanishing near it to his next tether, carefully following the paths to new worlds.

Quill watched for almost a full day before starting to do manipulation exercises that didn’t need much room as a way to help recover his mana control. The last doubling had been as rough as expected, but he had started to learn the best ways to recover his mana dexterity faster.

While he did so, Quill went through the dossier of the mission.

As the brief said, he needed to help the low Tier charity construction company avoid bankruptcy, caused by the discovery of a mineral vein that prevented them from building while the mining rights were being negotiated.

Aloy’s Construction was a simple charity organization that had the mission statement of creating low-cost housing on new planets for low Tiers to move into. It was a noble cause, but was generally not needed, which made Quill start digging deeper into the issue.

Generally, the local noble family would fund such projects to make their planet more desirable for said mortals, but companies like this weren’t unheard of either. They were just usually for-profit entities that charged those same nobles for their work, who then gave the houses out in the same way as if they had built them themselves.

It took Quill almost an hour of digging through records, but he eventually found the reason for the company, and what he believed to be the actual underlying issue.

The owner of the charity company came from noble stock, but had been ‘disinherited’ after his awakening, where they discovered he had a construction Talent. That in and of itself would have been fine, but the young noble scion, Michel Silvestre, had gotten a taste for constructing buildings, and found that he liked the actual construction more than making money. That was apparently unacceptable to his family, who wanted to leverage his Talent to open their own construction company, develop their holdings, and make a profit.

When his family threatened to disinherit him for his obstinance, he had threatened to call their bluff and the family backed down slightly, offering him a deal. They would give him a small payout equal to what he would have received as his inheritance to use for setting up a company where he could do as he pleased. The condition was, if his idea of charity work failed and the business went under, he needed to return to the fold and work for the family.

Quill shook his head at the family struggles, but understood the logic on both sides, at least from what he was able to source from the EmpireNet. Michel felt his Talent was best used to help others directly, and wanted to skip the noble families who might decide to charge mortals more than was reasonable. It was a possibility if he was a for-profit business, but would be out of the question if he operated as a charity. His family, on the other hand, felt that charity work was putting them and him at the whims of donors, let alone while working in a business where margins were already thin. A charity couldn't run forever at a deficit, after all, and that would slowly drain the family coffers, slowly ruining the family. From the reports, the family didn’t even want him to price gouge people, just charge enough to make a small profit. It would then be on the local noble families to give those houses away for cheap.

While both were looking at the situation from pessimistic extremes, Quill personally felt the young Michel had the right idea. Not every noble family gave those houses away on the cheap, which is why he chose the area he did to start his first large scale construction operation.

Joyful Meadows, the crown jewel of that sector of Empire space.

The system was a Tier 15 world which had had a number of resources funneled into it by the Nazwari noble family, who owned it. The benefits included terraforming and bringing the formerly smaller world into a better orbit nearer to the star, and increasing its size massively, but even that hadn’t been enough for their ambitions. It being the only world over Tier 10 in the vicinity, they had a plethora of immigrants, and two planets weren’t nearly enough. No, they had gone ahead and built an entirely new planet from scratch in the system, if only to further increase the area’s value.

That third planet was Michel’s target. It was mostly regulated to a project planet, where only those too poor to live on the more established worlds or those playing the long game set up their homes or operations due to its low Tier. Eventually, it would Tier up due to the excess essence produced by the two higher Tier planets in the system. But for now, the images he had were more reminiscent of Lilly when he was growing up, rather than other high Tier systems, with only a few scattered cities built along the coast.

Being a purpose built planet, they should have never run into a gold mine near the coast, but they had, and even the company who built the planet was confused about its appearance.

If the Silvestre and Nazwari hadn’t been from opposite political spectrums, despite both being hereditary noble families, he would have suspected that they had colluded to hamper the young Michel and his ambitions.

While the unexplained gold mine was intriguing, Quill didn’t necessarily need to bother with it. His mission goal was to ensure Michel’s company didn’t go under while creating as little interruptions as possible.

His first idea was to pretend to be a lawyer and represent Michel, but he quickly dismissed that, as Michel already had a seemingly decent lawyer, and Quill would just get in the way.

If he was allowed to go in loud, he would just disguise himself and steal the ore vein to remove the problem, but that was disruptive, and would raise all kinds of red flags. Even low Tier gold was still valuable due to its properties in enchanting and manatronics, but it wasn’t so expensive that a Tier 15 would covet it, which would only raise more questions if he made a move.

While planning, Quill bounced his ideas off April, who helped him consider the pros and cons of each idea, and he eventually came to the decision of going undercover as an Imperial Investigator.

Imperial Investigators were, like most imperial organizations, limited in their scope and ability to interfere directly, but they had a few useful abilities that Quill thought might prove useful. Their entire purpose was to watch immortals who operated on mostly mortal worlds, and while they ostensibly only worked in Tier 10 and below planets, they had the governance oversight to limit immortals for nearly any reason.

And that suited what Quill needed to do to a T.

Michel and, by extension, his company was only a Tier 5 entity, while the company under the Nazwari noble family was, by extension, a Tier 20 organization. That gave Quill a plausible reason to interfere in the matter, even if it was flimsy at best.

After all, the Imperial Investigators were meant to limit corporations from muscling into local low Tier planets, undercutting the competition, and then jacking up the prices once they had a monopoly on the planet, not to interfere in a local noble's operations. The only reason he had half a leg to stand on was the fact that the Nazwari family had publicly distanced themselves from the issue, saying it was all in the hands of their planet building company.

And interfering in the business between an immortal led company and a mortal led company was precisely the reason the Imperial Investigators were set up.

Once he finalized his idea, April’s grin told him that it was a good one, even if that wasn’t the intended method to solve this issue.

April did redirect their travel to a Tier 25 planet after Quill’s idea, though, as she explained that if Quill wanted to play the part, he needed to get at least some training. They had a week or so of wiggle room to make it work, due to how quickly they had solved the dryad mission.

Quill arrived at Illeria, the Tier 25 planet, and took a fast shuttle from the spaceport to the Imperial Investigators’ local headquarters. Walking through even a portion of a city municipal building masked felt weird, but Quill ignored it as he found the lead Imperial Investigator’s office and walked in the open door.

As he shut the door and let his Quill mask appear, the slightly overweight man chuckled. “Either I’m about to die, or you need some help, young Pather.”

Quill turned and looked at the man and let his mask smile in return. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Fighting a Tier 27 is beyond even me.”

He also let his AI verify his masked identity so the man would know he wasn’t an impostor.

The man’s smile settled into something more natural as he gestured, and the chair against the far wall slid into a more central location, then he indicated for Quill to sit.

“Well, well, well. I honestly thought you were a fake, but the EmpireNet verifies you. What can I do for one of the Empire’s most promising teams? Or at least half of the team. Name’s Alec, Head Imperial Investigator for this Duchy.”

Quill quickly told Alec a little about his mission and his idea to go undercover as an Imperial Investigator, which earned him a thoughtful nod. He had been told by April before they arrived that Alec was a trusted agent of Harper’s, and the meek appearance was nothing more than an act to lower people's guard. While April didn’t know if the man was an information gathering specialist or something more active, like an assassin, he was trusted and in the perfect position for their needs.

“It's not a bad idea, and it’s a good way to use resources. Change your mask and walk with me as I explain how Imperial Investigators actually work.”

Doing as he was instructed, Quill followed Alec out of the building and to a nearby local taco shop, right across from an Empire wide chain food store, Golden Pots.

Seeing Quill look at the neighboring building, Alec nodded. “That's part of what I want you to see. Golden Pots serves mediocre fast food for decently low prices. You can quite literally find one on every planet in the Empire, and that's not an accident. What you won't find is one in every city. A large part of an Imperial Investigator’s job is to stop mega corporations from eating the little mortals’ job opportunities. Take this place, for example. Family owned for six generations of mortals, and the undisputed best tacos in this city.”

They were interrupted by a waiter who came and took their order, which Alec gave for both of them, getting a small pile of food between the two of them.

“Now, this place is still named after the original owner, Bethany, but imagine they want to become a… I don't know… a burger business? Since they became the fad of the decade. Not that they should, because the tacos are fantastic, but you follow me so far?”

At Quill’s nod, Alec continued. “Now, this is a mortal owned and run establishment, and therefore falls under the mortal bureaucracy. They put in a request to change their menu and branding, and within a month, they can start churning out burgers. Now, imagine an immortal-run or owned taco business sees that burgers are all the rage, and wants to capitalize on that trend as well. They need to go through us, and Imperial Investigators are very, very busy. That application might take anywhere from a year to a decade to get approved. Thank you, Marla.”

Their food came, briefly interrupting Alec’s explanation, and they spent a few minutes digging in. Having tasted the food, Quill could understand the Imperial Investigator’s assertion that Bethany’s tacos were the best in the city.

“Now, we don’t just delay the immortal's business because it’s funny to fuck with them, but because they operate at scales the mortals can’t even imagine, let alone compete with. Same reason we limit larger corps to one business per planet. If someone really wants to eat their grub, they can travel for it, and that's the same reason they stick to the teleporter cities.”

Quill was going to ask a question, but Alec headed him off with a wave of a taco. “Now for your little issue. You are right that an Imperial Investigator is in a position to stick their nose into that but you need to be careful. I see a few entry points, but if this is a mission of yours, I won't mention that. I will give one piece of advice I give all my new investigators. Don’t meet force with force. Always put pressure on another avenue, and use that as leverage to get them to do what you want. What leverage that is, I can’t really tell you, but you can’t be stupid to have gotten this far.”

After he mulled that over, Quill thanked Alec, and they chatted about inconsequential topics until their meal was finished. Afterwards, they went their separate ways, with Quill having a full false identity of a semi-junior Imperial Investigator ready for him to slip into.

Donning the mask of one Julius Alto, Quill finished his trip to Joyful Meadows and flew to the third planet. Before he moved to interfere with anything between the two companies, Quill first went and investigated the planets themselves. He wanted to solve the quandary of where an entire gold mine came from on a custom-built planet.

After all, metals were cheap, and few people who ordered planets sprung for extra metals to be added to the makeup when there were abundant resources from rifts and the star system's asteroid belts. So the fact that a gold vein appeared on the new planet was an interesting wrinkle that Quill wanted to dig into further.

While he didn’t have the spells which would make this convenient, like [Sense Metal] or [Locate Ore], he did have [Earth Manipulation] and [Metal Manipulation], which he could cast with 40,000 MPS, giving him an insane range compared to other Tier 15 mages.

As he flew around the continents, he found no unexpected ore deposits in his quick sweeps, but he wasn’t about to give up that easily. After a quick scan of each continent, he went back to one of the unsettled continents and performed a thorough scan of each and every square foot of the place.

Still, he found absolutely nothing.

Hovering in the sky, he looked up to the moon, and on a hunch, inspected the smaller celestial body.

Still, there were no unexpected metal deposits, leaving him stumped.

Standing on the moon, he watched as the planet slowly spun underneath him.

As he asked himself why there would be a metal deposit on an otherwise ordinary low Tier planet, he came to one answer. Like those that ordered metals in artificially created planets, they wanted them to slowly Tier up through ambient essence until they were higher Tier and therefore valuable. For the relatively low cost low Tier metals, the local nobles could have a near guaranteed return on their investment as the planet Tiered up.

While rifts created an unlimited number of metals, they could sometimes get unlucky, and not have rifts that produced a specific metal at the quantities they needed, and those rifts would get changed every time the planet Tiered up. There was only a fifty percent chance that a rift would stay as it was at its last Tier, after all, and with some bad luck, a planet's ore production could vanish overnight. If that became the case, thenobles would have to break and reform rifts, which was disruptive and expensive.

Or, they could just bank off the ores they had seeded the planet with, and use that to tide them over until they had enough time to break and rebuild said rifts.

Still, Quill wasn’t entirely sure why one would deliberately hide an ore vein.

Was it the company who made the planet who messed up? Quill thought that unlikely, but theoretically possible.

Was it the noble family who asked for it, for whatever reason? Quill figured that was much more likely, but wasn’t sure why they would bother. Low Tier metals were practically worthless on the scale of wealth higher Tiers had. At least, the unprocessed metals were, but processed metals like steel alloys carried at least marginal value.

Seeing a large stretch of ocean pass over him, Quill cocked his head and flew back to the planet and into the ocean.

Once he was deep inside the depths, he activated [Earth Manipulation] and [Metal Manipulation], searching for any feedback of any kind of metals.

And oh, did he get feedback from [Metal Manipulation].

It seemed like the entire bottom of the ocean was stuffed with various metals, just far enough below a layer of dirt and stone to not interfere with the local aquatic life.

Flying around in zigzag patterns, Quill found ore vein after ore vein all the way till he neared a coastline. He suspected the out of place gold mine was from a shift in a tectonic plate or last minute change in the desired coastline, but couldn’t prove anything.

He still wasn’t sure why they had deliberately ordered the planet with such massive amounts of hidden metal reserves, but now he had the perfect method to apply leverage on the company. Heading back into the sea, he found a relatively rich vein of aluminum and carved his way through the ground towards the metal.

Even within arms reach, he couldn't see anything unique about the metals and decided to harvest some.

With a flex of [Metal Manipulation] he carved himself a chunk of the Tier 5 aluminum out and froze the moment he saw what he actually pulled out.

It wasn’t aluminum, or rather it was aluminum, infused aluminum which was far more rare and far more expensive.

Even a Tier 5 infused metal was worth its weight in Tier 15 mana stones, no matter the type. That was mostly due to the fact the metal couldn’t be mass produced or pulled from rifts, and needed to be harvested from planets that had been left alone in a high mana concentration area for long enough that the metals started to change.

All infused metals were useful, and their applications varied, but most of its uses revolved around enchanting. An ounce of infused copper or gold could be added to an enchantment that used one of those materials to both strengthen the enchantment and make it more efficient. There was one notable example of a man creating a weapon out of infused steel, which allowed that sword to rival a weapon five Tiers above its own.

Quill had never even seen infused metals, let alone in the massive quantities that this planet had to have, especially if all the ores in the oceans were infused metals encased in their normal variants.

Testing a theory, he checked a few more places and found there were no depleted metals which would have formed if the metals were naturally located there, proving this was some kind of smuggling, money laundering, or tax evasion method by the Nazwari house proving the infused metals were not natural in origin and being deliberately hidden inside their normal variants.

Exiting the ocean, Quill flexed his Concept to repel the water clinging to him and went to go find the company under the Nazwari family.

Flying into the one settled city, Quill walked around inspecting the people and how they fared. For all that he was expecting another copy of Lilly and the incompetence of the Junipers, the Nazwari noble house seemed far more competent.

Even though the city was using mostly the low Tier equivalents, they had all the modern amenities that he had seen on the two higher Tier planets. Things like early warning detection drones flew around the perimeter of the cities, watching for any rift monsters. The entire city edge even had cleverly concealed formations which would create defensive barriers if they were attacked. While those things didn’t prove they were good rulers, it was a good indication, and made Quill more confused as to why they were trying to hide such mineral wealth.

Once he had gotten his fill of the city, Quill made his way to the Nazwari family company in charge of the local construction, and asked to speak to someone in charge.

The receptionist tried to deflect him, but Quill just grinned and flashed his Imperial Investigator badge. Then suddenly, the manager, Willa Stonewall, had her schedule freed up as if by magic.

Quill used his AI and Imperial Investigator credentials to get some quick information on the woman and liked what he saw. Her younger sister had married the third son of the Nazwari’s current matriarch, making her an inlaw to the noble family, which was how she had gotten this otherwise cushy position.

Her bright smile was a little fragile as she asked, “How can I help you, Investigator…?”

Quill returned her smile, letting his mask stretch it out a hair more than normal, giving it a slightly unfriendly feeling. “Julius Alto, Imperial Investigator out of the Illeria system. Badge number I15794BT66. I’m here to have a little chat with you about your company's interference in a mortal charity’s day to day operations. Do you have a minute or ten to chat?”

Willa’s smile nearly slipped as she led him to her office, but he didn’t miss the receptionist’s frantic tapping at his pad the moment they were around the corner.

Perfect.

That meant someone with actual decision making power would be here as fast as they could travel the intervening distance between planets.

Willa deliberately kept the conversation from going anywhere important, and Quill didn’t push, knowing she wasn’t anyone actually important.

Despite that, he carefully watched her physiological reactions to his questions and determined that she had no idea why he was actually here, and was simply afraid that the gravy train would come to an stop with his presence.

It took almost half an hour, but eventually, the third son, Dejene, arrived with a bright smile. “Good day Investigator Alto. I’m sorry you needed to come out here. That’s a failing on our families' part. What can we do to assist you in rectifying the issue?”

Quill returned his smile and handshake. “Really, this isn't anything important. Frankly, it's not even an official matter yet. I was just nearby and heard about the issue through the rumor mill, and felt it was worth a stop. Best to head things off before they become official. I’m sure you’d agree.”

Dejene’s smile widened when he heard Quill wasn’t here on official business, as that would be a black mark on his family no matter how the issue was resolved. If this was just an information seeking trip, they could either bribe Quill off the issue, or fix the issue before it became an official problem.

Gesturing for them to take a walk, Quill and Dejene walked to the edge of the city where the gold deposit was, and Quill indicated it and explained the issue he and the Bureau of Imperial Investigators had with a mortal charity company being hamstrung by such an incident.

Dejene tried to play it apologetic, like he was sorry it was an issue in the first place, but continued on the fact that an unexplained gold deposit had to be carefully handled, which took time.

Quill smiled right back and agreed.

Then, he abruptly changed the topic.

“You know, Dejene, this planet has some beautiful oceans. I grew up on an archipelago planet, and I love deep sea diving. It's my favorite pastime. I do it whenever I have any time to spare. Have you ever been diving?”

Quill had to hold back a laugh as Dejene tried not to react. Sadly, his heart escaped his control for a moment and started rapidly beating, even as his smile stayed plastered on his face.

“I can’t say I have. I’ve always been more interested in the stars myself.”

Quill continued with the fabricated tale of his adventures of deep sea diving, and let the conversation drift back to more neutral territory, until they got back to the city building that housed their local branch.

Once they separated, Quill indicated he would stay around for another week or two and see if he could ‘figure things out’. If he couldn’t solve the issue, he’d be forced to open an investigation. Which was exactly the threat they both knew it to be.

Quill knew the issue would be corrected for Michel’s charity within a few hours, but he would stick around, just to let the threat linger a little.

While he was interested in why the Nazwari’s were trying to hide that much infused metal, he also didn’t care that they were. It was probably to evade some tax laws, but he simply didn’t care. Tax evasion, or what he now suspected was inheritance tax bypassing, was a natural product of having taxes, and he couldn’t fix that, even by reporting them. Besides, if he reported them now, the tax hit would be comparatively tiny compared to when the planet was a few Tiers higher.

With that thought causing a grin to stretch across his face, Quill decided to go rent a boat and see if he could figure out how to sail. From the way Aiden talked about it, it seemed like a great pastime.