The Path of Ascension

Chapter 241

Aperology on a planet without an essence core was not as easy as just slapping down a boundary formation and adding mana, but that was why Matt was looking forward to it. Without both ambient mana and essence, things became far more complicated.

Given he had essentially free reign to make whatever rifts he wanted, all at a fairly low Tier, Matt seriously wanted to test a number of theories he’d developed since his time with Erwin. The past decades had resulted in a lot of thoughts piling up, and the only times he’d worked with rifts since then weren’t real aperology; just following some guides for making the ideal rifts for new delvers.

Not that he planned to avoid making those kinds of rifts, but with his mana generation, he could test all his theories and have time to spare for the basics.

Matt looked up, watching Liz reading a book, and twisted to bite her on the hip. She flinched and thwacked him on the top of his head with said book, but Matt didn’t let go.

“Stop, you beast!”

Matt growled in return, giving Liz a small dog-like shake of the head.

Two thwacks later, Matt licked her, which caused her angry shouts to turn into involuntary giggles.

“Stop; I need to pee!”

Letting her go, Matt laughed as Liz ran to the bathroom and came out of it, pouting and rubbing her hip.

“That hurt.”

Matt smiled. “I can kiss it and make it better?”

His proposition simply earned him another thwack with the book. “Down, boy. Didn’t you want to start making rifts soon?”

Matt theatrically sighed. “Yes, back to the mines. Another hard day's work is ahead of me. Whatever shall I do?”

Liz poked him as she got dressed, tossing her book on the bed. “Yeah, right. Woe is me, my ass. You begged me to help you with the rifts.”

Matt grinned as he spun to his feet. “I know, I'm excited. Let's go get started! There’s no time to waste.”

With Liz tagging along, he explained the differences between aperology on a normal planet with essence and somewhere without. Mostly, he was touching on already well-established theories that weren't even hidden, due to how obvious they were. And while Matt would love to test those theories and see if they were as sound as they were presented, he only had a year to work with, and knew he could easily spend a decade just recreating the documented tests.

Still, some of them just sounded so interesting.

In a place without essence, you could form a rift using just an essence stone if it was broken in a small enough contained space. The rift would form out of the pure essence and start creating mana instead of the usual other way around.

He had a million and one questions about what kind of rifts would form, and if he could control the process at all as he could when making rifts out of various mana types.

He wasn’t sure it would be possible, but he had bought a literal spatial ring full of Tier 1 essence stones, so he had more than enough to go wild in testing even his most inane theories.

Liz had agreed to assist him with his aperology, but getting her excited had been an effort in futility, though he was pretty sure that once she saw the results, she would get into it. Their efforts would help generations of future delvers, and if they could make relatively safe rifts, they could change lives.

Throwing down one of the thousands of barrier formations, Matt stepped inside and activated it with a burst of mana. The barrier glowed a light blue at the edges as it filtered out all the ambient mana and essence, but was nice and clear for the rest of the formation, showing the improvement of his enchantment skills.

“Ok, so first, I want to test a few very basic rifts. Things Erwin and I already established.” Looking to Liz, he asked. “Kobolds or goblins?”

Liz chewed her lip for a second before saying, “Kobolds. It's a classic first rift.”

Even as he started pouring in the appropriate mana ratios for a kobold rift into the air, he countered, “Factually untrue. Goblin rifts are superior due to their similarity to humans and propensity to use tools.”

“What? No! That logic would mean an orc rift is the best beginner rift. Kobold rifts are best, as they only really have their claws and teeth to attack with at low tiers. Besides, goblins are so short, the height difference means it's nothing like fighting a human.”

“Yeah, but kobolds are generally seven percent faster than a goblin of the same Tier due to their essence distributions. Speed is dangerous. Small slower humanoids are clearly safer.”

Matt could feel Liz roll her eyes. “The difference at that Tier is minor at best. And if they really wanted slow creatures, you’d see more slime rifts.”

Both of them shuddered at the mention of one of the most irritating low Tier monsters. Slimes were notoriously hard for non-mages to fight, and rifts containing them had the tendency to be broken immediately when appearing at a low Tier. The only places Matt knew of which had intentional slime rifts were mage training schools, which used them primarily as tools to help teach mana management.

The rift monster was not well received for good reason, which made her counter even dumber.

He was going to retort when the rift snapped into reality in front of them. Monsters were trying to flow out, but Matt waved his hand and cut them to pieces with shadows before they could tell what type of monster they were.

Gesturing at the distortion in space, Matt said, “After you, milady.”

Liz shot him a rude gesture as she entered the rift.

Following on her heels, Matt screeched to a halt, almost hitting Liz.

They were most certainly not in the standard kobold rift he had tried to create.

“How is there lava? I barely used fire mana. There’s no way it just spontaneously managed to perfectly combine with natural earth mana to make lava mana. What the fuck?”

Together they walked into the first room lit by the lava that ran along the walls, and Matt frowned.

A Kobold.

One single, perfectly normal kobold.

Liz pointed at the rabid monster and asked, “Seems perfectly normal to me.”

Liz gestured with a hand and pulled the Tier 1 monster to them. It tried to resist, but without a domain and being more than ten Tiers below her, it was futile. When it reached them, Liz flicked her wrist and pulled apart the unfortunate creature into what was essentially a medical diagram.

They both studied the monsters' internals, but everything was normal. The only oddity was the lava illuminating the rift.

Liz asked after they inspected another few monsters, “Is lava really that big of a deal? Sure, it's not what you were aiming for, but it's making things a little nicer than usual. My kobold rift only had shitty little torches to illuminate the place. I’d have killed for this much light.”

Matt paused as he tested the air temperature and compared it to what it had been when they first entered. Half a degree higher over half an hour.

“Are you asking if I need to thoroughly explore this and see what is going on, or if this is a big deal for potential delvers?”

“Both?”

Matt shrugged. “It seems like a decent rift, all things considered. The lava is heating the place up slightly, but at a degree per hour, there isn't really much reason for concern there. I just don't know what I did wrong. This is exciting!”

Liz completely understood as an alchemist, and was more than happy to act as his assistant as they killed everything in the rift and started exploring thoroughly.

He had to be careful, as the one time he pushed [Earth Manipulation] a little too hard, he nearly collapsed the rift around them as he ran into its spatial boundary wall. He had forgotten just how small Tier 1 rifts were. The wall was only two feet thick, which was nothing to the current him. He was sure if he pushed a little too hard, he could easily destroy the rift and cause it to collapse, which would be a disaster.

He needed this rift to study.

Was it unique with the lava? Was that a product of the mana types he had used? Was it the planet? He had so many questions, and couldn't let this baby rift die so easily.

For amusement, they opened the rift distortion, and Matt cocked his head at the puff of dust that was produced.

Liz snorted. “Now that was just rude.”

Matt agreed, but took the hint and left the rift through the exit.

Moving a few feet away, he set up another formation, but after activating it, he didn’t immediately create a rift. Instead, he let all of his senses spread and checked the formation for anything inside that might change the composition of the next rift. Finding nothing that seemed out of place, he tried to find any kind of gap or problem in his formation.

Coming up blank again, he turned back to the first rift but couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary there.

Returning to the second formation, he recreated the same rift once more, only to again find lava inside.

Exiting the rift, he was incredibly confused and tried to recreate a catfish rift he had made by accident. The rift once more had lava at the bottom of the water, causing a number of bubbles and steam to rise up.

Liz laughed, seeing the monsters slowly getting cooked. “You might be out of a job with this rift Matt. It can cook the monsters for everyone, no fighting needed.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “It's not edible, and you know that! The monsters aren’t cleansed of their guts, and the monsters need to be purified before mortals can eat it.”

After leaving the rift, Matt sat down and thought in the vacuum of the planet for long enough that Liz grew bored and started bouncing rocks off his head.

Matt finally looked down at Liz after what seemed like an eternity.

“Are those the clothes that you were wearing when we were throwing asteroids around?”

At Liz's nod, he asked her to wait outside while he made the fourth rift, which came out perfectly normal.

Liz cursed at the realization. “I washed these clothes, I swear! Hey, don't look at me like that.”

Matt was indeed glaring at Liz, albeit in focus rather than annoyance, as he studied the mana flows around her.

“Lift your boot.”

Laughing, he nodded at the offending boot. “There we go! Right there, you’ve still got some contamination from lava mana. That would do it.”

Liz stomped her feet and started twisting. “And you thought I didn’t wash my clothes.”

Matt tried to defend himself, as he had most certainly never said that, but Liz kept going. “Who cleans their boots when they aren't covered in blood? No one! That's who.”

Liz made a quick detour back to their house to properly cleanse her boots, then returned as Matt was setting up his next formation.

“It's fine,” he reassured her. “Honestly, this was a learning experience, but controlling for variables is important. Honestly we should be doing this in clean suits for this very reason.”

Getting back to work, Matt started testing a few of his theories.

Ideally, he’d be able to create rifts without monsters to be used as farm locations, but he knew that was a pipe dream. He still intended to try, though.

Starting with a mixture of all four level one mana types, he checked one of the most elementally balanced rifts he could think of and checked the result. The result was a very normal rift with boars that charged at them almost immediately, pouring out from a very sparse forest that seemed to compose the majority of the rift.

It only took them seconds to clear the entire rift, but Matt didn’t keep this one.

Instead, he slightly altered the ratios.

Less fire, the same amount of earth, slightly more air and water. The resulting rift from that combination contained a morning or evening sun, which wasn’t ideal, but it did have a nice, open grassland with a meandering river running near its furthest edge.

The little snake that was dangling off his leg as it tried to sink its teeth into him was less than ideal. Its venom would kill a Tier 1 in half an hour if his [AI] was correct, which meant the rift was a dud, even for training.

Crushing the monster, Matt exited the rift and tossed the corpse to Liz. “Pretty toxic for a Tier 1. Figured you might be interested.”

“Oh, nice. I’m no Sam, but I can always see if it does anything unique with its venom.”

His next attempt with a similar mixture resulted in a full daylight rift with boars and a stream.

Perfect for farming once the monsters were killed.

Not that anyone would really use it for farming. Low Tier planets, even those in a capital system, rarely lacked space or low Tier, mundane fare. Rifts excelled at making such things, and the capital planets, even with their trillions of citizens, never had a food shortage. Part of that was Empire policy keeping supply prices down, and part of it was the richer citizens avoiding mundane cuisine with no benefit when they could have more exotic food possessing special advantages.

It wasn’t that rifts couldn’t grow those specialized versions of foods, but it tended to be a crap shoot at best, as they usually needed incredibly specific environments to grow properly, which made it nearly impossible to mass produce them. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing, as it kept the outlying planets valuable and maintained a near-unique export that the capital systems demanded.

Matt could hardly claim to understand the economy, but it seemed to him that it would be fairly disruptive if those planets lost one of their main exports. The core worlds of the Empire were already overcrowded, and it seemed to him that enabling them to make even more of their own stuff would only exacerbate the problem.

Not that his little rift was some miracle of fertility that could grow exotic crops. No, it was dead average, and would only be able to handle two or three rotations of crops before the soil degraded into uselessness. Though, that wasn't much of an issue with rifts, as they would just recycle everything into essence once the last of the farming bots left.

After noting the latest formula as a possible farm candidate, Matt and Liz checked a dozen or so subsequent formulas for anything unique while trying to create nice and easy rifts for beginner delvers to practice on.

Rifts with finger-sized venomous snakes were not good for fresh Tier 1s. Or really anyone below Tier 8, where they could reliably get magical armors that offered more comprehensive coverage. Rifts with hummingbirds that darted in and out of range while trying to peck out someone's eyes didn’t fit the bill either. Rifts that had thirty goblins in the second room in half their instances were both odd and immediately destroyed. Rifts with boars that used skills were also rifts not suited for beginners, but Matt didn’t destroy that one.

The roast pork was pretty good, and they liked the added variety to their dinners.

It was low Tier, which meant it didn’t really provide the nutrients their Tier 15 bodies needed, but it was better than feeling hungry and fueling their bodies with essence.

He also wanted to see if he could isolate the variable that gave the Tier 1 monsters access to a skill. If he could do that he felt he might be able to make a breakthrough of some sort.

They were working on creating a few good rifts near a prospective coastline when Luna approached them one day.

“Good morning, children. How is your little break?”

Matt felt the trap in those words, and flexed his Concept almost in unison with Liz.

The Luna in front of them shattered into motes of light, revealing the real Luna standing slightly off to the right, arms crossed.

“Good. I was going to make you break illusions for a month if you fell for that.”

Uncrossing her arms, she walked over to the rift he had just created, and with a tap of her foot, dissipated the formation that kept the mana and essence locked inside.

As she did so, the rift flickered as the mana supporting its existence fled and it tried to fill the void. The same thing happened with the essence a moment later, which caused the rift to fall apart like a fading heat haze.

Luna gestured at the now-empty formation and asked, “What did I just do?”

Liz stated the obvious. “Dissipate the rift.”

Luna nodded. “Correct. How would you do the same thing?”

Matt paused as he thought over the idea. “In the first rift, I almost broke through by punching a hole through the spatial barrier.”

“A possible method, but a damn hard one as you Tier up. But very much a viable option.”

Liz offered up her own idea next. “Damage it with our Domains. Not sure I can do that with my Internal Domain, but that's how I could see a rift being destroyed.”

Matt was about to say run the rift until it ran out of mana, but Luna surprised him.

“That's not exactly true, Liz. You have the right idea, but only if you are trying to destroy a rift from the outside. If you, with an Internal Concept, enter the rift in question, you can easily break it apart. You are your own realm, and a rift just can't handle that sort of pressure well from the inside.”

Looking at Matt, he gave his answer about running the rift, to which she nodded.

“Note that as Tier 15s, you can dispel a mid-Tier 7 rift without too many issues, but attempting to break a Tier 8 rift in the same way would be substantially more troublesome. I want you to make a few dozen rifts and practice all of those methods. Once you get the hang of that, I can then show you how to identify a rift instance and enter it once it has closed. That's even harder, and takes a level of control few can master, but with a Tier 1 rift, I think you two can manage it.”

Matt opened his mouth, but Luna spoke over him. “Cloaking yourself from a rift is a generic ability of Intents, and will be impossible for you until you have one.”

Matt shrugged as Luna showed them each method of destroying a rift.

Doing so with his Concept, Matt understood what she meant about learning how to destroy a rift before learning how to find a rift instance. The rifts with active instances felt like a pastry with many layers. Thin, parallel, and hard to notice individually at a macro level, but when you crunched through one, it was much easier to distinguish the layers.

To practice, he and Liz switched off being inside a rift. The other tried to enter, but it was slow going, and Luna let them return to the terraforming before too long, with them happily practicing on their own.

Liz ended up figuring it out first, but Matt wasn’t too far behind. And while it still took them an hour or two to be able to identify a particular instance out of the mess that was a rift's folded layers of reality, they were eventually able to tear a hole into a desired instance.

Though getting the desired result was the tricky part neither of them could actually do quite right.

They could rip a hole in the rift's fabric, but they couldn’t do so and enter without destroying the entire rift wholesale.

Luna insisted it was possible for them to do, but both of them believed she was blowing smoke up their asses with something theoretically possible, but not something anyone without an Intent ever managed.

The rift work itself didn’t yield any new results, but Matt wasn't that upset. He really hadn’t expected to discover anything new, so he instead started trying to create rifts with purely essence stones.

The results were explosive.

A barrier made of mana to keep everything inside was, surprisingly enough, still mana, and gave the essence enough to condense and form a rift, blowing his containment field up and sending him to his butt.

Liz, who was nearby, laughed until she choked on floating dust, but Matt wasn’t even that mad.

This was an interesting problem that he had to solve, and that was half the fun of science.

Making a barrier out of pure essence was possible. Matt knew that, but it wasn’t the answer he sought out. He didn’t make essence by the bucket load, and preferred an answer that could use his mana generation, which is when he came up with the idea of using something similar to his Concept's repulsion effect.

That was easier said than done, as he couldn’t use mana in making the effect, but rather it had to power the effect. It was the difference between mana being used to make a breeze by pushing it around, and using it to force air to move by turning a fan. Mana was moving in the first example, but wasn’t necessarily in the second as long as there was no ambient mana.

It took him almost a week, but eventually, he figured out how to make a rudimentary repulsion rune that was powered by mana. The rune didn’t create any barriers or waves, but instead worked through vibrations. He was pretty sure this rune existed, as he had taken the idea from a report he only sort of remembered reading as a Tier 13, but it worked, and that was all that mattered.

With that settled, he created his first rift made purely from essence.

The result was quite possibly the most average rift he had ever seen before.

Twenty-four rooms with perfectly average goblins increased by one per room before being reset every sixth, where the goblins got better armed, until the final room containing a hobgoblin boss.

It was exactly the rift he had delved as a Tier 1 at the PlayPen on Lilly.

That was hard enough to believe that he called for Luna to see if she had any more information on how the PlayPens did aperology, but she had nothing. Matt debated putting in a request for that information, but pushed it off. He was cut off from the EmpireNet, and leaving to enter a planet that was connected would take more time than it was worth, and he felt like he was onto something.

A dozen more essences only rifts, and he found his idea held true.

Rifts made from purely an essence stone and no mana were far more similar than any other rift he had made before.

Not that that meant all the rifts were the same. No, the rifts had a natural variation on the monster type, mana type the monsters preferred, and terrain. But when he eventually created a second goblin rift, it was almost identical to the first one. Twenty-four rooms, resetting numbers every sixth room then a hobgoblin boss.

In the second goblin rift, the goblins were all left-handed, and the rock shivs they used as weapons in the first set of rooms were a few hairs longer but more narrow. The angles that the rooms connected at were slightly different as well. The boss's variations were the same, but the tactics the variations used were slightly different. The first rift’s boss usually preferred to fight solo while the minions just rushed them, but the second boss’s minions kept a formation around it most of the time.

Matt and Liz had no idea what to make of it, but they had a storage ring full of Tier 1 essence stones and intended to find out.

Liz’s PlayPen had had a Kobold rift, and it was a nigh perfect copy of the rift they made on this planet with pure essence stones. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it followed the same outline just as the goblin rift had some slight variation.

In just under a week, they covered most of what would become a sea with rifts and only stopped because they ran out of formation plates.

While there could always be some kind of Talent involved in the process of making rifts for PlayPens, he and Liz doubted it. There was just no way that someone made each rift for a PlayPen when it only cost a low Tier essence stone. That might be expensive for commoners due to their rarity but even a Tier 15 like them could buy them by the storage ring full with a little planning so the Empire most certainly could do the same on a larger scale.

Interestingly enough, not all the essence stone rifts were good for beginners. Some were downright awful, but that extended to all essence rifts of that monster type.

The Tier 1 boar rift had the entrance dump the delvers right between two packs of boars, and fighting either pack drew the attention of the other, making it far too dangerous for fresh Tier 1s. Matt estimated it would take a team of fairly experienced Tier 1s to safely clear that rift if no one had skills.

That rift paled in comparison to the honey badger rift. Those little shits were fearless, aggressive, and came in packs. Tier 1 monsters should not attack Tier 15s who weren’t hiding their power, but they charged at them en masse. That revelation explained why he had never seen a low Tier honey badger rift before, they were most likely immediately destroyed, like undead rifts.

The Tier 1 undead rift was also bad enough that Matt wasn’t surprised that they had never encountered one themselves.

The skeletons inside weren’t bad opponents, as they were fairly slow and clumsy, but with their near immunity to slicing damage and general tankiness, they weren’t easy prey either. What made them truly dangerous were the traps the undead rifts were littered with. Pitfall traps with bone spikes at the bottom that were scattered around the rooms containing skeletons were hardly beginner friendly.

The rabbit rift was one that made for a decent PlayPen rift, and Liz believed she had heard of a PlayPen with them. The rabbits were more aggressive than normal, though not to the level of the honey badgers, but they didn’t have skills. Besides, rabbit teeth weren’t that dangerous. The largest danger in that rift was the pit traps that would dump a delver into an underground warren of rabbits that would try and headbutt the victim to death.

Even a skill-less Tier 1 could fight their way out of that, though they would get covered with mud and poop.

Embarrassing, but not immediately lethal.

Those rifts gave Matt inspiration for his own Tier 1 rifts, and he tried his best to recreate their layouts with just mana.

He didn’t figure out any special mana percentages, but he did learn something interesting. The essence he used from a single essence stone had a slight tendency to create rifts of a certain type. Or rather, his [AI] noticed the pattern, which he would refuse to admit to Luna, but the sample was so small, it was only possible to recognize the pattern in larger samples.

When creating rifts with mana as the base, he didn’t need much essence and didn’t want to waste an entire essence stone. So instead, he just pulled a tiny bit of essence out of it and then directed it into a formation where it acted as the catalyst where the rift would form. A single Tier 1 essence stone had enough essence for him to create a hundred rifts from it, which was when he noticed a full nine percent of the rifts were pigeon rifts.

The next most common monster formed from that essence stone was only five percent, and when they tested that idea further, it seemed to hold true around sixty percent of the time.

Matt and Liz couldn't identify why some essence stones seemed to favor a specific type of monster. They chalked it up to the essence stone dropping from that rift originally but couldn't confirm it. They also couldn’t make heads or tails of the rifts that didn’t have any preference beyond chalking it up to chance, a bad ratio of manas used for the monster in question, or local conditions.

Sadly Matt wasn’t able to isolate the variables that made a rift safer, no matter his playing with the mana ratios.

A rift made from pure fire mana should not be a simpler rift than a rift made mainly from air and water mana. The first had nice simple encounters, while the second had mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds that came in the dozens. A fire mage might love that rift, but no Tier 1 melee fighter would ever step foot into that rift if they had a choice.

Though the planet was still barren when they left, Matt felt like he had still accomplished a lot. Nothing groundbreaking, but that had been the break he needed after the Justinian disaster.

That had hit a little too close to home, and even though they had saved him, Matt felt like things wouldn’t be really better until Justinian made a full recovery.

But first, they needed to go to their lessons.

Bondsman training for Liz and telekinesis for beginners for Matt and a few billion others who would be attending Harper's open lecture.