The Path of Ascension

The following day Luna and Kurt interrupted breakfast to debrief them.

Luna hovered while laying horizontally and addressed the room. “What do you think you could have done better?”

Matt rapped on the table to interrupt the older woman's question. Cindy’s fate had been bugging him all night.

“What happened to Cindy? When’s the trial? Do we need to be there?”

Luna stretched slightly before saying, “She’s safe in custody. But I think the real question you want to ask is why she wasn't just killed on the spot. Am I right?”

Matt peeked at Liz and Aster, and with small shrugs, they confirmed that it was close enough for them. He nodded.

Luna took that as enough of an answer. “The short version is, she’s going to be publicly tried, and then executed to help restore public confidence in the local government. Kurt and I recorded everything she did for the last month. We have recordings of her admitting the past killings and planning this most recent setup. It will be a good lesson to the populace that the Empire's laws are not to be trifled with, and that no one is above the law.”

Luna's indifferent expression hardened as she looked at Matt. “Speaking of which, you pushed a fine line with that stunt with the fence.”

Matt went to open his mouth, but Kurt held up his hand and wrote, “No one is saying you didn’t get the job done. And in the end, that’s what matters. But you pushed a line, and pushed it hard. You punched down a Tier and tortured the man. That's not acceptable as anything short of a last desperate resort, and you were far from that point. You had information that normal teams never get, and our assurance that no one would die for weeks. If he hadn’t been such a deplorable character, I would have brought you up on charges myself. Not that you even knew about the true extent of his criminal activities at the time.”

Luna nodded along as Kurt wrote that out.

A chill ran down Matt’s spine. In its wake, all of his hairs stood on end. Not trusting himself to speak, he only nodded.

Liz had no such problem verbalizing. “We all can agree that it wasn't perfect, but he was our only lead at the time. People's lives were on the line.”

Luna raised an eyebrow and snarked, “So harsh. You didn’t think that we’d step in to save the day if you failed?”

Liz shook her head. “Honestly…? No. None of us were sure if you would step in or not. You never said that you would stop the killer. Only prevent deaths. We both half expected this to be another gambit to boot us off The Path.”

Kurt looked surprised and slightly hurt, but Luna just looked tired. Glancing to Matt and Aster, she must have read something on their faces that deflated her.

“I'm a hard woman. I push you to the edge. But have I ever been anything but fair? Or honest?” She must have meant the question as a rhetorical one, because she answered it herself. “No. I’ve explained everything we do, and give you a fair warning of when I’m pushing you. I clearly told you when I was trying to shove you off The Path with that special Tier 9 rift. And if that were my goal here, I would have told you beforehand.”

Luna sighed. “True, this was a real mission that we had no right getting you three involved in. However, Kurt and I were here, so there was no harm in taking the opportunity to get you some real life experience. We would have stopped the sacrifices anyway; we could have wrapped it up ourselves in the first five minutes. Believe me, if you had not solved the case, I would have intervened. If any of the hostages were in danger of dying before the deadline, I would have intervened. If you’d gotten yourselves into a fight you couldn't win, I would have intervened. In all three cases, I wouldn't have pushed you off The Path either. It would have been unfair in the extreme to punish you for something you shouldn’t have been involved in to begin with. Especially without any prior warnings about the consequences.”

Matt felt sheepish. Luna seemed honestly hurt that they thought she was that callous.

“I want you to be the strongest you can be, yes. But I won't push you into being rabid beasts.”

She pointed at Matt. “Beating the shit out of that guy should have been the last step after everything else failed. There are laws for a reason. I know you spend most of your time fighting and training, but you need to remember that the world isn't just a rift. If might makes right, you are way too low on the power scale to be throwing your weight around. Sometimes, you need to pressure people. Occasionally, more brutal methods can’t be avoided, but they’re supposed to be the final escalation. Not your first resort. We’re going to chalk this up to you thinking this was your only chance, but understand that it can't happen again. Forget about simply falling off the Path, I’ll throw you in prison myself before I let you become some sadistic little tyrant.”

Matt opened his mouth to apologize, but Luna cut him off. “No. Keep it in your head. It's done and over with. You don't need to apologize to me, or even the idiot you beat. You need to ask yourself under what circumstances will you do it again. That's a conversation that only you can have with yourself.”

While Luna moved on to pulling apart how Liz performed, one thing stood out. They could have used [Lesser Sacrifice] to prevent Cindy from absorbing her followers’ power. It would have given them a power boost, and would have weakened her as well. They were so used to shunting essence from people that none of the three had even thought about it.

As he half-listened to the rest of her critiques, Matt thought over what she had said.

He had been quick to resort to violence. Almost eagerly so.

There had been a potential source of information that the fence hadn’t given up, and he had immediately used his power to extract it by any means necessary. Only for the lead to become a dead end anyway.

The excuse that he had limited time was just that— an excuse.

He didn’t know exactly when, but he had started becoming someone that he would have hated as a kid.

Lives were on the line, yes, but they had known the timeline. There was no rush at that moment.

Kurt seemed to understand what he was thinking and wrote, “It's hard to not use the easy solution. Overwhelming violence is our answer for so many things, it easily becomes a habit. We have to remember to only use our power for good. The laws preventing attacking down Tiers are so ironclad because abuse can easily become rampant, even if it's not overt. What happens if a Tier 9 can beat a Tier 8 without consequences? What happens when the Tier 8 is a produce seller? If the Tier 9 can physically overwhelm him, then how can he not be afraid of that implied threat anytime he sells his food? Will he be strong-armed into lowering his prices to the point that he can’t make a living?”

Kurt shrugged while shaking his head. “It's not all perfect, but the no punching down rule is strictly enforced below Tier 15. After that, things are a little less concrete, if only because it’s much harder to catch and enforce. If it's not in a city, no one’s going to look into it. And after Tier 35… Well, at that point, there are too many monsters who’ve grown up with the old rules for punch down laws to ever be enforced. It might help if you remember that you can't save everyone. Sometimes, I believe that following the laws as much as we can is all that keeps us from becoming like the people you hunted down. More people might die because we don’t start breaking kneecaps at the first question, but eventually, the general population would be just as scared of us as murderers like Cindy. Lawful restraint is a price we have to pay as a civilized society.”

The older man smirked. “Plus, if you're going to do that to someone, don’t start with their knees. How are they supposed to get to a healer when they can't walk? Start with the hands and ribs.”

Matt tried to take comfort from Kurt's joke, but his thoughts started spinning in circles.

He had been wrong in how he handled things, but he couldn’t change that. He could only be better going forward.

Matt just had to remind himself of that.

***

A whirlwind of activity consumed the next three days. Cindy’s trial was swift and brutal. Kurt and Luna had damning evidence of her misdeeds, and from more than just the latest kidnappings. All of that information rapidly came to light in the following days. The citizens were nearly sent into a riot after learning what kind of monster had been living in their midst.

Viscountess Alara came out of the whole thing, if not looking like the hero, then at least with most people's support. She took the initiative to apologize to the guild in a blanket statement with no caveats, but Matt didn’t miss that the location of the hidden world was leaked, and most news reporters were quick to point out the hidden space's location next to the guild headquarters.

Nigel’s Delvers was given remuneration that went undisclosed, but there seemed to be no bad blood left between the guild leader and the Viscountess.

The minute both the judge and jury handed down the guilty verdict, Viscountess Alara placed her hand on Cindy's head, and the woman instantly turned into a pile of ash that fell to the ground.

Kurt later spilled the beans that she hadn't actually incinerated the criminal instantly. She had used her Concept to squish the woman's brain, and then brought her body into her spatial ring. She swapped the body with ash to give the appearance of its instant destruction.

He said that not having a physical remains helped hasten the mourning process for the victims and prevented martyrs.

Matt figured that it was just cleaner that way.

That afternoon, they departed the planet to return to their normal training.

Luna informed them that she had a few things to set up, and dropped the trio off with Kurt, April, and another tactics trainer in the meantime.

The training was low intensity, which was needed after the mission they went through. None of them complained about being allowed to decompress.

A few months later, Luna arrived and kicked off another round of espionage training and missions.

Matt took special note to avoid any serious physical altercation whenever possible. No exceptions. It got to the point that Luna had to pull him aside and remind him that a last resort was still a resort, and was not to be completely avoided altogether.

Their thirtieth birthdays were approaching when Luna finally instructed them to break through to Tier 9.

For Matt, they explored new ways to concentrate his mana pool, which involved them using Erwin and his laboratory. For the last few years, the scientist had been working on potential answers to Matt's mana concentration problem. While he had ideas, nothing was confirmed.

Since they had a margin of error for the lower Tiers, they wanted to attempt a few simpler methods based on some of Edwin’s hypotheses.

For Tier 8, they made Matt a faux mana crystal with no capacity but incredible throughput.

Erwin's idea was for Matt to continuously fill his mana pool as the potion took effect. If the potion worked on the incoming mana too, they could get more out of the potion, effectively giving him a larger mana pool to concentrate.

It didn’t work, but they didn’t really expect it to. That method had been a long shot at best, but was low-hanging fruit in terms of how cheap and easy it was to test.

What turned out to be a stunning success was his sitting at nearly no mana to speed up the aspecting of his mana type.

In just three weeks, Matt fully converted his 0.01 mana. When he expanded his pool back to 320 mana, it had kept its progress, which let him skip the slow process of converting normally.

His mana now spun like a top. Even once it left its string, it kept spinning for some time.

The effect kept Matt’s mana active for longer than it normally should. Single cast spells like [Fireball] or [Mana Bolt] had their range expanded by about twenty percent. It was useful, but for his other skills with continuous effects, the advantages were far greater.

When Matt now cast [Mage’s Retreat], he could cut the flow of mana early, and the mana inside the skill structure would linger before petering out. That allowed him to redirect his mana generation to other skills while keeping the effects of the skill going for a few seconds. With rapid and controlled switches, Matt could keep twice as many skills active simultaneously, without losing power. Luna had him practicing hard with that ability anytime he had downtime.

While still barred from performing rift experiments with his mana, Edwin helped him test his mana on enchantments and runes. The ‘endless’ aspected mana granted the same twenty percent increase in duration there as it had on his single cast skills. But it had far more interesting implications.

While neither of them were willing to let Matt's mana aspect out into the general public, they theorized that crystals imprinted with his mana aspect would more efficiently power enchantments, so long as the enchantment didn’t require a special type of mana already.

It would only be cost effective on items after Tier 20, Erwin predicted, as the price of a lower Tiered, aspected mana stone would outweigh any efficiency gain. Nonetheless, a fun few weeks went by where they tested his mana on any items they could get their hands on.

When Luna came back, new orders arrived with her.

She wanted their freshly Tier 9 selves to delve like anyone else.

Her reasoning was twofold. They needed to firmly establish their cover identities for the next tournament, happening in seven years, and learn to fight with their new combat styles. At thirty-seven, they would be among the youngest competitors, but not so young as to make their advancement speed worth investigating.

Apparently, most Pathers waited for the last tournament they could participate in, without endangering their ability to reach Tier 11 by the age forty-four deadline. With a tournament every five years, everyone, even at the slowest pace that The Path enforced, had a chance to compete.

Talented enough Pathers might have enough buffer time to qualify for multiple Tier 10 Tournaments, but the rules only allowed them to enter once. Instead, such individuals would often stall themselves at the peak of Tier 10 and refine their skills, to ensure the best showing possible.

The individual rewards were said to be enough to catapult anyone who did well into stardom. But Matt only wanted one thing, mana concentration potions.

Still, to enter, they needed to settle into their cover identities and combat styles.

Matt thought about it long and hard, and ultimately decided to lean into his talisman making. Using talismans usually required a linked Talent to be profitable or affordable, but money was the least of his worries. Plus, it would allow him to continually practice his enchanting skills in the coming years.

He had half-joked that he wanted to be a culinary fighter, but Luna just rolled her eyes, saying he wasn’t Helen. Despite badgering her endlessly, he failed to pry even a single detail out of Luna as to how Aunt Helen fought with her cooking skills. To his disappointment, Liz was clueless on the subject, and no information was available on the EmpireNet.

Liz settled into a more melee-oriented fighting style boosted by fire-based skills.

Aster was firmly limited to her ice-based fighting style, and moped for days about not being able to fight alongside them during the tournament, but eventually accepted it.

That left only their physical forms still needing to be decided on. It was a necessity to remain hidden and establish their cover identities for the next few years, so they kept their physical size close to their natural forms, and only changed their aesthetics.

Liz cut her hair short and made it a bright silver that contrasted nicely with her dusky skin. The purple eyes were a nice touch that made her more rounded face seem innocent.

Matt went with his normal height and frame while switching to a sickly pale skin tone and obsidian dark hair. His initial idea of a form that would have been closer to Liz’s had to be scrapped when they discovered that his burgeoning Concept had revealed its first physical alteration.

His pupils had formed little ‘white holes’ that endlessly spewed energy that bled into his irises. The masks they were using were completely ineffective in changing that feature, and the ethnic group that Liz was disguised as, Onsomi, always had purple or violet eyes. Matt’s own eyes kept overriding the mask and forcing his eye color back to the normal green with swirling white pupils.

When they noticed the change, Matt freaked out and rushed to find any of his higher Tier mentors. Erwin was closest and explained it to him. Spontaneous physical manifestations of Concepts were apparently rare at lower Tiers, but not unheard of. It only signified that he had deepened his alignment with his Concept, nothing more. After Tier 15, he could simply will it away. Until then, he was stuck with it.

Such phenomena were considered as proof of high competency for thoses in his situation; a badge marking someone as a promising young elite.

Many cultivators gained some version of the effect eventually, though it usually appeared after Tier 15, which meant it was easy to hide.

Kurt and Erwin didn’t have one, but both Luna and April did. Luna had wispy purple smoke that radiated off her fingernails, while April had complicated tattoos that slithered along her skin like snakes.

Matt calmed down a bit when he saw that, but was still slightly freaked out. In theory, he should be perpetually blinded with a light source in his pupils, but his vision was unbothered, if not slightly better than before.

One thing finally convinced him that the change was a good thing; Liz’s newfound fascination with staring into his eyes and watching the blue-white specks of his white hole slowly expand out. Despite the image shifting so slowly, she could happily gaze at them for hours.

Aster, in the end, decided to pose as an Imperial Cloud Hound; a fluffy dog breed with luxurious white and silver fur. Apparently, it was the closest thing to a fox she could be. According to her, the proximity to her usual fluffiness and cuteness was enough for her.

After settling into their new appearance, they moved to a Tier 11 world and bought out a Tier 9 delve slot.

To their irritation, they were only allotted a delve window once every five days, which was determined by the natural rate of refill with the planet’s ambient mana. It was so slow, they needed to space people's delves out to once every three hours, just to keep the rift stable.

Matt was slightly tempted to sneak in and charge the rift himself, but wasn’t so impulsive.

Luna wanted them to experience what normal delvers dealt with, and this was one of the greatest limiting factors.

Beyond the restrictions on their combat styles, she prevented them from buying anything with their previously earned funds. For the first time in years, Matt was actually poor again.

It sucked just as much as he remembered. Maybe even more.

He hesitated to say that it was worse, and believed that it was just his time spent away from struggling that made it seem harder. After getting accustomed to the finer things, poverty tasted all the more sour.

Still, Luna allowed them limited funds. They could rent decent accommodations, and food wasn’t an issue. Matt cut costs by sourcing meat and some other ingredients from the rift. Both the food and lodgings were hardly much worse than the high Tier versions they had grown accustomed to in the last few years.

Delving was harder with the limited skills they had access to, which caused them to initially struggle a bit with the Tier 9 rift. But as they settled into their new styles, they quickly eclipsed the challenges that the rift presented.

It was a large affair that took them nearly ten hours to clear under their restrictions. Using their full array of skills, the team could breeze through to the end in half the time.

For the three of them, who were used to delving new rifts every day, the experience became incredibly bland after the first five delves.

The rift was mountainous, with a variety of goats and boars on the outer regions of the mountain range, along with a tribe of kobolds living inside the mountains themselves.

After they learned the general layout of the rift, even the variations that the rift sometimes generated were just as boring. The variations changed the layout of the mountains, but not much else.

Their lack of liquid funds did force them into more careful harvesting of materials, both flora and fauna.

Matt learned how to process animal hides into parchment for his talismans, and their harvester drones got their first real usage. The mountains were poor in ore, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t any. After clearing the rift location, they spent hours finding the minerals and digging them up.

With the rewards of the rift, they slowly built themselves a little nest egg to purchase a Tier 10 rift slot on the same planet with, after half a year.

Luna congratulated them for adapting to their new identities so well, but forced them to hold at the Tier 9 rift for a full year.

Matt decided that after all that time, he abhorred how slowly they advanced most of all. With one delve every five days, they only had six delves a month. Even with the rifts increasing in size, that didn’t make up for the lack of activity. If they kept delving at their Tier, they would only advance to Tier 10 in three years. If they got badly injured, that would increase the time needed exponentially.

Suddenly, Matt and Liz both better understood why everyone else found their pace of advancement so absurd.

With his Talent and their full skill sets, the three of them could have reached Tier 10 in a year and a half, if they delved every other day, which was a pretty relaxing pace to them. If they also delved the same rifts over and over, they could probably finish the rifts fast enough that they wouldn't even need the rest day in between. With enough familiarity, they could reliably finish a Tier 9 rift in six hours, and have the rest of the day to unwind.

At the one-year mark, Luna let them purchase a Tier 10 rift slot, and they started delving up a Tier. Tier 10 was a breakpoint for the increase in power, being a tenth Tier, but even with their limited builds, Matt, Liz, and Aster had little difficulty. The prior year of practice had smoothed out many of the kinks in their new combat styles.

The increased size of the rifts lead to them advancing faster, and the essence being over their Tier helped solidify their past gains. With the monsters giving more essence per kill, the group started pushing through Tier 9 at a more tolerable pace, but it was still slower than they would have liked.

When they finally moved up to Tier 11 rifts, they really started to challenge themselves. Punching two Tiers up was nothing new, but their various restrictions forced their new styles to be tested again and again.

Matt learned how to be a standard mage, which he found to be far too fun. At Tier 9, he had 640 total mana at his fingertips. With his one percent mana being 6 mana, he was finally able to endlessly cast his modified [Fireball]. Despite having a hamstrung skill as his go to, apart from talismans, he was able to blast through or wear down all of their opposition with little effort.

It was some of the most fun he had had in years, as he stood and cackled like a villain in a bad movie while he leveled a small hill inside the rift.

His exuberance was enough for Aster to push past her hatred of fire spells and yip around his legs in excitement.

Their delving eventually devolved into the three of them starting a contest of who could come up with the best monologue line that fit with an endless stream of [Fireball]s.

Aster insisted that she won with ‘I just beat you with the worst elemental type. Imagine what would happen if I used a real spell.’

After that, they moved back to normal training, but it felt like the start of a turning point for Matt. Despite not fighting with his sword, his melee fighting skills were still of great use, as they let him control the battle during the rare instances that a monster got around Liz.

His blood mage partner turned out to have a knack for melee combat that was only outshone by her control of fire spells. Despite her Talent changing her affinity to blood, she had spent her earliest years with an innate ability to create and control flames, and it all came back to her in short order.

Liz bought and mainly used [Fireball], [Fire Manipulation], and the Tier 14 [Fire Weapon], to give her weapon a little more damage. Considering they were limited in their funds, the last skill was all they could afford for her. It tweaked Matt’s pride that Liz, with the skills in her outer spirit so her Talent wouldn’t affect them, had better control than he had with them in his inner spirit.

Aster sulked with all the fire skills being used, which was one of the reasons why Matt purchased [Jolt] for his cover identity. The Tier 8 lightning skill was rare enough that they wanted it on public record that he had it.

After using it a few times, he understood why Emily had adored the skill. At 20 mana, the initial cost was higher than [Fireball] or [Mana Bolt], but the damage was correspondingly greater too.

Still, Matt mainly used inscribed scrolls for combat against all but the weakest forms of monsters. Most talisman masters weren’t willing to waste even the smallest talisman on a weak monster; the relative costs simply did not justify it. As he discovered, the role of a talisman master was to hang back for most of the delve, and then kill the bosses and sub-bosses in quick, massive bursts.

With the proper two or three scrolls, Matt could usually obliterate the bosses in under a minute.

They settled into a new routine, living their lives where little happened between delving the rift and their activities of training and other hobbies. Eventually, while they were delving the Tier 11 rift, the monotony was broken up when they met someone special.

Samuel Barker was a solo Tier 10 delver on The Path. He was only a few years older than them, and intended to participate in the same tournament they were going to.

For a normal Pather team, delving up a single Tier wasn't unusual. Samuel was a solo delver though, which made things more interesting.

He and Matt met by chance at a tactics class, and they learned that they had quite a few similarities. A friendship quickly blossomed. Both were tragically orphaned by rift breaks, though Samuel’s planet managed to handle the situation after the first break. The local noble also stepped up to ensure that the orphaned survivors were well taken care of.

Unlike Matt, he had been scouted for his Talent, which let him turn most skills into variant summons.

Both he and Liz were fascinated by the man's Talent once they saw it in action. Samuel was in turn intrigued by Matt’s powerful talisman-making Talent.

Upon learning that they were going to the tournament as well, Samuel was happy to train with them.

His Talent turned most non-channelled skills into miniature humanoid forms that had a great deal of independence, but were loyal to Samuel. The only downside of the summons was their need to have commands communicated verbally.

It was amazing to watch as a [Jolt] skill turned into a three-foot-tall stick figure made of lighting. It would rush the opponent and punch them, inflicting the normal [Jolt]'s damage with every hit. The Talent was amazing, as the summons didn’t run out of power and dissipate, needing to be physically destroyed in order to be stopped.

[Earth Wall] turned into a stocky pile of rocks, half the size of a normal human, that regenerated from any non-mortal damage, creating a fantastic front-line fighter.

[Fireball] turned into a teardrop of flame that shot out its own [Fireball]s, but it was positively adorable looking, and more like a mascot than something dangerous.

Or so, everyone but Aster thought. She kept freezing the summon while acting innocent.

Matt believed that it was because [Ice Spike] wasn’t nearly as cute in comparison, and just looked like a crystal with arms.

They even delved together more than once, and Samuel was a wrecking ball of damage with his variety of skills.

The other Pather was clearly holding back some of his abilities or skills; while he was holding his own in the rift, he didn’t seem to be at the level of soloing the Tier 12 rift.

None of them could blame him, as they were also hiding portions of their own abilities, though they were showing the true capabilities of their cover identities.

Luna even made an appearance as Matt’s hired mage trainer, and spent an afternoon with the man, giving him some pointers and suggestions. She believed the other Pather had an interesting enough Talent, so she said that she was making a few calls for him and his future trainer.

If Luna’s friends were anything like Kurt and Luna herself, Matt pitied the other man.

They spent four years undercover and establishing their identities, when they got word that Amelia Galley was going to hold an expo, with her tailor abilities as the focus of the attraction. The rumor mill had spread the unofficial word that she was close to her Tier 22 inspiration. It would be her nineteenth one, which showed her dominance in the crafting field.

Her clothes, both armor and casual, sold for Tier 30 values because they were head and shoulders above what most others could make. Her light armor had the same defensive ratings as full metal pate that was three Tiers higher than self.

The rumor was given more credibility with her personally inviting crafters from all over, scheduling more than one demonstration, and even setting up question and answering platforms for herself and other crafting legends under Tier 30.

Both Matt and Liz wanted to go for their respective hobbies’ crafters that would show up. For Liz, her alchemy, and for Matt, his cooking and enchanting. The expo was becoming the gathering place for every crafter in the nearest three kingdoms and Matt wanted to see what other enchanters had to offer.

They, along with millions of others, swarmed towards the planet that was housing the event. Or, more accurately, the moon that was housing the event. Amelia had gotten the local Duke to let her fully occupy one of the moons surrounding the planet that had been terraformed, but not heavily settled yet.

By the time they were nine jumps away, places were already overflowing, and the planets were forced to run hourly jumps as the demand only increased. Matt, Liz, and Aster reverted to their original identities, and used their greater wealth to ensure that they weren't left behind. Even with the two years warning, they only arrived three months before the actual event.

Even the planet below was so packed, finding a place to sleep was more a matter of chance than money. Buildings were being constructed as fast as the inspectors could go through them, but it was still too slow for the influx of people.

The three of them ended up getting a position in a building that was little more than stone walls and doors for privacy. They had to live out of their tents, but it was a place to sleep, which was all they needed.

In the intervening time, while everyone waited for the moon to open its metaphorical doors, Matt used Luna as a mana launderer, and was selling eight hours of his mana generation to the planet for exorbitant prices. And with his current regeneration at 640 MPS, he produced over eighteen million mana in that time frame.

He was making a little less than two Tier 31 mana stones a day, which put his personal contribution second to only the local Tier 35 Duke.

A full eighth of the buildings were created using Matt's second-hand mana. He was smug enough that Liz and Aster stopped talking to him when he started guessing if each building they saw was created from his mana.

It was just too good to see the direct impact his contributions had on the planet. He wasn’t single-handedly changing things, but he was making a large portion of the work possible. That feeling made him warm in a way that building rifts and other indirect uses of his mana never had.

There was a housing problem, and he helped to solve it.

It also served as a reminder as to why people were so keen on his Talent, but Matt tried to keep that voice quiet and in the corner of his mind.

The rest of the time they spent going around to the various impromptu marketplaces that turned up. There, they browsed various goods from crafters or merchants.

One man was selling metal rings enchanted to conjure various mundane drinks, which Matt just found pointless. It took more mana to use the device than simply buying the drinks would cost. Who would waste money on a ring that created coffee?

The answer was a whole lot of people. He didn’t understand the desire, but added it to his list of profitable items to create once he reached Tier 15, and could make the more complicated runes needed for the enchantment.

Most of the best crafters spent their time meeting together behind closed doors, which meant Matt and Liz had no chance at meeting them. But they enjoyed seeing the others near their own Tiers work, and learned quite a bit from their peers.

When the moon and full event opened up, they were some of the first people to arrive. As Luna said, they were a part of her party, and as one of the people who had given the most mana, she was given one of the earliest spots.

She would have gotten one for her Tier on her own, but Matt was proud of the special treatment, even if it was second-hand.

He was impressed when Luna and the other highest Tiers worked together to bring up everyone who couldn't traverse the intervening vacuum of space themselves. As the world was Tier 27, the space was so firm that Matt was only able to fly with great difficulty. But even that was a struggle, to the point of it being useless, and even dangerous to leave the ground higher than a few feet.

Luna’s display of moving millions of people over the course of a few hours was a direct reminder of her overwhelming power. Luna was, at least according to April, the strongest person there, and was doing most of the work herself. Even she didn’t know the woman's true Tier, just that it was at least Tier 40.

Seconds after Matt arrived, he noticed something was wrong with the surrounding essence and mana of the moon. Before he could look into it, he got a message from Kelley, the crafter he had met and befriended in the vassal kingdoms.