Chapter 448

Chapter 448

Matt finally let himself feel the elation and triumph as they safely escaped into chaotic space and he saw they weren’t being chased. They had feared they would be targeted, but the Corporations ship hadn’t sought a final vengeance and turned their blades to them. The other team wouldn’t have won, unless for some reason they hadn’t brought their best fighters into the strange realm, but it might have started a dog pile, everyone hoping to be the lucky last group standing.

Instead, the ones angry enough to fight turned their blades to each other, letting the Unsparing slip out of the system uncontested.

When their scanners couldn’t detect the previous world, everyone finally let out the breath they had been holding. 

Matt was happy to hear that several of the crew had used [Home] on the previous world, so they could track it down again if they wanted to. 

After what felt like an eternity, the crew’s attention turned to wondering what kind of rewards could make them believe they were going to be attacked.

Liz spoke, knowing everyone on the crew could hear but were also watching. “We are going to need the harvest crew and possibly a bigger space. We might need to wait until we settle down to properly look at the loot.”

Her words were slightly contradictory, given her yellow gem identical to the ones they all held, but the crew still hung onto every word she said as she explained the strange realm and its challenges.

As she did so, Matt probed his gem.

At first he thought it was a simple storage item but that idea quickly changed when he saw Liz pull an herb out of her gem.

When she did so, the entire structure of the gem shifted; they all noticed it and hoped the rest of the items wouldn’t be hurt by the oddity.

Liz quickly tested the gem but found she could pull items out but couldn’t return them, which made sense and explained the gem’s uniqueness.

Or it did for most people.

Everyone else was far more interested in scanning the gems to see what they had gotten but Matt studied the phenomenon more.

He was used to crystalline mana structures but he had never seen one like this. Where he would expect consistent patterns in the atomic structure of the gem, instead, each gem reminded Matt more of a cluttered junk drawer than any gem structures he knew; nothing he did could make sense of the internals.

It wasn’t until he saw the crystal’s inner structures shift chaotically, as Liz pulled another herb out for their gathering experts’ appraisal, that he understood what was going on inside the gems.

As it turned out, the Natural Treasure that were herbs weren’t totally preserved and would need to be put away in better containers. 

Matt almost laughed as he watched the crew members realize how many Natural Treasures they had returned with. The size of the haul became their own biggest enemy and the crew worked at their best speeds, not wanting to lose any of the items due to their negligence.

However that wasn’t Matt's problem to solve and if he tried to help, he’d only get in the actual experts’ way. Not that they needed to stress that much, the gems were preserving the Natural Treasures, it just wasn’t a fully-permanent preservation. Matt let himself tune everyone else out for a few moments.

The inside of the gem was fascinating. 

It was similar to an irrational number like pi, with there being no repeating structure for everything else to crystalize and form around despite looking like a typical gem. Even his [AI] couldn’t find a whiff of a pattern. Its internal structure looked chaotic because when an herb was removed, the pattern shifted chaotically. But it wasn’t transforming as he originally suspected, rather it was comparable to looking up and down a string of pi spelled out. The pattern, if it could be called that, didn't change but the portion one could see might be widely different with each item removed.

How that had the effect of storing items, Matt had no idea, but he toyed with the premise behind it.

Non-standard crystalline structures weren’t unique but Matt made a note to play around and see if he could copy this pattern when he practiced his mana control later.

Instead of such deep contemplation, Matt was distracted by finally being able to see the loot they had gathered.

A quick count later, the crew had the numbers.

They had gathered a little over fifty thousand Tier 25 and lower herbs from the beginning of the pocket spaces in the months they spent inside alone.

Above Tier 25, they earned correspondingly fewer items but they were also the most valuable and important items out of the rewards. The seven thousand Tier 25 or higher Natural Treasures were enough to make even the veteran explorers excited.

It was an enormous haul.

A good number of the items were ores, already dead items like various woods, or were otherwise fine to be stored in a simple storage box, so that was exactly what the crew did. They only checked to ensure the Natural Treasures were inherently stable and wouldn’t have an issue being mixed with other Natural Treasures before moving on.

Aster and Allie salivated over the box scanning, constantly looking for anything truly interesting in the low-Tier stuff, speculating widely on what some of the weirder Natural Treasures might do based on the item’s energy signature. 

Matt made his own quick scan, seeing a decent amount of weapon upgrades treasures he knew would sell for a fortune back in settled space and grinning, knowing that even with others pulling similar items out of the breach, the market was so large the prices wouldn’t crash but go higher. People had to keep up or be left behind and that alone could create a market frenzy.

That was how he noticed the sheer amount of dual elemental items, created during the transitory periods, that would need further investigation before anyone risked using them.

He did however see several interesting items that caught his attention.

He personally hoped they would keep access to the Tier 25 Essence Fig Tree. Each fig produced was the equivalent of a monster kill. The Natural Treasure didn’t do anything more than convert ambient essence into rift-compressed essence, but that was all it needed to do to be worth a fortune as the tree didn’t have stringent living conditions or essence requirements.

They could stick it on Palustris and create fire essence figs and sell them Empire-wide for a massive profit for practically zero effort with the tree.

Fire cultivators unable to make it to their ducal capital would buy the figs to refine their own fire cores, or those who needed to leave and didn’t want to slow down their cultivation would buy them before they left. 

The next items that caught Matt’s eye were a series of general bloodline-enhancing items. Always valuable, they were a little too low Tier for any of them to use, but if they had a child with Manny’s heir’s generation, the Tier 20 to Tier 25 items would help their kids along their own path enormously.

The others would undoubtedly be picked up by the crew members for their own families or sold on the open market.

Amusingly enough, Rah knew what one of the Natural Treasures was when everyone else was stumped.

“I know this one well. It is an herb that, when burned as an incense, lets a cultivator enter a slightly psychedelic state that makes skill creation safe. I’ve been fortunate enough to use two before. I will say the skills you create can sometimes be… More eccentric than intended. If used, it is good to already be in the midst of a project because the mental state lends itself to… strange tangents.” 

Seeing he knew of it, the harvesting crew asked how best it should be stored. 

Tapping his chair, Rah said, “In my Realm, I would dry it out and powder it but with your Realm’s alchemical abilities, it might make a better potion fresh. That in mind, I would suggest keeping it alive as best as you can.”

Taking his advice to heart, they did exactly that, with the alchemists in the crew each reaching out for what Rah knew of the Natural Treasure and seeing if they could detect anything obvious.

Because of their mana type choices in the strange realm, they even had hundreds of valuable healing and divination-affecting Natural Treasures.

At their insistence, both of the Seekers took the Natural Treasures that fit them best. Magnus took a Tier 27 Infinity Splinter that, once infused into his sacrificial dagger, would boost all divination powers channeled through it. The effect would have been even stronger but the Tier gap meant that unless Magnus wanted to spend even more to nurture the effect, it would remain a minor but noticeable boon.

Given that even the best Seekers struggled to find, let alone buy, divination Natural Treasures, he was over the moon and profusely thanked them while clearly calculating over how many such Natural Treasure’s his cut would allow him to directly take.

Lura, like Magnus, took the treasures her powers told her to. With their permission, she took an unnamed Natural Treasure, being willing to go into debt using an item that wasn’t yet truly appraised but wanting the associated power boost. After she absorbed the wisp of muddy light, she relayed the effect. 

If she chose to undersell the effect to pay less, she didn’t do a good job as she reported that now, once a year, she could increase the power of her next divination twofold, leaving Magnus looking for another similar item.

Not that he could complain too much, given that he found a Natural Treasure that he believed would have an inheritable effect and gave to his immortal goat pet. If his efforts paid off his goats would soon be more inclined to divination mana, making them better Talent targets.

One of the weirdest items they got were skill upgrade orbs. Them dropping in place of Natural Treasures wasn’t unusual in and of itself, as upgrade orbs were technically Natural Treasures, but with the elemental transitions, the strange realm had created seemingly-unique elemental skill upgrade orbs.

Or at least that was what the general consensus was after inspecting the upgrade orbs infused with elemental energies.

Sadly, despite the sheer number of skill upgrade orbs, they didn’t get any Tier 38 orbs, instead getting three Tier 26 orbs and a plethora of Tier 14s. Two were ordinary but the final upgrade orb pulsed with a soft green healing energy.

They had no idea if their speculation was correct but the unique Tier 26 upgrade orb was so valuable, it was put in special storage that could be kept under lock and key.

In fact, all of the elementally-tainted upgrade orbs were put away for further testing once they returned to settled space.

Matt’s attention was then grabbed by the rarer and usually organic Natural Treasures that needed special handling to ensure they would survive the trip back to settled space as they reached the Tier 25 and higher items.

One that caught his eye was what looked like a Phoenix Lifeblood Lily, except it was made out of Ichor instead. The normal lily had enough of a baseline Rank 2 phoenix bloodline for a bloodline cultivator to swap bloodlines. For the incredibly profligate, they were also fantastic nourishments for a phoenix, being an incredibly easy to absorb energy to refine their bloodline.

And they seemingly had one for ichor.

The issue, if it could be called that, was that the typical fire Phoenix Lifeblood Lily was a Tier 25 Natural Treasure with higher-Tier variants being simply improved versions, giving more and better energies. There were other variants for the other popular phoenix elements but those were also all normally only found at higher Tiers, relative to their complexity. He knew for a fact that the Ice Phoenix variant was only ever found at Tier 34 or higher. 

Ichor, being even more complex, should be a higher Tier than Tier 34, let alone Tier 27, which was the Tier of the herb they had.

In the midst of that, Matt was distracted as one of the other team members brought out a pair of flowers entwined together, shouting in excitement for additional help.

One flower was ice blue while the remaining one was fire red.

Matt didn’t know what the item was by sight but one of the crewmembers shared the information, letting everyone else appreciate it.

It was called World Straddler by most because it took two types of directly opposing mana for the Natural Treasures to form.

Normally, the need for extreme opposite elements next to each other made the formation conditions near impossible but the rift had made them easy.

The reason the harvester reacted so much was the Natural Treasure before them could add a secondary element to a cultivator's mana pool without merging or interacting with the original aspecting as one would expect. The only requirement to use the Natural Treasure was the cultivator had to have one of the two mana types.

Fire and ice was a classic combination that would sell at a premium.

Matt watched as one of the crew members carefully mimicked its normal formation conditions in one of the storage containers and carefully put the Natural Treasure away once he confirmed it was stable.

His attention was pulled back to Liz, who was still busy helping set up a storage container for ichor items, when the next item was slightly horrifying enough to grab everyone's attention. That seemed to be something of a running theme with the ichor Natural Treasures.

The Tier 30 Natural Treasure looked like an Elemental Bonsai Tree, which was a priceless Natural Treasure that produced fairly regular batches of product, making it a near literal money tree. 

A typical Elemental Bonsai was a miniature fruit-bearing apple tree, whose apples varied in type and element. The fruit each tree produced never changed but they could impart various effects depending on the fruit. The only downside of the tree, if it could be called that, was its lifespan was usually only a few dozen generations before it would wither and die.

This Ichor Bonsai Tree might or might not follow that rule. It was not normal.

Matt recognized it.

It was the heart of one wearboar which had given them such a hard time. 

Except the wereboar’s circulatory system was now bent and twisted into the shape of a bonsai apple tree. The trunk of the tree, a massive fleshy pulsating vein, its branches, smaller capillaries, with a thin layer of golden flesh serving as leaves, almost similar to a bat's wing.

The apples were instead orbs of light floating beneath the vein branches.

Even as the harvesting team did their best to settle the Ichor Bonsai Tree in an environment that wouldn’t cause it to deteriorate, Matt, along with everyone else, tried to probe it and see if they could feel what it did.

Liz, being the resident ichor expert, spent a few extra moments inspecting the harvest but shrugged saying, “I don’t have the faintest clue what this does but I know it does something powerful. That's for sure. I wanna eat one so badly.”

Matt rolled his eyes but the official appraisers couldn’t tell them much more than that, so he had to give Liz the point. Anyone could tell the super unique Natural Treasure was powerful. The question ultimately depended on if it was powerful for them.

He suspected it wasn’t only valuable, but priceless. Once the tree was in a proper ichor environment, the tree pulsed with energy in a steady cadence, like a monster contented to stay in its new home.

Not that either of them were sad about not being able to tell what the item did. That generally meant the item was uniquely powerful, or at least unique in some capacity.

If the energy wasn’t ichor, Matt would almost have called it a regeneration type of Natural Treasure, but thanks to the fire and lighting aspects making ichor inherently volatile, eating one of the orbs raw like one normally ate the Elemental Bonsai Tree apples seemed like a particularly bad idea.

In the end, they couldn’t figure out what it did and could only preserve it and wait until better appraisers got their hands on the objects in settled space. 

Liz shook Matt slightly, unable to contain her excitement as she leaned in for a kiss before saying, “We made out like bandits. We could turn back around to settled space right now and I wouldn't feel bad at all.”

Matt grinned back, knowing exactly how she felt, multiplied by his excitement for her to finally have some Natural Treasures of her own manat type to look over. Natural Treasures were, by their nature, mystical and sometimes people learned things from studying them. Sometimes it was as ‘simple’ as replicating its effect, but other times, it was as rare as creating new skills or bloodline abilities.

It wasn’t often, but Liz hadn’t even been able to try her luck before now, let alone actually have a Natural Treasure she might find personally useful.

Not that she was the only one to make out well in their excursion.

They all saw items they liked or wanted.

Best of all for Matt and Liz, they even found several ichor items they believed would protect any children they had from most of the worst effects of ichor. Or that was their observation based on the energies. Most likely that was a secondary or tertiary effect, but it was more than enough reason for them to be put aside carefully by the crew without Matt or Liz needing to say more than a word.

Another notable item they found was a Tier 20 Natural Treasure allowing anyone to enter a Legacy Obelisk another time, so long as they aren’t past the Treasure’s Tier. It was too low for them to use but the Imperial government would pay handily for it.

Matt’s personal vote for coolest item was the Dragon’s Tears Susanne pulled out of her personal project pocket spaces. 

A honeydew-type Natural Treasure, Dragon’s Tears nectar was one of the original inspirations for the second set of Tier 10 bottled Concepts, allowing mass production of more complex artificial Concepts.

It, like a few other Natural Treasures, could grant whoever ate the single drop of nectar a Domain stage relative to its Tier. If Tier 25 or over, a Dragon's Tear would give an Intent. It was one of the few types of Natural Treasure that could be found with such vastly different effects given its Tier. Being able to compare the difference in the artificial Domains the Dragon’s Tears gave out as Concepts and Intents had been what allowed the original teams to create both variations of bottled Concepts.

Susanne didn’t particularly need an Intent of a mana type based entirely on her own energies, but the plant reacted to her.

So long as she was near the now-potted plant, the Dragon Tear would flourish and dance for hours on end even without a special environment; but if she didn’t visit often enough, the Dragon’s Tear would start to wilt. That ended the testing process as they didn’t want to harm the Dragon’s Tear and she put it in a pot and kept it with her, only placing it in long-term storage when they neared another ship or world.

That oddity made it Matt’s favorite item, hands down, and he wanted to know what a proper Talented appraiser would say about the item.

That was how Matt felt about most of their items. With the elemental ratios being in flux, the Natural Treasures produced were hard to identify but fun to speculate on. 

Matt personally grabbed a Tier 30 ore that, when refined and properly treated, could be added to make bladed growth weapons sharper on a Tier up. It didn’t replace the items needed to evolve the growth item, instead absorbed alongside them.

That type of item was incredibly rare and valuable, to the degree they were normally used upon acquisition or shortly thereafter, not even making it to market, and better yet the variant he had was a neutral mana Natural Treasure, making it a perfect fit for him.

Every exploration group handled loot distribution and allocation differently. 

Most smaller groups allowed crew members to take what they wanted for the item's estimated value so long as it was a known item, while others didn’t allow anyone to touch even the most common Natural Treasure without them going through an appraiser's hands.

Massive hauls from strange realms were one of the general exceptions where all but the closest teams would rather have the items inspected for oddities before use, hoping one of the items would be subtly different and hyper valuable.

It was rare but there were always teams popping up who made a fortune selling what looked like a normal Natural Treasure but was actually a rare variant.

Matt didn’t mind the resolution that everyone, crew and the seven of them alike, came up with. Once everything was inspected, anyone could take anything they wanted out of the bulk Natural Treasures below Tier 25, but everything over that, or anything that looked unique or special, was kept aside.

As the leaders of the expedition and the ones who hired the crew, as well as being the ones who had put in the hard work to get the Natural Treasures, the seven of them each got to take items within the estimated value they had. Following custom, one was entirely free, while the others would be paid for according to their estimated value.

They insisted the crew all take at least one item as well but most of the crew genuinely seemed to want to wait until after the appraisal so they could ensure they got the best item. 

The seven of them had no such patience. 

Matt’s first choice was obvious and he grabbed the Tier 30 ore. It was an easy pick and even going after Susanne, she didn’t need it and so didn’t take it. A strange realm might let him upgrade his sword out there and he didn’t want to miss that opportunity, which was why he was carrying his neutronium ingot with them.

Sadly, despite the plethora of arcane Natural Treasures, none of them were known mana-aspecting Natural Treasures. He didn’t give up hope entirely yet, as there’d be a flood of Natural Treasures entering the market, including from people going even deeper than them, but it was still unfortunate on an otherwise spectacular haul.

As his second choice, Matt picked up a Tier 30 Arcane Life Scale. They had never seen the exact Natural Treasures before but the energy signature was clear. Anyone who consumed it would have their spirit strengthened, more than fulfilling the requirements for all three crafters who could modify his sword to add the neutronium ingot should he not find a strange realm to do it in the breach.

Such strange realms weren’t exactly common but they weren't rare either. 

Best of all, the seven of them retrieved several such spirit boosting treasures and Matt took the neutral mana one that he hoped would be synergistic with his existing Natural Treasures. Everyone else in their group followed suit and selected the spirit boosting Natural Treasures that best fit them, even if that meant lack of specialization.

That was in fact the first and last Natural Treasures all of them absorbed. As much as he and the others would love to just absorb all of the best Natural Treasures, over their lives and post--Path careers, they had absorbed a lot of precious items and Natural Treasures. If they absorbed the wrong item, they might find themselves weaker, even if they gained a new ability, so while they happily used what they immediately could, they didn’t go overboard quite yet.

Thankfully, there were ways around such complications most of the time, but they usually took additional potions or carefully balancing to pull off so they only had to be patient.

Not that they minded only taking so few items, but that seemed to surprise the crew more accustomed to Lila’s draconic tendencies.

Though that didn’t mean they held themselves back. Liz found a familiar looking ore that she felt would upgrade the Blood Iron she had absorbed so long ago when they were on the Path.

Her instincts had told her the ichor Natural Treasure would allow her to increase the varieties of metals her Blood Iron could create and there was no reason not to take it. Reality proved her slightly wrong but in an even better way, as the ore additionally gave the metals produced an ichor slant, allowing Liz to make, with great effort, small amounts of ichor variants of any metal her now upgraded Blood Iron could create. That in turn gave her a bit more control over the metal while it was in her blood, which was a nice tertiary benefit all things considered. Given enough time she would be able to convert all of the metal she stored in her blood but that would take a considerable amount of time as it was a biological process even she couldn't do more than nudge along.

Liz wasn’t the only one to get a little extra out of the more unique Natural Treasures but she did make out the best with that one.

Her second major item wasn’t ichor-related at all. In fact it was one Natural Treasure they pulled out of a neutral mana pocket space, and Matt was fairly sure it had come out of his gem, letting him claim credit. It was possibly in the top one hundred rarest items they had gotten all together, right next to his Life Scale, only waiting for the unknown items to be identified to claim its place. 

It was the type of item crews boasted about for decades. 

A Master’s Dominion was a two-part Natural Treasure, consisting of any two naturally connected, entwined items, one parasitic on the other. Most such treasures allowed a beast master cultivator to project their Domain through their monsters as extensions of themselves, somewhat similar to a bond like Matt and Aster shared.

Best of all, the variation they found was one of the variations that worked regardless of which ‘monster’ it was channeled through.

The instant two Lizzes took the miniature pine tree and clinging ivy and crushed them, Matt felt her Domain pulse.

A third Liz stepped out of her and she tried to project her Domain through the additional clone at the same time.

From the tentative fluxations it was clear it almost worked, the connection faltering at the last moment, but Matt was happy regardless. He knew this would let Liz remove one of her final few limitations of only being able to project her Domain from a single body at a time.

In another century, Matt was confident Liz would have expanded the power into a dozen or more bodies, making her all the more lethal.

Aster’s haul was a little less personally useful, as she was attempting to shift her bloodline and didn’t particularly need winter, ice, or aurora Natural Treasures, but they had made pocket spaces of each type just in case and a few paid off.

She took a Core of an Ice Mountain gem Natural Treasure that made ice spells channeled through it more robust. Once she merged the gem with her tiara, she’d empower her golem’s innate defense but she’d need to Tier up her tiara or find a strange realm that interacted with growth items if she wanted to get it improved before they returned to settled space.

Her most impactful upgrade was an uneventful Tier 25 space Natural Treasure stolen from Allie, at least according to the teleporter, that once absorbed into her Talent’s spirit space made it harder to escape from once inside. 

She then reinforced it even more with a Winter Gaol seed. 

When carefully nurtured in a sufficiently cold environment, it would grow into a large evergreen tree that strengthened the cold in its surrounding, letting it seep deeper into cultivators body and making it harder to resist, paradoxically growing stronger as you near the edges of its area of the tree's influence. 

It took pride of place at the center of her spirit space, and she hoped that its influence would grow to cover it in its entirety. To aid with that, she also grabbed a handful of plant boosting and Winter based natural treasures to hopefully nurture and strengthen it even further.

Allie wasn’t any less happy than Aster. The teleporter had ensured her and Zack made her pocket space perfectly, and their diligence had paid off. She got two Natural Treasures that would help her bypass spatial restrictions. 

The lower Tier Natural Treasure, a Tier 26 Invisible Feather, would take a decade or so to fully absorb but it would allow her to slip through more elegant anti-teleportation wards. Her second Natural Treasure was a Tier 30 phantom that had come from the boss when it inverted, similar to Liz’s bonsai tree being a singular drop.

They had no idea what it would do but Allie was confident it was going to be good for her.

She additionally took a Void Stone as one of her rewards. Instead of being related to void mana, the Natural Treasure was a space-type natural treasure they weren’t sure where it came from, indicating it might have been one of the Natural Treasures the other teams created.

Its main purpose was to allow cultivators to add a space aspect to their Domains but Allie felt she could hone her Domain on the item and paid for it gleefully.

Not that Zack had been left bereft. 

The two of them had made a travel mana pocket space but most of the items were beyond their crew’s ability to appraise. Zack however absorbed a Travel mana Natural Treasure that was little more than a single wisp of purple energy. Once absorbed, it let him sense fast moving objects around him independently of his other senses, which would certainly come in handy should they encounter Valentina or somebody like her in the future.

He then grabbed a lifesaving Natural Treasure. In fact it was meant to synergize with the first Natural Treasure. Spring’s Rebirth did exactly what its name implied and allowed a cultivator to recover from fatal damage.

It was a one-time-use item but it was so valuable because once absorbed, the Spring’s Rebirth would last forever, growing with Zack as he Tiered up instead of being rendered ineffective.

Susanne actually absorbed one of the travel mana treasures as well, taking the speed-enhancement effect of her existing Natural Treasures to the next level, as well as picking up one of the known divination items.

Unnamed but with a recognizable energy structure, the Natural Treasure allowed Susanne to hone all of her seeker abilities, her single eye Natural Treasure, onto one object, her sword. Doubling up on what her eye already did showed small improvements in her sparing ability as her now twice enhanced eyes adjusted to the upgrade, letting her see more with less effort. Once she settled in and adjusted to the additional information, Matt was curious to the level she would reach.

She intended to absorb a Domain clone enhancing Natural Treasure but they could only digest so many chances at once if they didn’t want to risk rejection.

Rah, on the other hand, initially struggled to pick any of the best items and only after they insisted did he pick a few things out, preferring, like the crew, to wait and make an informed choice for most of his share. 

The few things he did take all grabbed Matt’s attention. A chunk of Tier 30 granite speckled with veins and spots of gold Rah intended to absorb feeling it would have a positive effect.

He was pleasantly surprised as his personally enchanted stone gained an innate suppression effect on other enchanted items near them. The effect wasn’t debilitating in its current form but it was a small passive reduction to anyone who got in close. 

After much pressure he also absorbed a second known Natural Treasure. A Mote of Chaos looked exactly like its name implied but instead of killing the user it allowed them to modify a single aspect of a spell. Matt had considered taking the mote but it was notoriously unreliable when used on cracked spells and he was happy for Rah to take anything, feeling bad seeing him watching the rest of them absorb or grab Natural Treasures.

They even had lower Tier Natural Treasures Matt identified that their friends and family might find useful and they all blissfully settled in to adjust to the influx. 

The high of the previous strange realm was followed up by three more Tier 15 or higher worlds that housed above average loot, but eventually they could progress no further and settled down on a Tier 31 world, intending to strip it bare.

They had reached the center of the Rasdale tidal breach and where there should have been energies of the second layer of chaotic space. Instead, they found a core of energies from the third layer, making it too dangerous to risk going in deeper.

Like everyone else they would settle down until the metaphorical gates opened up and try to hit as many strange realms near them until they could go deeper.

But first they needed to defend their conquest from everyone following.

***

Abbey Capple waited patiently in her brightly lit office for the countdown for the start of her work month. She loved her wife but as the shift officially started and her graphs, spreadsheets, cell growth reports, and live feeds of her herbs updated, she felt at ease. 

This was her element. Not home where she just wished she could get back to her herbs. Her shift partner Vester’s work was passable, but Abbey knew she was able to do far better. She just hadn’t yet been able to impress the higher-ups enough to be trusted with full-time care of an herb growing station.

She was in fact one of the junior most Analysts at SunShine Herbs, the premier Tier 30 supplier of Alchemists in the Corporations’ Prime sector two Sub sector five from the innumerable Base sector worlds. If one day they could break into the Tier 45 market, they would be able to operate in all three Prime sectors.

It was in fact the elevation to a Tier 30 company that Abbey, a newly immortal Tier 15, had been able to join the grandiose mega corp as they bought up the empty space in star systems of her subsector and set up new orbital-scale greenhouses. 

Anyone who was really into herbology had applied, and it was only through a dozen ruthless interviews and test rounds that Abbey had earned her job on the underside of the massive monoliths in a Tier 11 world.

In the space stations, SunShine Herbs grew millions of herbs for alchemists of Tier 9 or lower. Those who worked over there were the farmers. They dealt with massive quantities of low-level herbs where a bruised leaf or a slight discoloration might be acceptable.

Those fields took massive installations, but instead of letting that hard work go to waste, SunShine Herbs had used the existing infrastructure to grow as near perfect herbs as was possible. 

Her herbs were sold only to privileged clients who paid for near perfection. It was her job to take living and breathing things and make them grow to a uniform yet perfect state. 

The alchemists who used her herbs would eventually become the leading figures of alchemy companies, whether they be the SunShine Herbs internal alchemist or outsiders the mega corp sold to.

Looking over the previous month's information and inspecting each of the herbs thoroughly, Abbey went through each choice Vester made.

She made several corrections but overall it was an acceptable job, even if not as good as she could have done.

Before she knew it, a month had passed, and she returned to normal life for the next month. Delicate work like hers had its benefits, but it also had its downsides, and she caught up with her wife whom she hadn’t seen in all that time. As Tier 15s, that wasn’t the end of the world, but they genuinely enjoyed each other's company and Abbey was more than happy to spend her time hanging out quietly while Diana worked on whatever repair commissions she had between larger new forgings.

If their schedules clashed, they might only talk once or twice, but Abbey was pleasantly surprised when she was greeted with a prepared meal and a present.

The news that her wife had gotten a large commission to rework an adventuring company's training gear and she would be going head down for the next three months was mollified somewhat by her wife's gift, a new-to-her old book.

When she wasn’t able to tend to her herbs, Abbey loved nothing more than curling up with a good book in the loft above Diana’s workshop, listening to the quiet sounds that made it through the carefully-controlled sound dampening enchantments. 

Thankfully, her wife's hobby to do when she had time off while Abbey was working was scouring old junk stores looking for things she could repair for a profit and she often found old books for Abbey.

Abbey didn’t particularly care what she read but she enjoyed the process of reading an old book. There was a history in that, and Diana had found her a storybook printed on a very rare paper that felt rough when new but baby smooth when handled.

The book was clearly well-read and each page had smudges and smears.

Abbey carefully checked the rearmost page and found the link carefully stamped onto the fiber where no one could see with normal vision but was obvious to spiritual sense. There she found other people chatting about the book.

Immortals needed hobbies and Abbey had chosen old books. The hobby gathered on private forums and talked about the single book using the links hidden in the fiber of the book as ways to ensure only people who had read the book talked in the right chats.

The story itself was simple and Abbey read something she meant to ask Diana about, but discarded it when she saw how busy her wife was.

After preparing meals for Diana to eat when she was gone in case Diana came up for air, Abbey went back to work and forgot all about the story. It wasn’t until three months later when she returned home was Diana able to ask how she liked the book, having finally finished her project and taking time off to make a custom-order for a new enchanted weapon.

In another few decades, they hoped she’d be able to open her own full-time shop instead of being an independent craftsman who had to pick up side jobs to fund her main craft. Tier 15 was a brutal career Tier for crafters with so many people stalling out, but between the two of them, their differences ensured they’d manage to muddle through eventually as they both improved their skills.

“I liked the book. It was very old, which is always a plus. It was a cute collection of stories. I think a family with a young child had it. A few stains but it was well maintained. Thank you for it.”

Diana was looking set to preen when Abbey asked, “It did make me have a question though. I forgot what the question was though. Give me a moment.” 

Quickly scanning the copy of the book her [Assistive Intelligence ME26-MI] had made, Abbey found the spot in the story that had prompted the idea. 

“Here it is. This story is about a train that falls through a hole in reality to a new world, but can’t return for some contrived reason that makes no sense, so the people create a new civilization. One of the things they found was a rift that had light aura in a world without a star.”

Diana snorted. “Ahh, so it's that type? I get where you’re going now. They are super lucky and the main character becomes a Tier 50 of their own Great Power. I’ve read the type. Who’s the author? Have we read them before?”

Abbey waved a hand. “Don’t distract me yet! I wanted to ask about this moment where they happen to have some enchantment master who knew of super old enchantments that used aura to make light enchantments wayyyy more mana-efficient and made plants grow at visible speeds. The reasoning given was ‘they are normally too expensive to be practical’. I think the guy was really just a way for the author to smudge the numbers without relying on Talents but it… caught my eye. I wanted to ask if you had heard of anything like that before. Usually when an author uses that kind of logic it's because something similar exists. I thought it was interesting and wanted to know if it was really a thing.”

Their small little ritual was one of the affectations they both happily continued even now that they weren’t mortals hardly scraping by. Back then, they would ask each other to look up information if the other person had more related database access instead of spending the credits to risk a single search cost.

Diana was more than happy to help her look and, being adjacent to the enchanting field as a smith who enchanted her own work, Abbey’s wife had better information sources than most. 

Through the book, they were able to track down the real name of the magically powerful rune instead of the one the author used. 

The Mendel Enchantment. 

Abbey was just going to write the idea off as fantasy but Diana found an old repository of nonstandard, and generally useless, runes and enchantments that had the full information about the Mendel Enchantment. Being a collection of junk, it was cheap enough to be an easy buy.

Abbey poked at it with Diana to see what was so bad about the enchantment, but was aghast to see the enchantment was nowhere near what the book portrayed. She hadn’t expected much, but that much aura could make a dozen aura potions. In fact, the light enchantment was less than one percent more efficient when created with the aura than without, but the rumors of herbs growing faster was nothing more than rumors perpetrated by those who didn’t believe in the numerous reports proving otherwise.

The aura also had to be treated in an overly complicated alchemical bath that, as far as they could tell, only served to strip away what made the aura unique to make it easier to handle, which only added to the cost.

Abbey laughed away the idea, with Diana moving on after she was properly distracted. 

Later the next morning, Abbey found herself alone in bed, not seeing her wife anywhere in the loft.

She unsurprisingly found Diana in the workshop, but instead of hammering away on some project, she found her wife scribbling enchantments into a paper.

Upon seeing her, Diana said the words that changed their lives. “I think I can make this light enchantment better. I was thinking about how sad it was the inventor had to use a potion to get any control over the aura when I realized two things. Aura, as well as aura control methods, are cheap now. That means I might be able to leverage any cost-saving measures the aura adds if I update the rune to modern standards."

Understanding what that might mean, Abbey immediately supported her wife in the endeavor, lending what little she could do to help.

A more efficient selective full-spectrum light source could be amazing for her herbs and a dozen other purposes.

While trying to sleep, Diana couldn’t stop thinking about how foolish it was to soak aura for the Mendal rune, something whose value depended on how pure it was, before using it.

She was half convinced that was the major part of the enchantment’s problem.

As it turned out, she was partially correct. Using raw light aura directly was possible but hard. It didn’t accept handling easily, which was a problem all alchemists who made aura potions knew well. That meant they had techniques though, and by practicing one, Diana was able to get a hang on it well enough to apply it to enchanting, giving her her first breakthrough.

It took five years of iterations, five years of free time spent, five years of missed meals and extra work for both of them to support each other, but Diana managed to create a new light enchantment that was exactly one percent more mana efficient than the currently available same-Tier runes.

The added upfront cost of the aura hurt the return on investment payback period but the theoretical reduction in mana upkeep would hopefully be enough to counteract that. The math made sense but it was close with their first iteration.

Seeing that, Diana turned her attention to the process of enchanting with aura instead of only raw mana, trying to separate what was a useful step and what was fluff only done because it was what had worked the first time.

She wasn’t able to completely reverse engineer the process, letting her make any rune accept aura as an input, but Diana was able to make the rune more efficient by improving the original Mendel rune. 

Finally, they had their answer when Diana created a more efficient rune while keeping the original engraving method intact, sans the potion, giving them an almost three percent reduction in mana upkeep across light enchantments of all sizes.

A bit shabby, but viable, product in hand, they secured the rights to the invention, documenting everything. A truly new light source was useful but not ground breaking enough that companies were ready to retrofit their factories proactively if the two of them didn’t make any further breakthroughs.

Abbey would have been happy to use her job as an avenue to sell the invention to SunShine Herbs but Diana hated the idea of working for a mega corp. Instead, they began preparing for a product showcase, which meant testing things themselves, getting the information potential clients would need to pass up the corporate chain of command if they wanted to sell a finished product to even a low-Tier corporation, let alone a high-Tier one.

Knowing that more numbers were never bad, Abbey took her turn at the helm of the project and blocked off Diana’s workshop and most of their living space. Sticking with what the two of them knew, she had Diana create five small-sized encapsulated herb gardens to show the mana efficiency improvements using their light runes over the competitors’.

Abbey, being herself, put her everything into the project. She spent two years getting baselines before she even started the experiment, going as far as to go on an extended break from work, forcing the couple to dip into their savings.

She wouldn’t half-ass growing an herb, even if it was for a side project that might never take off.

It was in those tests trying to showcase Diana’s new rune’s mana efficiency that she noticed a discrepancy.

The herbs using Diana’s grow lights grew the tiniest bit faster than those not. 

If it wasn’t for Abbey recording cellular division charts like she normally did at SunShine Herb when tracking growth models, she never would have noticed the discrepancy. It was that small of a difference, but remembering the rumors about the original enchantment and knowing how valuable even a tiny increase in efficiency could be for a corporation and how much they would pay for that, the two of them immediately pivoted their testing for the much larger prize.

It took Abbey fully quitting her job and ten years of improvements from Diana with another three of testing, but they definitively proved their new version of the Mendel Enchantment made plants grow faster.

It wasn’t even at a full percent yet but even Diana alone had managed to get it there, showing the vast potential aura-based enchanting had. Or at least the potential the Mendal rune had.

Knowing they couldn’t handle things on their own, they went to the first Tier 40 lawyers who would take the time to listen to them in an effort to protect themselves.

Six months of preparation later, they had a meeting with the law firm enticing the various interested factions into a private auction for the details of their work.

Things had grown well beyond them and they had no issues selling out and securing their fortune, unlike those who continued to push for so much they ended up dead as a consequence.

When the rune was unveiled and its abilities made public for the first time, they watched on their private feed as the various company executives panicked. Suspecting this reaction would happen beforehand, the auction house announced a brief intermission while they ‘passed around additional information’. The executives used the opportunity to call everyone they could, trying to leverage everything. Most felt that was their company’s greatest hope of not being slowly pushed out in the next decades as one competitor edged past them with all of the information carefully hidden from the briefings. 

An early lead might not matter but some of the time it meant the race was lost and they didn’t want to risk being the next example. 

The law firm took twenty percent of the final sale value for their services but without them, the high-Tier corporations would have simply taken what they wanted rather than paying the two of them at all.

Abbey and Diana walked into the meeting two fairly average Tier 15s and flew out two of the richest Tier 15s seen in immortal generations, having caused a storm that had still yet to settle as the companies that failed to secure the invention pivoted into damage control.

More companies yet took the announcement of the sale and started looking into aura empowered enchantments seeing if there was anything they had missed.