Chapter 396
Despite the fantastic start to their delves, things quickly settled back into a pattern. One rift after another they rushed in, killed anything on their way to the boss, killed the boss, took the reward and left.
The individual fights were difficult, but no more so than any of their training. Monsters were ultimately only monsters, and even the smartest of them were driven by the rift rage that limited just how complicated their plans could be.
It was part of the reason that ultimately limited cultivators who fought at Tier. Without the pressure added from a speed and power difference it was harder to truly push oneself. Something they had seen in the scramble for the ruin world.
Most delvers never pushed themselves and therefore never reached their maximum potential. It was also why the army tried to never put fresh at-Tier delvers on the front lines: bad habits that got them and their teammates killed.
There was something to say for the fact they were alive, where others who had pushed themselves weren’t. But the fact still remained that delving was of limited danger, even when you delved up Tiers.
When delving up Tiers, you were forced to deal with the cultivation difference but the monsters didn’t become more clever.
But even they were hitting the limits of how far they could push up, not because of their skill, but rather the advantage of raw cultivation difference. If you couldn't even react to a monster's attack, you couldn’t properly defend against it either, no matter how skilled you may be, and would surely die in short order.
That was why Matt, Liz, and Aster spiced things up between other delves, and with Palustris being a fire-aspected world, they had a plethora of more interesting rifts to delve.
After the chef rift, they spent over four years hitting other rifts going as fast as they could.