Limitless Path

Old Tom was a bit of a gregarious individual himself, constantly chatting while they worked, often about the most inane of things. While his banter could be amusing, as they had had demonstrated once before, it sometimes took a turn into the odd or downright bizarre. She wasn't going to forget the story about the lobster and troll for a long, long time, and that wasn't even the worst of them. One of the other old men of the group, Cai, the man who farmed the oil, among other things, stopped by about a month into their stay and proved just as loquacious. Beth was getting the impression that there was a little club on this world, whether from happenstance or intention, of old crafters and oddballs that liked to mostly keep to themselves and work, but also couldn't helping chatting away at the first opportunity.

Old Cai also had quite a few strange stories, though his involved odd projects he'd participated in a lot more than they involved weird things he'd seen, but there were some of those, too. Considering he talked for nearly a day about a project he'd worked on to create an artificial core for a planet, it was clear he was also very skilled, though the story got rather weird when he talked about all the snakes involved. Even after a two hour explanation, Beth wasn't exactly sure how a bunch of snakes, non-sapient snakes, helped build an artificial planet core, but it was really interesting, at the least. Though when he started talking about squeezing oil from his toads in a rather…inappropriate manner, with Old Tom adding several bawdy anecdotes, Beth tuned them both out and focused on the metal she was shaping.

And speaking of metal shaping, her skills were growing by leaps and bounds every week, nay, every day that they were learning from Old Tom. He was a skilled teacher, able to take the complex concepts involved in his use of runes while practicing more traditional forging methods and break them down into easy-to-understand explanations that Beth could start work on that very day. That wasn't to say she could even produce a pale imitation of his techniques and skills, but she was learning so much it was making her head spin. She and Sera were also taking advantage of the fact that the two of them had near-limitless stamina and could stay awake for days at a time, even when working on complex projects. Tom had no trouble staying awake for even months at a time, so it didn't pressure him to have them in the forge for sixty, seventy, or a hundred hours a time. They did have to take more breaks than he did, as they weren't just crafting gear at their skill level but were learning new concepts and pushing their limits with their smithing. Their brains got a bit overloaded at times and they needed to take a break, even if they didn't really need to sleep, and they would sometimes go walk around the area around Old Tom's forge while holding hands and chatting.

Old Tom himself wasn't pushing his skills any higher, or not just focusing on that, though he said a good smith was always learning and growing, but he was working on orders for a very, very exclusive list of clients. Even with just a handful of people that he was willing to do commission work for, his waiting list was something like five years to get a piece from him, and that was if it wasn't anything too extreme. Too complex and crazy an order could get somebody pushed back even further until he had more free time to work on such a difficult project. When he told Beth what the price he charged, and that to his friends, was one afternoon while they practiced, she nearly went catatonic. Just a simple sword, as if anything a Legend forged could be simple, cost at least fifty adamantine coins, and that was considered cheap. Some of the larger projects he worked on went up into the Black Ruby price range, which was two ranks above adamantine. That kind of price meant that even if he had commissions open to more than his select clientele, he would only get a small number of takers. That kind of wealth was something not even the fourth-floor luminaries of the Seven Lights could splash around at will; most of the time when they had bids up into the Neutronium range, they were using the wealth of their entire faction to secure the item. Tom was talking about individuals with the wealth to pay three or four Black Ruby for his works; likely only the Exalted of the Milky Way could handle something like that. Beth suspected his clients were people like Laselle, Selene, Zane, Fallon, and maybe Baelvyr.

Beth knew for a fact that Baelvyr himself was part of a little group that was extremely powerful, so it wasn't surprising that there were some people that could afford Tom, but the scale of the money and materials involved was still staggering. Old Cai was a Hero Alchemist himself and could charge just about what he wanted, though he seemed to focus much more heavily on cheaper products that people could use as supplemental aids. Though, they were talking about cheaper often being in the mithril coin range, so that was cheaper on a relative scale, all things considered. The oil he produced for smiths like Tom to use was one example of such things, and he charged Tom the 'friend' rate of one mithril, twenty diamond coins per barrel, which he said was a steal and was practically leaving he and his toads living out on the street. Beth highly doubted a Hero was living in anything but the lap of luxury, but Cai was one of those old codgers who had elevated complaining to an art form. She was pretty sure his bellyaching was at the level of a Legend, beating even his own alchemy skill, but she kept that to herself. No reason to piss off one of the group of crafters who were of inestimable strength and had so many strange resources and hidden tricks that it would be hard to even count them all.

Beth's pocket Ascended went over without even a blink from Cai, but the old toad-milker had seen a million things a thousand times stranger than somebody having a bunch of Ascended shoved in their soul, even if that person was a freshly minted Enlightened. He did, however, say he wasn't teaching anybody anything, being very jealous of his toad oil techniques. At least, he was until Tom burst his bubble and explained exactly what the toads were and how they were raised. After that little incident, Cai disappeared for a whole week in a huff, not wanting to come around if everybody was going the greatest secrets of his trade, as he called them. Beth knew that that wasn't a real secret of his trade, but it seemed like immortality and a great dedication to one's craft made one a bit…loopy, if she was being a bit politic about it.

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Cai showed up again a week later with a woman following just behind him, the woman nearly of a height with Sera and quite strong, if Beth's initial impression of her was anything to go by. That was backed up when she used her eye power to scan the woman and it came back with a level of eight hundred and a rebirth count of eighty, meaning she was an Exalted. It was something that Beth had thought about a bit, been told about a bit, and experienced a bit herself, but there really were, as the old saying went, crouching tigers and hidden dragons all over the place. Most people assumed there were fewer Exalted in the Milky Way than one could count on their fingers, but here Beth was on a little backwater dirtball and Exalted just showed up left and right with no rhyme or reason, popping out of the woodwork like they were a common thing. An awful lot of people really just didn't understand the underlying workings of even a 'poor' galaxy like the Milky Way, or not nearly to the extent they thought they did.

Beth was snapped out of her musings after a second when the woman was introduced, Cai claiming she was an old friend, very clearly overemphasizing the term old. It was clearly an old joke, or small conflict, between the two of them, as the woman lashed out with nothing but pure mana, a very impressive display of both power and control. Cai didn't move, didn't even bat an eye, the mana spike absorbed into something on his person as if it were a rock dropped into an ocean. A small ripple spread out around Cai and then settled almost immediately, the man not even twitching an eyebrow at the attack. The woman, one Amalia, was a Hero leatherworker, self-proclaimed as 'Not that good' because she had spent too much time studying her chosen weapon, having recently risen to the level of a Hero with said weapon. A double-Hero wasn't something that was impossible or unheard of in the wider universe, but it was a crazy impressive feat all the same and spoke to the woman's unbelievable skill and dedication. What was even crazier was that that wasn't her primary method of fighting, or really what she had used on her climb to Exalted and still considered her bread-and-butter.

"So, let me get this straight," Beth said as they were chatting. "You rose all the way to Exalted by relying on spells as a pure caster, but you've become an Unarmed Hero since then?"

"I like to dabble," said Amalia, shrugging her broad shoulders. "I've always resorted to my fists and feet when all else failed, and I've used my body to cast my magic on more than one occasion. It wasn't really all that unusual for me to rise to the level of Hero with Unarmed."

"You act like achieving that level, even if it were your sole focus, isn't that big of a deal," Sera scoffed. "I've only met three Heroes in anything before coming here and I'm the princess of the Black Dragon Clan, even if I am the black sheep. And now Heroes are just popping up like weeds after spring rain. Not only that, they're all claiming how easy it is to get to Hero and how they weren't even trying that hard."

"I guess some people just have it," Amalia said with a shrug, smirking a bit.

Beth narrowed her eyes at that as Sera made a noise of disgust in the back of her throat. Beth said, "This is why I hate geniuses. You make even the most hardworking people look bad and act like it's nothing."

"You hardly have room to talk," Amalia shot back. "I can tell just from looking at you, a fresh Enlightened, that not many below Ascended would be able to fight you. Most of them wouldn't stand a chance."

"Not many and none are two different things," Beth replied.

"I think you're better than you think," Amalia said. "Anyway, I came here because I heard there was a cute girlie trying to learn how to work with leather. I happen to be something of an expert in that."

"Blood!" Beth shouted, her voice loud enough to shake the air. She did it just to annoy the others, as she could easily have contacted Blood through their bond or using their communicators.

The wolf appeared in just a second, muttering something that was likely rather unkind before saying, "What's all the shouting?"

"Trainer," Beth just said, nodding at Amalia.

"Bad introduction," Sera growled, elbowing Beth before saying, "Blood, this is Amalia. She's an Exalted, just in case your eye power didn't pick that up, and a Hero Leatherworker. She's decided to come over and see if she can offer you some tips."

"I don't mind," Amalia said, clearly referring to Beth's introduction. "And, I couldn't let these old coots hog all the fun of having a cute student."

"Well, if you want," Blood said.

"She's a lot less dedicated than we are, unfortunately," Beth explained.

"Still, I'm sure we can work something out," Amalia said, undeterred as she took Blood by the hand and dragged her out of the smithy.

"Well, my work here is done," Cai said with a satisfied dusting of his hands before also leaving the smithy.

"Why can't we ever meet anybody normal?" Beth complained.

"As if you're one to talk," Sera replied with a snort before returning to her work.

Amalia was a bit of an oddball, but it appeared that everyone that got to Exalted was odd in one way or another. Baelvyr was probably the most normal of those that reached that level that they knew, but that was balanced out by knowing Zane and Fallon, Manumitted who were about as zany and wacky as they came. Still, she was a good teacher, from what little Blood said of it, and she helped both Blood and Odorra said, the phoenix having sat in on a few of the lessons. Out of all of Beth's pocket Ascended, Odorra, Erosh, Zel, and Mikhael seemed the most interested in the crafting that was happening and were the most often working with the girls or involved in some discussion with Old Tom. Zel, the man who had created the reliquary itself, was most keen to pick Tom's brain when he could, as he was the only one of the pocket Ascended who had reached Hero in a craft and was interested in how Tom had plowed past the barrier to Legend.

That was all a bit much for Beth and Sera, and they dedicated themselves to absorbing what Tom could teach them as they worked through Expert. If they could even get close to Master in their craft by the time they were through training under Tom it would be time well spent, and they were definitely going to reap a ton of benefits from this training session for years, if not decades and centuries, yet to come. The biggest improvement that the two smithing girls saw right away was a boost to how they worked and hammered metal in the traditional sense, the two of them already improving in the way they shaped hot metal with just physical blows. Beth had more success than Sera in trying to incorporate runes while hammering, but she certainly hadn't mastered the knack for it yet. Even just what she was able to do made her crafts stronger and last longer, and she was able to gain an extra level in the proceeding months because of that. The longer they spent training under Tom, the more their skills started to increase, showing the kind of benefit sole focus on one thing while a dedicated high-ranked trained them could bring.