Limitless Path

"Didn't you say you got a Title for that, too?" Sera asked, ignoring Beth's act.

"Yeah, let me check it," Beth said, looking at her stat page.

One Who Realized Beyond the Self

{Awarded for Achieving understanding of the self before a Fated Opportunity arose. Creates a greater sense of understanding of the self through the actualization of the Ideal.}

"I don't know what most of that means," Beth said.

"You got it for fully understanding your Ideal far before you were given an opportunity by the Path to have greater understanding," Mortaine explained while rubbing his chin. "The second part just means that possessing the title will allow you to better control and use your Ideal when you manifest its form in the physical world. Yours has properties of space and fire, so when you manifest the flame, it will be stronger and easier to control. There's more, but you need to train with your Ideal and you need to study it first. There are concepts that you won't be very familiar with as you're not expected to even start encountering your Ideal's framework until Ascended."

"How do you know that? Is there some kind of Title database or something out there?" Beth asked Mortaine.

"I'm sure there is, though it's not something that is generally available to the public. Not in any form I'd really trust, at least, but it wasn't that that let me determine it. I have seen similar language in Titles where the mechanics of the benefit they provide is well understood. That, and I have experience with language in Titles and skills and am able to interpret it quite easily," he answered.

"Well, that makes a lot of sense," said Beth, looking around. "What, uh, what was this machine supposed to be for, anyway?"

"It was supposed to open a tunnel through spacetime into special extra-dimensional spaces, usually only accessible through special gateways. It wouldn't really punch through to anything that interesting at its current power level, though," Mortaine said before starting to mutter something. "Hmm, the secondary tunneling effects rely on a new modality of spatial mana that I have to analyze later. This tunnel leads to…a secondary effect…hmm…seven new forms…"

"Right, anyway," said Sera, getting the rest of the group's attention. "I think we can leave him for now and get back to our own business. Safer than before with our mini-Exalted now, too."

Beth rolled her eyes at Sera's grin, saying, "Don't count on me for anything more than normal. I have no idea what this is or how any of this works. Just forget it even happened."

"Right, like that's going to fucking happen," Val snapped. "You are now one of the most powerful, and interesting, people in the whole universe, let alone this measly little galaxy. Even people from galaxies so rich they have thousands of Eternals would go fucking ballistic knowing that you made a damned Ideal at fucking rebirth ten!"

"Well, uh, sure," Beth said, scratching her head. "I know it's cool and all, but it doesn't feel that crazy."

"Be careful about hitting people," Mortaine came out of his rambling stupor to warn. "I know you don't feel all that much stronger than just an hour ago, but just having a fully realized Ideal will have increased your power by a large amount. Even without deploying it, you will be faster, stronger, more resistant to damage, and your skills will have extra power."

"That's right," Val cut back in as Mortaine turned back to the gateway and started tinkering with it, everyone else in the room nervously backing away. Not that they didn't trust the Exalted, but they definitely didn't trust the Exalted.

"Is it really that big of a deal?" Beth asked.

"Let's go-and I can't believe I'm saying this-train and show you just what it means," Val said, urging the group to leave, which they did right before a very strange popping noise started sounding out from the far end of the room.

"Come on, let's leave for now. I think Mortaine is going to be, uh, busy for a while," Beth said.

The group made their way back to the teleporter room, no small feat when Mortaine had moved them all through dimensions to get to the room where the device needing the materials was located. Beth had a good sense for where they needed to go and managed to lead the way herself without Blood having to go into scout mode. It was a bit of a miracle that they managed to not walk into anything unusual, or rather, anything too unusual, as the room with gravity that pulled every direction at once and somehow none of them was very odd. Perhaps Beth should say she was rather glad they didn't stumble into anything far more dangerous than a little weird gravity and a few other small oddities. The talking cactus was something she was going to be puzzled about for a rather long time.

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They returned home for now, the teleports being about the cheapest, and the shortest, that they could take out of any destination. Their home Hall was rather different at this point, as all of the older hands that were part of Baelvyr's little clique were gone, none of the original Seniors left. Of course, most of the group were Gold Emblems at this point, meaning only the new Hall Master was of a more senior rank at this point, giving them a pretty high degree of freedom. They didn't have total free reign to do whatever they wanted in their home Hall, but there certainly wasn't anybody telling them what to do or how to do it. The new Hall Master was a woman on the edge of Ascendancy that had been an Enlightened for four centuries of objective time, giving her plenty of experience and knowledge.

The main reason they were there, other than a small bit of time to regroup in relative peace and quiet, was to give Beth a chance to test a whole bunch of things out in a place where they wouldn't get many eyeballs on them. Combined with her being able to summon her gate in one of the two suites they rented out in the main building, they weren't in any danger of being observed. The most someone below Manumitted was ever going to be able to figure out without some extremely specialized skills and a whole lot of knowledge that few possessed was that they had some kind of portal active. Funnily enough, they knew several people who had just the kinds of skills and knowledge they were talking about, though only Mortaine could really do it below Manumitted. Still, strange that they had managed to find likely the only person in the entire galaxy who could peek into the gate at Exalted-tier.

Beth put the settings to a plain area with plenty of high-level beasts for them to go after, taking the opportunity to test herself there first. The big thing she was thinking about was that they didn't really have any safety mechanisms for any sparring, and if she really wanted to go hard and test just how much more powerful she was, she didn't want any accidents happening. That was yet another thing tossed on the long list of things half-done or yet-to-do, getting arena equipment for the residence so they could do some sparring and duels with a high degree of safety. Cost wasn't really a concern, but the permanent versions of that equipment was both highly regulated and rather sparse; the demand wasn't really there to even make it a market, so the only way to get the gear was through the CRA, which would likely raise some eyebrows. Not that it was unheard of, but Beth was figuring a little flying under the radar would be a good strategy for a while.

Getting back to the testing, Beth found herself pretty surprised with the results, even if she was expecting big improvements based on what Mortaine, something of an Ideal-haver himself, had told her. She was hitting a lot harder, and that was just baseline; her regular punches, no Presence or Ideal or even skills at play, were noticeably stronger. Noticeable to the level of crushing hardened beasts' carapaces with little effort, a result that had her excited and the rest of the group with their jaws on the floor. At their level, with the amount of skill and experience they had, it was very easy to tell when someone was using a skill or an ability and when they were doing nothing but purely physically attacking. It was very clear to the group that Beth wasn't doing anything, no mana movement or buffing skills, apart from the boost that Beastly Tyrant was giving even without active mana usage, and she was still hitting like a runaway freight train. Beth said she felt like she was about thirty percent stronger with her Ideal just passively boosting her, which was a lot bigger jump than what a Presence gave. It was a good bit bigger jump than what someone with a strength or physical-form focused Mana Physique would get, especially since at least some of their power always went into toughening up the person's body.

That was just her physical capacity, and with everything running as passively as possible, but her new power did more than that. The second set of tests she did was using her skills to fight various powerful, armored beasts, and that proved to be a wild difference. Her mana flowed far more smoothly and felt like it leapt out of her body, conforming to the patters of the skills more naturally as it produced a bigger effect. It was a little more difficult to tell just what was going on, both with how the Ideal was affecting the skills, and with how much change it was actually producing. Her body and mana were both stronger because of the Ideal and that acted as a bit of a confounding variable when trying to figure out how much assistance the Ideal was giving her skills. She estimated an overall increase of ten percent after a hour or so of testing, but that was really rough and wasn't factoring in her enhanced body. With her strengthened body and mana taken into account, her skills were hitting much harder, likely doing twenty-five percent more overall damage.

The last thing she needed to test, which was going to take the most time out of everything, was using and manipulating the Ideal itself. It wasn't like a Mana Physique, which acted as a largely passive thing; even Beth's fire control that came through her Mana Physique was much more like her having an unlisted skill and didn't require her to learn a whole new system to be able to use. There were some similarities to her Presence, but that was really right either, as Presences were more passive increases that couldn't be control as finely as what Ideals could be, though some of the reading she had stacked up had suggested, in her brief scan, that different Ideals could work very differently. She had very fine and advanced control of how her Ideal manifesting externally behaved, but many people either had a more internally focused Ideal or had less fine control over the Ideal when they expressed it.

What other people could and did do was helpful as a reference, but she needed to get a good handle on how her Ideal worked. That started with understanding how to manifest it, though that wasn't any trouble for her; Beth just had to think about it and there were pure white flames surrounding her. Beth gestured with a hand and the flames moved, spinning around and flying out from her body. The whole group who had been observing from the side and they all backed up, very far back, when they saw the flames start moving. It wasn't just that it was fire and it would be annoying to get hit, the flames were visibly tearing apart space as they moved, not to mention that they were part of a higher order power that very few people would ever get access to. Getting hit by it, even a casual use of it, would do a lot of damage that was best just avoided, though they would have to test how Beth did fighting a sapient with her new abilities.

Beth created some more flame, though the initial fires hadn't gone out, and she moved them all to be in front of her. She attempted to concentrate them together, but found that was much easier said than done. The flame tended to just overlap without becoming denser or more concentrated. That was a bit of a bust, at least for now, though she would likely come back to the idea of making the flames denser without having them take up more area. She tried to manipulate the flame into a more usable shape, getting it into something that would very roughly pass as a lance or maybe a javelin before throwing it at a beast. She used some mental force to propel it forward and was rather surprised when it tore the space between it and the beast apart, looking like it teleported into and then through the beast, continuing into the distance until Beth stopped it. That showed it had both a lot more power than she was expecting, and that the flame she made would stick around a lot longer than she had thought. The whole idea of it being a flame was more a representation, as it was a distilling of her Ideal into the physical plane and wasn't really a fire. If she didn't want it to, it didn't even give off any heat, though that was a little deceiving, as even like that it would do major damage to anyone else that tried to touch it.

She clearly had a lot to learn, and she spent hours testing things and working through some of her thoughts and guesses. The entire rest of the team stuck around, which she thought was a bit weird, but it made more sense when Sera explained that not only was seeing a person using an Ideal insanely rare, but seeing somebody learning to use it for the first time was even rarer. They entire rest of the group could get massive value from just a couple hours of watching her play around with the manifestation of her Ideal. Accepting that simple but very good explanation, she went back to testing, this time trying to lean more into the ability of her Ideal to affect and destroy space. Instead of piercing a beast, she created a cage around one of the level four hundred ones that were nearby and locked down the space. Much to her surprise, and chagrin, she tore apart the space itself, sending the beast tumbling into a chaotic, interdimensional boundary domain that quickly shredded it beyond all recognition. It wasn't enough to destabilize the gate, or really even effect it overly much, but then again, Beth was just on ten rebirths; she would have to be a lot more careful about stuff like that when she was on seventy rebirths. The ability to shred space and cause massive spatial destabilization, while powerful, was extremely dangerous and not to be used lightly, nor without far more control.