Limitless Path

The biggest thing Beth focused on for the next month of objective time was her combination training/quest completion, using it as a tool to sharpen her focus on her skills. She still found she had an exceptional understanding of space and spatial related skills, and that was where her first breakthrough came from. She was fighting beasts at level five hundred and fifty, more than even what she needed for her current quest and something that was pushing her rather hard, when everything just suddenly fell into place. It wasn't quite an epiphany in the way she had had a few, but it was more like she had gradually been building the understanding for a few years, and pushing on that one skill in the last few months had been enough to break through that final little barrier. It was, somewhat unsurprisingly, Spatial Obliteration, which had evolved from her oh so reliable Crush a number of years ago and was still a staple skill for her. The skill at Diamond rank didn't get any great new powers, but was just a straight upgrade in terms of overall strength.

That was really the dam breaking for her, which wasn't a great surprise; once she had both had a skill breakthrough and sensed what a Diamond skill really was, pushing skills she had a real affinity for higher wasn't a challenge. That's not to say it didn’t take subjective months, and more than a little trial and error, but she pushed Spatial Step and Spatial Slice up to Diamond as well. The rest of her spatial skills were still a bit behind, though all of those had gone through upgrades and transformations over the months she had been killing and training. The best of the lot was the skill Spatial Domain, which she had pushed into Platinum, getting it a big upgrade in terms of power, though that was mainly due to the ability to move other objects, or beings, around within her domain with little they could do to stop it. It was a good upgrade, meaning she didn't need to lean on her Ideal, which was still very tiring and stressful to use, to move others around, though her domain was still limited in range. Well, she wasn't going to be teleporting others to other systems any time soon, so it didn't really matter that the range was only a few hundred miles.

Time passed and most of what they needed for their next rebirth was finally ready, which was now certainly becoming the long pole on the tent for them. Not that they needed any less experience during the leveling process, far from it, but they were able to get so much experience fighting so far up level every level that time wasn't really an issue for the leveling. That wasn't true for the gathering of any materials they needed, nor for any special quests they had. Others were starting to get things other than just gather materials for their rebirth quests, and that was quite a lot for some of them. It was a really big challenge even for some of her group to do something like fight a thousand beasts at a hundred levels up when they were at max level with no help, but they could all still manage it. It was another reason why people really stopped doing True Rebirths and just accepted the Perfect Rebirths after a while, and the lazy even accepted Regular Rebirths after a time; the True Rebirth requirements for most people simply accelerated out of control after a point. Also, doing Perfect Rebirths or Regular Rebirths didn't make the requirements for a True Rebirth any lower, nor even make them maintain at the same level. If somebody did Perfect Rebirths for all of Enlightened and then wanted to do a True Rebirth at the start of Ascended, they'd face the same requirements as if they had done True Rebirths all the way.

She was just glad that getting the resources was still viable via their purchasing power, not that that might ever prove untrue, but the amount and wait time might increase to the point of madness. She also thought it rather fitting that the first of their Enlightened rebirths would be the last that Selene would be directly helping them acquire the materials to accomplish. Between that, and reaching out to Mortaine for a couple pieces, they had gathered everything, and Mortaine had shipped things Selene. They gathered up the materials and paid out what little they owed, as Selene had used proceeds from sales of ship parts and a few other items they had consigned to pay for much of their orders. She mentioned it had actually made it easier for some of those negotiations, as some factions she traded with were happy to trade evenly for the parts of the dreadnought, which wasn't a losing proposition for either group. Beth's group just wanted money and resources for the ship parts, and other groups were more than happy for the salvage for their own fleet repairs and construction. It was still a level that was beyond Beth and her team for a time, but they were getting their own little fleet together, even if the airship was under-powered and the cruiser wasn't particularly convenient to move around.

Beth was hoping that she could come up with a solution to the cruiser problem soon. She was thinking about working on her spatial affinity and seeing if she could use space magic to move the cruiser in and out of the reliquary, though that was a bit of a dangerous proposition. With the reliquary welded into her soul, that delved a bit into the realm of soul magic, and messing with that without a clear plan was a recipe for disaster. Still, if she could figure out some way to get the large ship shoved in her soul, or her gate, though the second idea was a bit farfetched as she couldn't really extend the size of the opening all that much, they would have a great level of convenience on the move. Being able to teleport to a far away planet and then drop the cruiser and have that level of speed, comfort, and firepower at their fingertips would be amazing.

That was a plan that was still in development, unlike their next rebirths, which were happening right now, and for the entire team. Well, Veren excluded, but he had pulled his classic disappearing act, likely to seek the final inspiration for his push to Sage, and she wasn't really worried about his rebirth stage or types in any case. If he made it to Sage, there would be few outside the peak of Ascended that could really do anything to him, which was a bit crazy to think about, but Sages were both that powerful and rare. If Beth and her team could even push one or two of them into Grandmaster, they would be an almost incomparable fighting force that most entire mercenary companies or large fighting forces would have to avoid. It was a classic quantity versus quality thing, and in this world, or rather, this universe, quality won every time. Sure, throwing enough numbers at Beth could eventually wear her down, but most galactic-level polity would be out of troops before that time came to pass. And that was considering her current level, let alone what happened as her skills increased, particularly if her weapon skills hit Grandmaster.

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Speaking of hitting Grandmaster, the closest of the remaining members of the team, not counting Veren in the mix, would have to be Bjorn, who was probably the second best with weapons after Veren. That was a distant second, considerably so, but he was ahead of everybody at this point, with Beth and Andrea next behind him, the short girl surprising adept with Unarmed, though comparing Beth to the others was a bit unfair as she was still working on two weapon skills in tandem. That was a ton of extra effort and time, but it was already paying amazing dividends, as she was able to pretty thoroughly trounce anybody at around her skill level who just used one weapon. A beating, by the way, that didn't rely on her monstrous stats, skills pushing into Diamond, Ideal, or even her great acumen in controlling and utilizing her Presence in combat.

Presences were another thing that could be trained and something that a lot of people neglected, as training them was very time-consuming, difficult, and rather slow to show any marked progress. Beth persisted with hers partially out of necessity; she was fighting level five hundred and fifty beasts before the rebirth they were currently doing, and that level was a massive jump in power. After level five hundred, every fifty levels was more similar to the kind of jump every hundred levels had before and up to five hundred. Every hundred levels would see an even bigger jump, starting with six hundred being a massive wall that was a bit terrifying to confront. It was also things like that often caught even experienced Wayfarers out and contributed to deaths; every time beast strength underwent a massive jump, it would inevitably catch at least a few people off guard, despite all the warnings and their own experiences. Starting to fight above level five hundred was like that for a lot of individuals and teams, and that was where a lot of Enlightened deaths would happen, especially for fresh Enlightened.

Beth's team could handle it, or mostly handle it, as they didn't really need to fight even level five hundred beasts for a while. Only for their rebirth quests would they really engage such powerful enemies, and those quests didn't always require a massive jump in the level of beast they fought. Some of them had more esoteric requirements, like fighting very, very specific kinds of beasts, usually then doing something with the corpse, like harvesting the heart blood and using it in a drink or some such. Beth was glad that hers were much more combat focused; she would rather kill another ten thousand horrifically powerful enemies than have to do some weird blood-drinking ritual or whatever some of the others had to get up to. Then again, nothing they were doing was that far out of the ordinary, so most of the others were on the other side of the fence, preferring tasks to kill very specific things and eat them or the like.

They all did their rebirths together, using Beth's gate as a safe, controlled environment, not that they really needed something so secure for their rebirths. Beth still felt the connection with Sera, that link firmer and deeper than it had ever been, and there was a bit of feedback from Blood, as she had experienced a bit before, but it was a different flavor. The resonance from Blood was partly from her bond and partly from a link through Sera, which she assumed was something due to their link through humanization. The feeling certainly wasn't anything bad, far from it, but it also was something rather mysterious; there was little precedence that she had found for such a thing, more from it being something private, based on the bit of research she had done. Such bonds and links were personal things, and her link with Sera was an intensely personal thing and others in the same kind of position would speak very little about it. The bond linkages were more discussed, but resonance even there was a rare thing, with less than ten percent of bonds having a reported resonance event during rebirths or other significant occurrences.

Rebirth didn't come with anything different this time, maybe unfortunately for some, but no far senior members of the CRA showed up asking anything or anything similar. That meant the next objective year or so was just a pure grinding session, the team just knocking out level after level in Beth's gate in near-record time. It wasn't a race, but they wanted to get the leveling done sooner rather than later so they could get to that more difficult prospect of trying to complete their quests. Leveling went rather quickly and very smoothly for the team, with them splitting up in Beth's gate and going far, far afield to grab independent groups of enemies. The individual members of the team fought at their own pace and in their own time, but they were still leveling at a very similar rate. None of them had any real boosts to the leveling process or the experience they earned, but fighting up so many levels meant that they all leveled at an immense speed, especially at the lower levels. It took them only around seven years of subjective time to hit their new max level, which was level four hundred and twenty and, no, nobody else got any of the several jokes Beth made about that. Not without explanation, which sort of ruined them as jokes.

Upon reaching their new, very dank, max level, they were then confronted with their new True Rebirth quests, which were of varying difficulty. Beth was both convinced that it was variable based on more factors than just their stats or skills, and she was thinking that classes also had something to do with it, or humanization, in the sapient beasts' cases. It was about time for her to get a class upgrade as well, something she had also been thinking about, but other than truly extraordinary circumstances, she wouldn't know when it would happen until it occurred at the end of one of her rebirths, how it had always happened. She was secretly hoping that this next one would be the time, as it was fairly common for a class upgrade or evolution sometime near the start of Enlightened, and hers were usually rather early. Again, those were also based on a number of factors, themselves a topic of much debate, and it was more an art than a science to understand when and how they happened. She hoped she had artfully predicted it correctly, but only completing her next rebirth would tell if she was right.

Speaking of that rebirth, and its attendant challenges, if she was right in anything, it was linking rebirth difficulty to overall power in a general sense. Her extracurriculars were only growing greater, if anything, as she had several steps to complete outside of just gathering materials. It still wasn't too onerous, though that was more from the fact that the quest now seemed almost more tailored to her. It involved a lot of fighting, which she absolutely excelled at, though for others this might be more of a curse than a blessing, as she was sure even other strong Wayfarers wouldn't be able to complete the challenges. At least, it wouldn't be easy for anybody but a prodigy to do what was required of her at this point, which made her a bit speculative.