Limitless Path

The third place she stopped was…well, it was something, and not in a good way. She felt that Mortaine might just be testing her a bit, as he had very clearly sent her to a place that was subpar, if she was being a little generous in her terminology. The world really reminded her of a frontier world that hadn't ever properly developed, with a capital city that was made of mostly blockish, drab, concrete and stone buildings. The place was dreary, dingy, dirty, and didn't have much love or life put into it, with even very few plants or trees in the thoroughfares and what passed for parks. The city itself really just looked bad, both in bad repair and just an unpleasant place to live and work. The citizens didn't seem all that much better, with everyone she passed in the brief walk from the CRA hall to the trading firm's base being bundled up in fairly drab and slightly dirty clothing and looking depressed.

The trading firm she approached wasn't all that much better, with the building a big, drab block of stone set in the middle of a large block of businesses. Walking into the front doors, she found a slightly mussy and dirty lobby with plenty of people packed in. That might have been a good sign for most places, but this was supposed to be an exclusive trading firm, and they weren't having an auction or faire or anything today, meaning that people were here for regular business or for some other reason. It only got worse when she got to one of the counters and waited half an hour to talk to an attendant who was rather disinterested in what she had to say. When she explained why she was there and who her reference was, the person perked up a little, but it was still with an almost bored air that they asked a few more questions. Before she could even get passed up the chain, she made an executive decision and simply turned around and walked out. She checked in at the CRA Hall to see if there was anything she could do to help the place, but there was very little. That was mainly because people saw the CRA as a way out, and their ranks for both Copper and Silver Emblems were very voluminous on this world. Shrugging, she fully disengaged and teleported away, heading back to Earth.

Once she was back home, she rejoined the others in working on their rebirth quests, which also served to help in gathering materials and items. She wanted to have something to show for not just the Black Ships, but for Red Sun Trading and Seven Lights as well. Her looting power was still progressing very slowly, but very slowly was a little faster when one had access to a ten-times time dilation area and infinite beasts to kill. Still, this was the work of objective years to level, and she could only plug away at it. Beyond the looting power, killing things at and over level five hundred gave a lot better loot just from the excess mana. At least, that's how it was explained, for at that level she was getting both specialized beast cores that were worth a small fortune per unit, and she was getting skill gems. The skill gems were entirely random, from what she had both personally experienced and what she had read, in that they was no way to influence them just based on what she was killing. Except, there was an exception to that, as there was to everything, but that exception was looting powers.

The way looting powers worked, through some esoteric principles that weren't entirely understood by the wider Wayfarer community, let alone Beth, they based their harvests entirely on the beast or monster type. That meant that, unlike normally where a beast using frost mana could drop a Flame Magic skill gem, with a looting power, the loot from a successful harvest of that same beast would be a Frost Magic skill gem or similar. However, Beth needed to push her looting power to Gold, and high Gold, at that, before she was going to be consistently getting skill gems, even from successful loots of level five hundred and beyond beasts. Right now, it was just better to rely on numbers, killing thousands of beasts and getting a skill gem every so many thousand kills. At level five hundred, it was more than five thousand kills for a gem, sometimes as many as ten thousand, which was still very time consuming for her. At level five hundred fifty, the highest level she was fighting up to, that number dropped just a bit, and she would get a gem every four to seven thousand kills. As the levels increased, the chances of a skill gem increased, and that held true all the way to level one thousand.

Level one thousand was a very big change, both in beast power and toughness, and in what the beasts dropped when they died. That level was still very far away, but the rewards for being able to kill at that level were pretty crazy, and also one of the reason why Ascended at high rebirth levels, usually beyond forty, and Exalted had access to so much wealth. Someone like Baelvyr, for example, could quite safely kill beasts at level twelve or thirteen hundred with little difficulty, and the rewards he could earn from such kills were mind-boggling. Very specialized beast cores with multiple mana types and interesting properties were just some of the least of the rewards, and the chances of skill gems of more than tier one or tier two skills became much higher at those levels. Right now, for example, Beth was getting mostly tier one skill gems, and occasionally a tier two gem. Those were still valuable, especially if they were the right skill, but she had already seen the kind of difference that even tier three made for skills, and their value, and it would be practically a money printer to be able to farm those gems.

Speaking of money printer as well, she was also collecting some of the best of the best in what she and the team were killing. She didn't have as big a stockpile as one might think; her looting power saw to that, unfortunately, with most kills turning into nothing but a little dust and excess mana. She did keep some of the corpses, however, and use them for their hide, scales, blood, organs, meat, cores, and so on. Anything off a beast even just at the line at level five hundred was worth big money, and that was her plan for trading with both Seven Lights and Red Sun going forward. Both had plenty of connections and both were more than capable of handling the large volume of high-end, high quality materials that her team was able to generate in just a month. She would sell the materials through those two trading firms while taking advantage of the much greater reach and wealth of the Black Ships to sell the much rarer and more valuable items like the entombed heart and more beyond.

After an objective month of farming, which is all she was really doing, as she had already completed her rebirth quest other than gathering the last of the materials, she decided to take a little break. A month in the gate was nearly a year with the time set to max and she had plenty of stuff to sell. The first thing she wanted to do, however, besides checking on the orders she had placed for goods, was to visit home. Well, she didn't really think of the old neighborhood as home that much any more, but it had been a couple months since the last time she stopped by and she wanted to drop in for a bit and check how they were doing. It was always a bit weird to see everyone there aging barely at all while decades passed for her, but she had started to get used to the disparity. One might think it would be the opposite, a story of Beth going off to the stars and coming back after years and all her family and old friends being far older, but it was almost the opposite. Compressed time meant years passed for her while weeks or months passed for those back home, and nobody was really aging all that fast. Even with the much slower pace her parents were leveling at, they had done a couple rebirths at this point, which already increased their longevity a few decades; if they kept at their current pace, she would eventually experience them growing old and passing away, but it was likely centuries away. Besides, in that time, it was likely she would have enough wealth and access that she could just pay for them to have some kind of soft immortality like digital consciousness upload or some such.

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That was for the future, however, as for the now was just seeing what was happening and if they were doing alright. The town had expanded again, becoming something of a hotspot for early to middle level Wayfarers; people just starting out to people that had two or three rebirths under their belt. The town was situated almost perfectly and, having acted on some of Beth's advice, had both plenty of places for people to rent out and plenty of supplies. The small hotel they had built, the one Beth had recommended based on how popular she assumed the dungeons would eventually be, was now a large hotel that was usually at seventy or eighty percent capacity. That kind of occupation kept the town bustling and the revenue flowing, and the local guard, alongside Zack and Beth's parents, were able to keep everybody in line without too much trouble. Having two good dungeons, a CRA Hall, and several underground areas that were quite challenging nearby made the old neighborhood a fantastic place to level and even farm money, as well as get a lot of training in a short amount of time.

Beth was happy to see the town was doing well, and it was a damn sight better than that world she had visited that was like a rundown old factory town from the late eighteen hundreds. The place was clean and well kept and had had a lot of work done on the buildings to update them. Funny to think that a town from the twenty-first century was having work done to modernize it in a world of magic and monsters, but that was what had been happening. A lot of the houses had been fully rebuilt, not just using new and stronger materials, but also making use of formations and even mana crystal to provide power and energy. Beyond that, many people had rebuilt their homes larger, accommodating more family and guests, and they had gone with a philosophy more leaning towards building a small fortress versus a luxury house. That was one of the differences in wealth; truly wealthy people in the new universe that people from Earth had been introduced to built for luxury first and had enough money that they could jam in high security into luxury. Luxury was a secondary concern for everybody else, and a lot of houses were built with the idea that one shouldn't rely solely on the walls and town or city defenses to protect one.

Beth walked back to her home, seeing that there were a handful of people on the streets that were something other than stock human. It hadn't been that way until the last time she visited a few months before, with hardly any external visitors, but now there were even people from off-world stopping by. It was a bit of a strange experience to walk through the neighborhood she had grown up in and knew so well and see most of the houses vastly changed and elves and dwarves walking the street. It put her in mind of some kind of out-of-body experience or a kind of fever dream, though most might point to it as something one would experience when high. Beth didn't really partake in any substances any stronger than caffeine, for the most part, and the only real exception was alcohol, so she couldn't really relate, but the whole thing did have a slight surreal feeling.

She made it back to her own house, still marveling at how the cul-de-sac had changed so much over the last few objective years. Every single house was different now, including Mr. Jones' large home on the corner; the old man had had a few family members come to live with him and, while he insisted he was too old for all the hubbub these days, he had been highly involved in the remodeling and rebuilding of his house. To a suspicious degree, in fact, and Beth was quite sure there was a good bit more to the old man than she had first, or really ever, suspected. The way he moved and acted, while appearing perfectly normal for an older gentlemen that had seen most of his years go by, was far too coordinated and had a certain style she knew came from very high skills with combat. Since he was an old neighbor and friend of her family and everyone around she hadn't felt the need to go prying into his business, but she knew that there was more to be discovered there than anybody else in the town, which she really should start calling a city at this point, seemed to suspect.

She was going to let that lay for now, though, and just walked up the street, which had been redo some time ago all in stone. The other houses in the cul-de-sac were all rebuilt as well, with most of them being at least three stories and having extremely solid walls. Now, Beth could take one of those houses apart in a single strike, but any beast below level two hundred was going to have a tough time working their way through the building. That wasn't even considering the extra defenses almost all of the houses had built into them now with formations and arrays, all of which could stop just about anything that would set the town in its sights with little effort. While the houses still did have yards, both front and back, they were smaller than what they had previously been. Some of that was made up for in the fact that there were plants and trees both along the walkways and even in the center of the roads in some sections; the cul-de-sac itself had a patch of flowers with three trees in the middle. Cars and trucks weren't really being used by the town all that much, and in fact, most people didn't use vehicles at all. It was a bit tough because nobody else nearby had been all that concerned with road maintenance and most people didn't have something that hovered or flew. Besides, a lot of the people in the town that traveled any appreciable distance could either do so at more than highway speeds or would just have the funds to use a teleporter or hire someone to take them.

All that aside, she walked up to her old home, not even recognizing it anymore, considering it was a four story fortress of stone and special types of wood that, being from mana rich environments, were stronger than steel had been before magic showed up. Mana changed everything, sometimes in small and subtle ways, and the change in how structures were built and how they were designed was just a part of it. She thought it a bit quaint that she still had a room set aside for her, including with its own bathroom, even if she never used it. Rooms that did see use, however, were her sisters' new bedrooms, as the two would sometimes come home and stay for days or weeks at a time. Considering they probably had the finances to stay at the CRA Hall in a nice suite whenever they wanted, she knew it was more sentimentality than anything else. Her sisters weren't exactly like her and her team, which certainly wasn't a bad thing, and they visited home more often and took larger, longer breaks to relax and rest, not just physically taking it easy, but letting their minds recover. Not many people could just throw themselves into fights for hundreds of hours straight and then come back the next month and do it again, over and over for years at a time.