Limitless Path

"So, how far exactly did you get?” Val asked Beth, curious to see where exactly they stacked up.

“I stopped at floor five hundred,” Beth said with a shrug, fiddling with her space puzzle again. She thought that she was really onto something with it, both of the last layers clear in her vision as she sent threads of spatial mana, controlled by her Ideal into the puzzle box.

“Five hundred?!” Val exclaimed, the others expressing various levels of shock. “Beth, floor five hundred is supposed to be done by Ascendants. Hell, floor four hundred and fifty is supposed to be where Ascendants are needed to climb the tower. How did you make it to five hundred?”

“Floor four-fifty was tough, but it wasn’t that bad,” Beth said, shrugging again. “It did get a lot tougher there, I will say. I wouldn’t want to push beyond five hundred right now. Or even in the near future. I think five-oh-one is best attempted after I’m Ascended, at the very least.”

“That’s both good and discouraging at the same time,” Andrea said with a sigh. “We have a lot of knowledge about half the tower now, and we can pick your brain about the floors. But, at the same time, damn! Even you, with all that extra power, think you’ll need Ascended to go beyond five hundred? Just how fucking crazy is this damn tower?”

“It’s definitely something. I think the rest of you have to be very careful if you want to get beyond four hundred right now,” Beth said. She twisted the cube in her hand in a certain way and then slammed a hundred spikes of spatial mana into so hard that the others could feel everything around them twist for a moment. “I think we should probably say late-Enlightened for you guys to go beyond four hundred unless you get something crazy like your Ideal like I have. Maybe as a group you could go up to four-fifty, but I’d just be really careful about it. You could-oh…”

The cube had suddenly snapped apart in her hands, not from her raw strength, but from her solving the last two levels simultaneously. The whole thing split apart into more than a dozen pieces that all transformed instantly, fitting back together in her hand into a narrow, thin object. It was about the length of her hand from the base of her palm to the tip of her middle finger, which was a pretty decent distance considering the size of her hands and long fingers, and then it was two inches wide and about half an inch thick. Beth stared at it in consternation for a moment before using her eye power to figure out what the cube had transformed into, her eyebrows climbing up into her hairline.

Eld Key[?????]

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A second item that she couldn’t Identify, even with her eye power as it currently was at the peak of Gold. She also had that item she had bought from the merchant that worked out of the Blue Queen’s brothel, something she still had a good feeling about, even though she couldn’t even see the name of that one. This one, at least, made it obvious that it was a key, even if she had no idea what it was a key for or to. It was also just a touch strange the way it showed up, as the brackets after the name meant there was some kind of secondary name or title or something, since the second set of brackets should be where the description, identifying information, level requirement, and more were all listed. Very few items she had encountered had multiple descriptive boxes like that, apart from skills, but a key shouldn’t have a rank or tier like a skill or skill crystal did, so she was a little puzzled. She snapped a picture of the thing and the description she saw, a handy thing she could do with her communicator since it involved her eye power, and sent it off to Mortaine, Baelvyr, Selene, Laselle, and Zane and Fallon. She trusted all of them, knowing that none out of that group would care to steal from her or betray her, and they were also the most likely to know anything. She would also take it to the Black Ships and ask Illiem about it if the others came up blank, but she didn’t run to spread the information to the four corners of the galaxy just yet. She’d let people stew on it for a minute and see if anybody had any brilliant ideas.

“Can anybody see anything other than the name?” she asked.

“No, it just says Eld Key,” Blood said, and she would be about the best among them, considering her eye power was already well into Platinum at this point.

“Well, I messaged the heavy hitters we know. We’ll see if anybody has any crazy ideas,” Beth said, stashing the key in the reliquary. Not that her necklace wasn’t safe, but the Empyreans could take their time to examine something like that if it was in the reliquary, so she tossed in the area with her other interesting loot.

“Anyway, you were saying?” Neph prompted.

“Oh, right, that,” Beth said, clearing her throat. “I was just saying, you guys could group up and go to four-fifty. I would split Bjorn and Sera and have each lead a team, mainly because they’re more than tanky enough to survive up to four-fifty with little help, and they could take the focus off each group. I wouldn’t try it with everybody together. And don’t push past four-fifty until Ascended, would be my advice; that’s when I had to start using my Ideal to help me a bit. More than just the passive effects, I mean.”

This tale has been pilfered from NovelFire. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I think we can easily live with that,” Kris was the one to speak now. “I don’t particularly want to go any further for now; I stopped at three-seventy. We can see about pushing further once we climb some more rebirths, though I think just waiting until we’re all in Ascended wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“I don’t the tower’s going anywhere,” Sera said with a slight smirk. “I think we can put this aside for the time being.”

“Then we can stop paying this damn usurious fee and get out of here,” Bjorn grunted, the most he’d said in days.

Beth was in agreement; the kinds of prices they had slapped on everything in the city that had grown up around the base of the tower were pretty insane. Again, that was tempered by the fact that only truly rich people would even be coming there, let alone the fact that most people were from off-world. Whereas in Beth’s neighborhood right now, there were one or two people walking around who were clearly from outside the solar system, and maybe a couple more in the hotel or dungeon in total, there were tons of people from off-world in the Tower of Rebirth city. As had been explained to them a long time ago, the faction that managed the tower didn’t use it themselves anymore, and there were few, if any, locations left in the Milky Way, so the place was going to be a big attraction on Earth for a very long time.

The group packed up, which didn’t more than literal seconds, and they were soon on Beth’s airship and heading for her home neighborhood. Not to stop by her home, that was not the plan, but to stop and investigate something nearby, which is where Blood set the airship down a couple hours later. It was the place Beth and Blood had spent quite a bit of time early on, that strange, cylindrical hole in the ground with the spiral ramp twisting down into the earth. The place wasn’t all that bad, even these days, as it wasn’t that deep underground, but the levels had certainly increased since their last visit. They were dealing with anything from one hundred and fifty to two-twenty in the deeper parts. They had, of course, taken care of the old titan facility here, something Bjorn was apparently still tracking down leads related to. The thing they hadn’t dealt with yet was the other branch, as Beth thought of it, the portal that led to the strange space with the tower and the trapped sapient beast. Beth was hoping to finally wrap this up and free them and they had just about a guaranteed chance of that, considering they had an ace in the hole, or, more specifically, Beth’s pocket Ascended that could give them a very good idea of exactly what was what.

They made their way down to the area quickly, not at all slowed by the kobolds and other beasts haunting the place. It was pretty comical to see one of the cave brutes try and jump Bjorn, the big, brutal, ogre-like beasts looking like children next to the titan descendant. Bjorn easily picked them up and smashed them, into the walls, the floors, even the roof of the large cavern, and it wasn’t something that knocked the air out of their lungs. There were a lot of crunching and squelching noises when he got his massive hands on them, and none of them moved again after being flung away, so pretty safe to assume what had happened.

They approached the area shielded under the strange dome first, they group not having had enough skill with runes or enchanting to handle it the last time they were down there. It was quite a bit different now, however, as Val was quite a bit through Expert in enchanting and they had the Empyrean to back them up, combined with the fact they were all much better at reading and understanding runes then they had been. Even Beth could read a lot more of what was there in the shielded area, though she absolutely couldn’t make sense of all of it. Her study of runes had improved by leaps and bounds, and she had witnessed what truly, truly high-level crafting looked like when they were with Old Tom, and the man had used mana and runes to rebuild all the component materials directly on several occasions, explaining how even good Sages could do it with any profession, not just smiths. The study of runes was never-ending, and it provided a lot of help in more than just crafting, as witnessed by them all being able to contribute to helping unravel the puzzle.

The empyreans let them go it for a while before offering any help, seeing it as a good challenge that the team could work on to help flex their rune-knowledge and crafting capabilities. It wasn’t entirely beyond the team’s limit, but there were a few parts that even Val had trouble with that Beth’s pocket Ascended had to step in and explain. The biggest hurdle was that none of them could figure out exactly what the original creator had done to link the group of small pyramids together, as that group of metal wedges was what all the runescript was on and what was generating both the domed shield in the cavern and the imprisoning effect on the sapient beast. Zelmainne, obviously, was very knowledgeable about runes and their function, as were many of the others, though only Zelmainne and Abigail, the woman who had ruled the City of Mended Dreams for a time, actually held the enchanting profession. The two of them contributed a bit, walking Val through how the whole thing was linked together, and once they had that part, the team could decode the rest.

It was nice, in a way, to take a break from all the challenges and dungeons and other tasks they always handled that involved a lot of fighting. The cave system itself did have beasts in that they had fight through to get there, and occasionally kill to keep the dome clear, but it was like disposing of a bit of litter or doing some housecleaning; hardly worth being called a fight. The entire adventure here relied solely on them using their brainpower to figure out a difficult puzzle, which Beth was greatly pleased with, even though she had just been bending her brain on her own puzzle. Speaking of that, she had only gotten acknowledgments from the others that they would look into; unfortunately for her, nobody replied that they knew exactly what the weird, hidden, mysterious key was. Selene had asked to see it in person, as there were a lot of things she could do that couldn’t be handled over communicator, her years of appraisal experience leaving her with both skills and knowledge that needed that hands-on touch. But they could stop by later, after they took care of this and possibly a few other things. Beth was thinking they could go home, drop the others off or let them wander off on their own devices, and then she could first visit Selene and Alex, then try Illiem if they couldn’t figure anything out.

For now, however, the team was slowly cracking the weird shield. Even Val had been confident enough to declare that the final pyramid, in the middle of the shield, was the power source that fed everything. It also linked the array to the prison, meaning if they shut it off, or destroyed it, though the group had frowned at Beth flexing and declaring she’d just smash the whole thing, they would stop the operation of the imprisoning spell. Or at least, they would cut off the power supply; Beth remembered from the visit she and Blood had done that the beast was trapped in a rune circle inside, though there wasn’t anything overly complex about that one. Hopefully, even if it didn’t shut off right away, they could still take care of it, maybe even through Beth’s fists, once the main array was dealt with. The other thing they had to worry about was if the sapient beast was either hostile, which it hadn’t seemed the last time they were there, or if it had maybe cracked, mentally that is, from all the time imprisoned, though Beth thought she recalled it had been asleep when they first entered. Hopefully, it could while away the hours in a kind of hibernation, or maybe even the array kept it unconscious and it couldn’t wake other than with extreme effort, which was likely better than it being awake and trapped for years or decades or even centuries, whatever the case may have been at that point.

It took about ten hours for the team to crack it, though Beth had to admit it was mostly Val, with some help from the Empyreans, that did a lion’s share of the work. It was an interesting problem to work on, something that could keep them engaged and an opportunity to learn quite a bit, but she was glad when the work was done. The plane was head into the portal at the back of the cavern, make sure the beast was free, and offer to escort him or her somewhere safe based on their last memories. Beth’s only concern was if the breaking of the shield and shutting the pyramids off had made the portal unstable and, while she wasn’t a dimensional mage like Mortaine, she was still pretty confident she could not only teleport out, she could take the team with her if need be.