Chapter 151

Chapter 151

Quill and Torch idled away their week on a healing cooldown by publicly puttering around and spending the small portion the points Luna and Kurt had earned for them, before throwing themselves back into the wilds.

Instead of just wasting most of the points as they had before, they started setting up their own counter-bounty system on the more determined assassin teams. Some protested that action, but their hypocritical arguments were successful on exactly no one.

As a continued show of force, any team that took a snipe at them was ruthlessly hunted down and killed with as much damage as they could get away with, before the Gardeners pulled the victims away.

Still, the number of people willing to attack them only increased each time they went out.

With only two days remaining till the end of the month, they entered the endless rift, and they were forced to change their tactics from the first time they entered as Matt and Liz. Even with that change, they cleared their Matt and Liz record in less than half the time.

Being unable to cast unlimited spells, as they did when Matt publicly used his Concept, they paced themselves in the first half by swapping between who did the fighting and mana recharging.

That method let them pull out the stops for the Tier 14 monsters, who were still a pain to fight, despite being able to showcase more of their combat skills. Being four Tiers lower than their enemies was nothing to scoff at, and as the monsters started to reach higher and higher through the Tier, the fights likewise increased in difficulty.

In the first wave of the Peak Tier 14 monsters, they were forced to use the improvised meteor skill to kill most of the monsters. It was difficult to damage the rift created creatures without showing any more of their hidden skills, but with that spell and its synergy with Torch, they managed.

While they slowed down, they eventually finished all five waves of the peak Tier 14 monsters, and exited the rift after getting washed in essence.

Having experienced the rush once before, they expected to get more essence, seeing as they had advanced further through the waves. To their surprise, they received only about ten percent more essence for their much greater efforts.

Their reward, on the other hand, made up for it. A Tier 14 chest armor dropped for them that appeared to be made out of smoke. When they inspected it spiritually, they were shocked to discover that it was a growth item. While a growth item dropping after Tier 5 was not impossible, it was absurdly rare, to the point of being almost unheard of. Neither of them could figure out what it did, but what little public data existed on post-Tier 5 dropped growth items suggested hat the effects were often more nuanced and complicated than their Tier 5 and below counterparts. For the time being, Torch stowed it away so they could quickly leave without advertising their monstrous luck. However, when they tried to leave the rift area, Diego ambushed them, though without Page backing him up this time.

After her very public faux pas suggesting beast bonds werent worth anything more than their combat ability, she had been pulled completely out of the spotlight for the next two weeks. In the interim, Diego was working the tournament scene on his own.

Matt took a bit of pride in her public apology video, but also accepted that the punishment was fair. She had seemed honestly sorry for her offending question, and promised to do better going forward.

Maybe it was just him being naive, but he chose to believe her.

He also chose to be thankful that Quill and Torch only had to deal with half of their tag-team today.

By reaching the end of the ninety-fifth wave, they had taken the top spot in this rift. This feat elicited a flurry of questions from Diego that the duo delivered primed answers for, all without revealing anything new that wasn't already obvious from the recording.

Once they could escape, they took the smoke armor to an appraiser, who immediately confirmed it as a growth item with a rare power set. Just not one that Matt, Liz, Aster, or even any of their friends would ever find very useful.

On the first inspection, the appraiser believed that if the bonded person had a smoke affinity, they could shift themself into the element for up to a certain amount of time before reforming back into their corporeal bodies. In and of itself, that would have made it a powerful piece of armor, if acutely limited in who could use it. On the second, more detailed inspection, they determined that the chest piece wasnt actually that restrictive regarding its required mana type. Any smoke-constituent mana affinity would also work to activate the armor, but resulted in increased spiritual strain and cooldown time. Smoke mana was a higher level mana type, mainly composed of air, fire, and wood mana. If the caster had any of those mana types or their paired combinations, they could still use the armor, just not quite as efficiently as an individual with true smoke mana. Considering how incredibly valuable the effect was to various build types, Matt could easily see someone with a lower Tier affinity pursuing a smoke affinity specifically to make better use of the armor. All together, the loosened restriction increased the number of people who could and would want to bond such a powerful item to a higher level. So much so, they expected to snag a significant profit for it.

As they didnt have any of those mana types, none of them could make good use of it. For all that Torch used fire spells, Liz had blood mana. Matt, in turn, had no interest in aspecting his mana to any of those types. With that information, it was an easy decision to put it up for sale on Tur'stals special auction. It was scheduled for the middle of the fifth month, right before the start of the solo and team battles of the Big Three. Only Pathers would be able to place bids at the event, but all bids had to be in points. They expected to net a large amount of points for the armor, which could then be converted to items and skills they otherwise wouldnt be able to afford.

As the second month ended, the top performers were all brought forward to hear Lila talk. The number of different people who qualified had nearly doubled, as the number of teams topping more than one leaderboard was down to just seven. Only one team, the Gems, claimed three top spots. The competition had greatly intensified now that everyone knew time with the Ascender was on the table.

Aster had been so busy with her friends that she had only been replying to Matt and Liz in text format, which made Matt wonder if this was how parents felt when their kids left them, but he managed to stay busy.

In the last month, he had already released a second rune for free. This time, it was a version of a neutral mana barrier that was slightly more mana expensive, but proportionally stronger. With more time for his AI to spend on the project, the final version was a much firmer and cleaner Tier 5 enchantment. It was an overall improvement from his first rune, and a good workout for his AI. Kurt warned him that he was starting to make enemies from the guilds, corporations, and noble houses that had a vested interest in enchanting, but the man seemed proud when Matt was insistent on making the improved runes free.

The end of the month came and went, but as the third month was the start of the one-quarter mark, and the crafters profession rankings were going to start the next month, Turstal held an extensive amateurs tournament for every profession.

Quill participated and won a Tier 15 enchanting set in the enchanting portion of the tournament, which was fun but hardly challenging. His victory had people questioning whether he was a crafter hiding as a fighter, but the accusations held no water and were forgotten after a few days.

Liz, on the other hand, surprised Matt with her insistence on getting in the top one hundred of the alchemy tournament. The fact that there were more than two hundred thousand participants, versus the ten thousand amateur enchanters he had to deal with, spoke to how hard her goal was. But he still gathered all of their friends to support her.

She said she had a reason to reach that rank, but refused to explain until after she won the tournament, no matter how much he tickled her.

So, like everyone else, he was forced to wait and cheer.

***

Liz sat in front of the table they had set up for the contestants and took long, deep, steadying breaths.

Despite her efforts, she couldn't stop her hands from shaking. She needed to reach the top one hundred winners if her plan was to work. If the crafting Pathers were competing against her in his tournament, she wouldnt have had a pipe dream of even reaching the top ten thousand, but everyone here was an amateur, just like her.

That gave her hope.

It was actually her perusal of the tournament and its rewards one night, along with the formatof the tournament, that lead her to consider the possibility of using her blood alchemy for a chance at some of the rewards.

Alchemy was one of the most popular sub occupations for good reason. It offered a way to heal and empower any fighter without a need for a skill. Anyone could learn it, and there were plenty of knowledge databases centered around it. That meant on average, at least one person on a team was trying to master the craft and use the items they found.

Matt had laughed that the alchemy tournament, at least for the early rounds, wasn't using real items because of the number of contestants, and was instead using [Mana Copy] versions to help cut costs. His next comment that he wished he could use [Mana Copy] to replace his talisman parchment had struck her like a punch to the gut.

She was using blood alchemy to absorb potions into herself and then boost her powers. But with physical materials, it was an annoying process that forced her to vent the waste materials.

For her, [Mana Copy] would presumably become [Blood Copy]. If it worked the way she hoped, turning her blood into the ingredients she made her potions out of, then she could mix them inside herself, and revert the changes after their effects ran out.

It would allow her to continuously boost herself without one of the biggest drawbacks.

Of course, it wasn't so simple. [Mana Copy] needed a physical representation of what it was going to copy, and it didnt work on finished products, but that wasn't an impossible restriction to work around. The skill had an initial mana cost to cast the spell, and reserved a portion of the casters mana for each item copied. This put a limit on how many copies could exist at a single time. However, the biggest flaw was that any item copied by the skill didnt contain any essence, which meant that anything created using the items wouldnt have an effect on reality. The copy was just a shadow of the real thing.

Essentially, any potion Liz created wouldnt actually work.

It made [Mana Copy] a practice only skill. Still useful to practice within the lab to ensure valuable ingredients werent wasted, but not so in battle. This was a major gamble with her plan. If the blood version of the skill didnt produce working potions, then her whole idea would collapse. Her hope was that the blood copies being made from something containing essence would resolve the biggest limitation of the skill.

[Mana Copy] was a rare Tier 14 skill, but there existed two other skills that went hand in hand with it for higher Tier alchemists. [Create Blueprint] and [Library] were Tier 20 and Tier 32 skills, respectively, and were just as rare as [Mana Copy]. But they were indispensable to any higher Tier alchemists.

Alchemists generally used [Mana Copy] to let them practice with the exact herbs they were about to use to make a potion, and to give them unlimited tries without wasting rare ingredients. But that was just the lowest application of the skill. With [Create Blueprint], they were able to perfectly scan the item and store the blueprint in their spirit for later use. Due to the size of the blueprints, the caster was limited to half a dozen blueprints without [Library] to organize, index, and efficiently store them. But the latter was only needed if one wanted to store more than a dozen ingredients at once.

Liz could manage with just [Blood Copy], and having the ingredients on hand for the near future.

And coincidentally, [Mana Copy] was available to purchase from the points rewards shop for any of the contestants who ranked in the top one hundred. [Create Blueprint] wasnt going to be so easy to get, but she only needed [Mana Copy] for now.

She just needed to beat everyone but ninety-nine other participants, or she would be forced to fight with every other alchemist in the greater Empire that also wanted the skill.

It was why she was shaking like a leaf. If she failed here, she was screwed until she could throw around the Tier 20 wealth that the [Mana Copy] would undoubtedly cost.

Even with Matt creating rifts, they would be hard-pressed to earn that much wealth in a reasonable time, or without drawing attention to themselves. Even if they wanted to make a rift that dropped it as a Tier 14 skill, they could end up spending years just trying to get the rift to Tier 14.

It was now or never.

As the countdown reached zero, she and everyone else looked up to the stage, where a middle-aged woman stood and clapped twice.

On the first clap, a number of blue-tinted and slightly see-through materials appeared, and the second stilled the air, stopping any sound from escaping the contestants.

Good morning, everyone. I am Senior Alchemist Giana, a Tier 35 professional alchemist in the employ of Queen Tur'stal. I will be overseeing the competition for you. Also, I will be one of the five main judges for the upcoming official Alchemy Competition. Her being a judge for one of the Big Three did mean that getting to know her beforehand could be very useful.

At that, she looked to the side towards the crowd, where Liz suspected a number of the Path crafters were watching this competition to try and learn what they would be dealing with.

Today, we will be eliminating most of you over the course of four events. First is a written test to weed out anyone here just for fun. Were not wasting true ingredients for people who arent even serious about the field. The second trial will entail creating a simple Tier 10 strength-boosting potion. The recipe is common enough to be familiar to almost any alchemist, but producing it at high quality requires exemplary application of multiple key techniques.

Liz took a deep breath and settled herself; hearing what they were going to be doing helped to settle her nerves. Exemplary application of multiple key techniques could mean anything, but if she worried about the standards being too high, it would push her out of the competition before it even started.

All of her friends took her out for a party at one of the more exclusive restaurants, and it was only the day after the finals that she was able to absorb [Mana Copy].

One and a half days later, the skill entered her inner spirit, where her Tier 1 Talent took effect. She didnt bring the skill into her core spirit, which had an extra spot, on the recommendation of Luna. Their manager had told them to keep that spot open for the inheritances that would be opened next month.

To her surprise, Uncle Manny didnt have a prerecorded message for [Mana Copy] turning into [Blood Copy], which meant that she didnt have an easy and convenient way to know if the skill would work as she hoped.

At Matt's insistence, they invited Melinda and her team so she could be healed with Overhealth in case the skill had some adverse effect.

With nerves worked up from everyone elses worry, she took out a Tier 10 Grasping Vine and cast [Blood Copy] on the herb, and she felt something lurch inside of her.

The spell was reaching for something more than just mana or blood to finish creating the replica of the Tier 10 Grasping Vine. Liz quickly dismissed the skill and took a moment to explain to everyone else what had happened.

Matt was worried, but after Melinda gave Liz the all clear they started considering what might have gone wrong. It didnt take them long to speculate that the blood Liz provided either didnt have enough, or the right type of essence, so the skill tried to draw essence from her spirit. The problem was that she didnt have any unallocated essence, so the skill failed. They quickly went to the nearest rift, and after a small bribe, entered with the next team. They allowed Liz to kill a few of the monsters to gather some essence before they left.

This time, instead of being painful, she felt an odd draining sensation that pooled in her hand, and a portion of her blood seeped out of her skin, forming an identical copy of the Grasping Vine. The amount of essence contained in the blood copy was approximately twenty percent of the original.

Melinda was the first to move, with Sam right behind her, and they both leaned in and started examining the herb while Liz looked inward.

Just like [Mana Copy], [Blood Copy] seemed to reserve a portion of her mana, and she felt that she could dismiss the copied ingredient by dismissing the structure that held a portion of her mana still in her mana pool.

The only odd thing was the blood used for the ingredient. While she could use [Blood Manulapation] on it, the blood didnt move oxygen, or have any of the other properties of blood.

It was something to investigate later, but for now, she joined Sam in their testing of the Grasping Vine. The herb in question was one of the main ingredients in her strength potions, and they were now hoping that [Blood Copy] worked differently than [Mana Copy], while keeping the magical properties of the original skill. As it was creating things out of a physical liquid, she believed it would.

As they hoped, it worked. The essence made all the difference. But in turn, the Blood Grasping Vine was harder to work with normal alchemy tools, and basically required someone with [Blood Manipulation] to properly handle.

Liz then created copies of all the needed herbs, locking down around a quarter of her blood, and used the blood ingredients to create one of her concentrated strength potions.

Matt, who had been looking adorably proud, turned worried again, and practically begged Melinda with his eyes to edge closer as Liz pulled the finished blood potion into herself.

With months of practice, she kept a firm control over the potion and its medical effects, but she found it almost trivial. Where she had once needed to encase the potion in a film of blood, now she just commanded the potion to not be absorbed, and it flowed like normal blood.

It was made entirely from her blood, after all, and her Tier 3 Talent meant that she was one with blood.

Liz only had to will the blood potion to release the medicinal effects, and it flooded her body with strength. About twenty percent as much as when she used the real ingredients, but this was fully under her control. The strength of the potion corresponded to the amount of essence contained in the copied ingredients, which made sense. The dosage had to be increased, but it had worked.

Her gamble had paid off.

She threw a few punches with Matt to give her an outlet for her power and smiled the whole time. As she had hoped, when she was done with the potion, the small remnants of the potions that usually lingered in her body like a poison vanished when she dispelled [Blood Copy]. She felt the release of her mana and a small trickle of essence returned to her spirit as the skill dissipated. She couldnt recover all of the essence that was used in the ingredients, but a small portion of the total cost was returned.

Perfect.

With the safety of the new skill tested, she kicked everyone but Sam out, and the two of them started to test everything they could with her new skill.

As with the normal skill, she was unable to copy a finished product. But after a lot of work, and an idea from Sam, Liz was able to skip copying the intact ingredient. Instead, they used a refined version of the herb as the starting point to copy, and then created a potion with those ingredients.

It didnt save Liz any ingredients, nor make the potion creation any easier, as she needed to tweak her recipe. But at least the samples were now small enough to hide on her person. Since she wasn't at the level of control where she was able to mix the potion in her body, they created a small pouch that slipped under her armor on her back, where she could mix the ingredients on the fly and then absorb them into her body.

Despite not wanting to interact with Frederic and his shitty backwards noble faction in any way, shape, or form, she still messaged him and asked if he had a [Create Blueprint] skill handy, and if she would be able to swap her second choice spell out for it.

She was nearly instantly rejected, which, while expected, was still annoying.

He said he didnt have a cracked version, and because of the rarity of the skill, he was prohibited from substituting it in.

Frederic did offer up a good suggestion that she use the true [AI] skill and her Talent to make [Blood AI], which might let her mimic the effects of both [Create Blueprint] and [Library] with a single skill. He wasn't able to give her one, but the skill was far, far more common than the other two, so it wasnt a bad idea.

Frederic was a stupid idiot who she believed honestly bought the drivel he peddled, but he knew what he was talking about when it came to skills.

She had honestly expected Matt to have a worse reaction to him because of his history, but Matt just shrugged it off, saying that the man wasnt the one who ruined his home. No matter the connection, he would treat the man fairly until he had a reason not to.

Liz knew her partner well enough. She knew he wasn't lying, but she was still surprised at how level-headed he took it. She wasn't sure that she would have been so sanguine about everything that had happened after meeting the man representing the faction that believed the Junipers had done nothing wrong. Even if it was just a portion of his retainers, Frederic still represented the worst of the nobles.

There was a reason why those nobles had been removed from Aunt Tur'stal and Uncle Rusty's kingdoms, and Liz wasnt going to forget that.

Matt might be willing to play nice, but she was watching every move they made, waiting for a single misstep. When that happened, she would strike with everything she had in both political power and physical might.

Still, that was for the future, and she stopped herself from planning, as it only angered her. Besides, today was a day of celebration.

With her testing done, she gathered everyone up again and hosted the largest party they could without spending points.

She had spent a little more than half of their points on [Mana Copy], and they would need to save them before the start of the next month, when the legacy battles started. While she didnt know everything that would happen then, she did know a few things from the tidbits that Luna, Kurt, and Uncle Aiden had said over the years.

And if they were right, each of them would need to buy another skill.

With the increase in her power, the two of them powered through the remainder of the month with an increase in points earned in both identities.

They even left the safe side of the planet with their real identities more than once, which made for a stark contrast to their time in the Jungle as Quill and Torch.

As their masked identities, they had to constantly deal with attacks from people who thought they had the drop on them. It never ended well for the other teams, but apparently, whoever was funding the bounty on them was willing to give five points to every team that they crippled. And considering that was the same as taking second place in one of the rift rankings, most teams were more than willing to take the risk.

One man repeatedly attacked them to earn the bounty, but only after announcing himself and asking if it was a good time to fight. When they agreed, he died after carefully losing a small chunk of non-vital flesh, and took the reward for trying.

Neither she or Matt had any issue with someone wasting the oppositions points and happily played along.

But as Matt and Liz, they never encountered any problems, and were even helped by random teams who knew of Matts mana giving Concept.

Liz wanted to punch every smiling face who would happily pull out their knives if they knew the bounty on their heads, but kept up the same fake smile as Matt did.

At the end of the third month, they managed to take two first-place rift rankings as Quill and Torch, and one as Matt and Liz. They and the same group who took first place in the wyvern rift had gathered back up to ensure they managed to place first at least once. The group rift they chose this time was a swampy marsh rift that meant an awful three days of slogging through for them, but they managed to clear the rift with no injuries, and faster than the second-place team by a day and a half.

Spending time with Lila was unsurprisingly amazing, as the older woman was more than happy to keep telling stories for their enjoyment.

Even taking fake advice from her when the others were around was still fun. The older dragon had, after knowing they were actually friends with the people they tackled the group rift with, given them her full attention. She had full training regimens ready for everyone, created to interact with their AI and the full virtual reality capsules.

The others were shocked and in awe of the treatment, but accepted it when Lila said it was because she wanted to see Baby Azure more often.

It was a believable excuse, as no one missed the dragon-sized bracelet that the small dragon came home with.

It was a Tier 1 spatial item.

Even Liz, growing up with the rich and noble, had never heard of a Tier 1 spatial item before.

The wink Lila shot her and Matt hinted to the fact that her tall tale about stealing the Republics' higher Tier planets vaults might have a touch more truth than she had believed.

As the Fourth month started, and the crafter Pathers started their own real competition, the Legacies tournaments started for the fighters.

She and Matt had a date with a power-up.