Limitless Path

Beth moved into a small chamber that was only a single room back from the exterior. It was the closest to the front of the ship she had been personally without observing from Jaq's ship, in an area none of them had been or scanned yet. The chamber had managed to remain mostly intact, but there was a crack in the outer wall facing the compartment that had been ravaged by a powerful claw attack. Fortunately, the claw attack had just started right there, leaving the surrounding area with only minimal damage. The room had held up surprisingly well, and what was in it was in a handful of small storage containers, all of which were enchanted, though two of them had the enchantments fade over time. Beth called out Erosh right after stepping in to make sure she didn't disturb anything too important.

"I understand now," he said almost instantly, as soon as he appeared in the room.

"Is this what Jaq was looking for, you think?" Beth asked.

"Part of it," Erosh said, picking up a large chest that looked like a little jewelry box in his massive hand. "Components for neural enhancers and advanced cyberware. Valuable."

"Wasn't this ship here for millions of years?" Beth asked, looking at one of the other cases that was anchored to the floor. She didn't open it, but there was a display listing the contents on the top.

"That's why it's valuable," Erosh explained. "People have been around and working on things forever. Sometimes people come up with novel or unique ways of doing things, ways that get lost at some point. Finding an ancient trove isn't just valuable because the stuff in it is really strong, it's often valuable because it has stuff that represents a whole different paradigm."

"Is this stuff safe to grab?" Beth asked, looking at the dozen different containers.

"Sure, why not?" Erosh said with a shrug. "Could put it in that necklace you use; could throw it in the reliquary. Doesn't really matter."

Beth did just that, tossing the stuff into the courtyard of Erosh's palace in the reliquary just to mess with him. He clearly had a way to detect that, as he immediately gave her a very suspicious squint-eyed look. Beth just shrugged and moved on, taking note that the room would have been heavily armored and sealed with quite a few enchantments if it hadn't been damaged during the attack. The derelict could have, quite literally, a thousand rooms of that size hidden all over the place and it would take them months to discover them all, particularly with how strong many of the beasts that haunted the place were. Then again, they had as many as fourteen Ascended that could help knock this problem out, so it wouldn't quite be that time consuming.

Beth sought out Jaq and presented him with the crates, to which his eyes gleamed and he asked her a near-endless series of questions about the room and how she found it. When she had shared everything about it, twice, he left her to her own devices to search out more rooms that were similar. The cybernetics were exactly what he had been looking for and he was eager to get them, though Beth still got the feeling that there was more to the story than just valuable old tech that he was interested in studying or selling. The whole thing being a convenient mission placed in front of them was something more, and it was something more than just distracting her team and keeping them busy or out of sight, though that could also be part of it. Not that she was complaining about there being actual treasure, as it were, on the ship they were salvaging; more money at the very least was a welcome thing, and maybe her team could make use of some of the tech if Jaq didn't keep all of it.

Beth informed the rest of the team of why they were there, or the first part of it, which is when Kris said she found the second room just a few minutes before. She had thought it was strange, a room near the outside of a section with heavy enchantments that had remained almost intact. That almost was the key piece, however, as the enchantments had worn down over time, specifically the primary enchantment locking the door. The security enchantment was still active, according to Kris, but the mana pathways that would link it to the security system were entirely gone, meaning it was making a slight buzzing noise as it was desperately trying to send a signal to a grid that no longer existed. Kris posted photos of the inside, showing cases of mana-modified guns stacked in three rows with a stack of ammo taking the entire far wall away from the door. Jaq was on the circuit and told Kris to either grab everything or have Beth or one of the others stash it for now.

Kris stashed the goods while the others kept searching, though it took a couple hours to find the third room. Beth's thought about there being a thousand of the rooms wasn't correct, but there were definitely more than two or even three. The group was thoroughly combing the derelict at this point, prioritizing searching for the rooms over anything else. Beth had a couple of the Empyreans help, which was good for more than just a couple pairs of eyes that could move fast. Somebody at forty-nine rebirths had all kinds of ways to detect and monitor things that somebody at no rebirths, or even at seven rebirths, might not have access to. Mainly it had to do with the wealth, lifespan, and strength the Empyreans had had before they were trapped in the reliquary, all those factors combining to give them a vast plethora of skills, not to mention spells and other, even stranger abilities. Apogee was able to send out something like a sonar ping, but it went through mana fields, which Beth only vaguely understood, and it could basically ignore walls and other barriers. The ping would light up if there was a living being or really high source of mana in its path; not super useful for finding advanced tech in shipping crates and boxes, but just one example of the kinds of things the Empyreans could do.

Some of the skills of the Empyreans were even more esoteric in nature; Liveria helped greatly with an administrative skill she had that allowed her to catalogue and search huge volumes of information. It turned her brain into a far more advanced computer, letting her preform all kinds of calculations and crazy things with minimal effort. She was able to catalogue everything they had explored of the ship, building a three-dimensional model in just her mind while tracking every single nut and bolt they had encountered. She was able to then use the data and the skill to extrapolate blueprints for the ship, including locations of the secure rooms and where other valuables or interesting bits might be stored. She wasn't one hundred percent accurate, but she was correct a surprising amount of the time, which greatly helped the group in finding the secure rooms.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Some of the Empyreans, unfortunately, weren't quite as helpful. Apogee couldn't really do much, nor did she care to, talking about not doing busy work for somebody else's profit, even if it would get her time outside the reliquary. Ragnheiðr, on the other hand, wasn't really able to navigate the corridors very well, though she could compress her size. She said it made her uncomfortable to do so, and she didn't think there was that much she could contribute, so she just stayed in the box and did her own thing. Others, like Abigail, who had once ruled the City of Mended Dreams, simply didn't feel like moving themselves to assist, preferring to meditate or spar or do something else instead. They weren't Beth's property, either, even if she owned the reliquary, so she let them do whatever they wished; she was already grateful for the huge boost they were giving her and didn't wish to push any of them too far.

That was not true for Jaq, however, in either sense of it, as she had no problem pushing his buttons constantly, while he, in turn, had no problem driving their team hard to get as much done as possible in as little time as they humanly could. They were all working as much as eighteen hours at a time before taking a rest, which was fine for them physically, but it would start taking a toll on them mentally after a time, especially as they often only rested for an hour or two at a time. They kept that up for a few weeks, scouring out more than a dozen of the secure rooms, three of which they needed to break into to get past still active barriers and security measures. Beth left that to the Empyreans, the various Ascended that worked on it happy to be out of the reliquary and to have an interesting puzzle to chew on.

The rooms contained less of the cyberized gear after the first ten and more specialized equipment, which Beth took for another clue, though Jaq was still remaining tightlipped. It was the lucky thirteenth room that Beth found what Jaq was looking for. Well, she found a piece of it, quite literally, as it was a section of a much larger machine. The people who had built the derelict, or the ones who owned it, if they were different people, had thought this thing shouldn't be kept all in one place. The thing Beth was looking at looked like a big tank, as in a giant storage container for liquids, though saying giant when describing something about the size of a house while on a starship the size of a small moon was a little of an exaggeration. Beth called Jaq as soon as she found it, knowing by both the crazy circuitry, and insane amount of very intact enchantments carved into every nanometer of the thing, that it was something crazy valuable. The borg showed up to find almost all of the Empyreans crawling over the tank, quite literally in Erosh's case, the find enough to stir them all out of the reliquary.

"This is what you wanted?" Zelmainne asked with a raised eyebrow as Jaq entered.

"This is part of it, yes," Jaq answered tersely.

"But, what's it for?" Erosh asked. "I get that it hooks to a…biological?....refinery system, but I don't get what it does. Does it transform flesh?"

"You're only partly right," Jaq answered, walking up and inspecting the tank before tapping a specific section of it. The whole thing collapsed, compacting into about the size of a four-door sedan, causing Erosh to drop to the floor from where he had been sitting atop the device. He frowned at Jaq as he inspected the compacted tank, his eyebrows slowly climbing, along with several of the others', as he found something in the compacted device quite fascinating.

"It's spatially nested," he said slowly. "How the fuck did they do that without using white adamantium or sacred gold? What's going on here?"

"It was built with a type of quark manipulation," Jaq answered tartly, getting several more surprised looks from the Empyreans. "It's purpose is to transfigure the flesh of a person, provided there are sufficient resources available. This ship had the only known copy the Seven Sigils Empire made. Some of the pieces from the other secure rooms are meant to link into this or be used with it, but I feared the device wasn't onboard. This is the stasis tank meant for someone to undergo the transformation within. Just this find both proves that my guess was right about what this ship and what it was doing and is an incredible find of almost incalculable value. Just this tank is worth nearly as much as the rest of the derelict combined, not counting the rest of this device. If we can find the complete device…"

"That sounds great, but I'm a little lost," Beth said, frowning as many of the Ascended turned to stare at her. "Can you explain it a little simpler?"

"The whole device," Jaq began, "is meant to reprocess certain materials, not just raw resources, but all kinds of complex machinery, nanomachinery, and even picotechnology, and rebuild a person's body with that. It would increase that individual's base power, multiplying all increases from there on. It would also give them extra stats, new skills, new abilities, and more. The possibilities for this system are really only limited by the amount of materials, and the complexity of the technology, that one has available to use to rebuild themselves. It was thought to be just a myth, if even that, as the dreadnought the empire built, the only one they ever built, was lost with all hands. Of course, that missing dreadnought was rumored to have the only copy of the device, and the plans, on board, which sounds like something straight out of legend. You can see why it was dismissed by most a very long time ago."

"Wait, you said the ship was lost with all hands, but that's not true. The ship's still here, and there are some pretty obvious signs that the people evacuated," Beth said, holding up her hand to interrupt.

"Yes, there are signs of that, aren't there," Jaq said a bit obliquely.

"Come on, boy, don't leave us in suspense," Zelmainne grumped, causing Jaq to frown severely before sighing and continuing.

"The crew never made it," he said simply. "Wherever they went, or whatever happened after they abandoned ship, they never got back into polite society. And before you ask, I've searched this solar system and found no trace of them. They didn't build a secret base here, including your home planet; they left the solar system about as fast as they could, according to the ship logs that I've accessed so far. My personal theory, if you must know, is that they encountered whatever did this much damage to a dreadnought somewhere out there while they were fleeing. The thing, whatever it was, was a lot more interested in them, including in their mana and flesh, than it was in this ship. I surmise it pursued them, likely to total destruction, and just never bothered to find what it might have guessed was an empty ship."

"Gruesome," said Erosh with a sigh, crossing his arms over his chest as he shook his head sadly.

"Well, likely a predictable end," Jaq said.

"The fuck do you mean?" Beth asked, struggling to understand if there was anything he could have meant other than that these people earned their deaths.

"They were piloting a dreadnought, and not very competently," Jaq scoffed. "These things don't exactly scream 'stealth mission.' On top of that, the device, as well as materials for it, would have shone like a beacon to certain monsters, even through their shielding and the cloaking runes. Couple that with the fact that the empire couldn't spare anyone over Ascended to guard this thing and, well, they might have been desperate, but still, to think they were this sloppy…"

"Harsh," said Beth coldly.

"But accurate," said Zelmainne with a nod. "If they were only guarded by people as strong as us at most, and likely far weaker, this was a fool's errand, whatever the crew may have been told."