Limitless Path

She made it to the counter with a bit of time to spare, not really having needed to run there. The day was going to be busy, despite everything that happened yesterday, as they were still hosting the week of cheap teleports and inter-Hall competition. There were way more people there that day than there had been previously, and Beth realized she was largely responsible.

News of her fights and what had happened had traveled fast, spreading around the world in minutes, and that had inspired people to take advantage of the low teleport prices to come to her Hall to check things out. Luckily, nobody challenged her to a fight, not at first, at least, not when they saw her taking her place as one of the refs, which was something that seemed to have been lost in the retelling. People seeing her in the ref box suddenly thought she was a Senior Enforcer and thought twice about approaching her, which was just fine with her; she didn't really want to take on every random person that felt like testing her in a fight. Fighting on the Ladders was going to be something she would do a lot of, but queuing for them was different than every random slob in the Hall walking up to her and trying to pick a fight.

The day was a bit more exciting due to the presence of so many other people, but it did drag on for quite a while. Despite the numbers, there wasn't anybody there really worth looking into, Beth secretly hoping this week might have popped up a hidden genius, some mini-Veren, though that was a bit of a shuddering thought, that might spark some interest from her. So far, however, there was nothing, just a bunch of people between zero and three rebirths, though the two people with three rebirths that Beth watched weren't supremely powerful. Beth estimated they had not even gone to max level on any of their rebirths, not that she could hold that against them, considering there were definitely people in bad situations that just needed the jumps in power. Better to rebirth at one-fifty or something like that, level more quickly the second time through, and get a modest overall power boost from the additional stats rather than take it more slowly the first couple times and be lacking on stats in a desperate situation.

The day came to a close, or her shift did, anyway, and she made her way down to a training room to run through a few more drills on her own. It was still a bit surreal to have experienced a second, perhaps smaller, epiphany and have pushed to Master because of it. She was adjusting well, and she was more concerned about what Baelvyr had just mentioned, in that she was concerned about bringing her Unarmed up to match her now far ahead Swords. It wasn't that they were that many levels different, but it was going to be a good bit of work to get her other weapon skill over that hump and into Master.

Then again, she could draw on the experience of having done it once, and on the fact that she actively had a skill in Master, to make it that much easier. That, and she remembered Veren's words about the change, about what it meant to become a Master and a Grandmaster and what she should be focusing on. Master was at the limit of what a human could do, or close to it, and Grandmaster was someone who had reached the pinnacle and was pushing for greater power and understanding. She understood that explanation a lot more now, feeling how deep her understanding of swordsmanship was now that it was in Master. She also had a couple ideas about what Veren had meant when he explained Grandmaster, but she didn't want to put the cart that far ahead of the horse. She had plenty of time to work through Master with two skills before she needed to make that jump to Grandmaster.

And speaking of Veren and the others, she had been messaging them a bit and was curious if some of them might want to stop by for a visit. She didn't have anything quite as grand in mind as the titan factory or the tower in the desert, but then again having some of her more extended group of friends would make a lot of the weekend explorations they were doing a whole lot safer and easier. It wouldn't even be a nuisance to have to split the loot, not considering there were already places where they might not even be getting any loot at all, Beth thinking of the place with beasts all the way up to level five hundred that they had had to run from just a few days before. They might not be able to tackle something like that, even given that they had Bjorn to tank and Veren to deal ridiculous damage with his Grandmaster weapon skill, but there were areas approaching that level of difficulty that they could explore.

First, however, she did want to get just a bit more of the general area explored. She had been keeping in contact with the others sporadically, so she also knew that many of them were busy with various things currently. She dropped a few messages to some of them that were out of contact that she had some interesting stuff for them to look into, specifically including the stuff about the caldera appended into her message to Veren to pique his curiosity. She would wait on replies as they came back, and meanwhile she would keep polishing her own skills.

The last couple days of the week rolled by without anything crazy happening, though it wasn't until Friday that she looked for Baelvyr to practice again. It was during that session that she had a few really valuable insights about her fighting style, how she mixed the use of her body and blade, allowing her to eke out a level with her Unarmed. That brought her much closer to parity, but the wall between Expert and Master still loomed in front of her. Sera and Blood had also been training, though Beth didn't see as much of Blood's, assuming the wolf had been busy while the rest of them were and wasn't just sleeping on the couch fulltime. She did know for a fact that Blood had been working on her piloting stuff in the evenings and even at night, knowing that some of the Seniors were qualified instructors and could provide her some of the required flight time.

After Beth was done with the session with Baelvyr, they headed out to scout for the weekend, with Blood flying them close to where they had left off. Not exactly where they had left off, as they didn't need a repeat of the previous weekend, but they resumed their explorations from close to that point. The first thing they needed to check was a point that read as a dungeon, and it turned out to be a bit of a surprise when they got there, though not the good kind. Despite being in such a mana rich zone of the planet, the place had barely hit level two hundred. Beth knew that things would change and shift over time, especially if an area weren't well-controlled by some kind of authority, but this looked like something that had just formed. It couldn't have been more than a handful of weeks old, meaning they had to have scanned it during their initial scouting right after it was created by the Path itself.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

They took some quick scans of the dungeon and the area around it before moving on, not really interested in something so low level. They got more than enough data on the place, but it wasn't worth their time, certainly not at this point. They flew to the next point, only taking about ten minutes to get there, finding this site was much better than the first one. It wasn't a dungeon, which was a bit annoying, as they would be the easiest clears, but it was something just about as good. Blood put them down a short distance away and they made their way over to the site, having to fight through beasts in the high two hundreds before they got there.

They looked down on the site from the lip of the wide valley it was buried in. Beth was a bit surprised, given the terrain and the proximity to more than one river, that the place wasn't submerged, but there wasn't even a stream in the base of the valley. Despite that, there were plenty of trees spread throughout, blocking their view of the actual bottom of the valley. The tree cover was combined with a bunch of bushes and brambles that further lowered visibility and made their progress, when they descended to the valley floor, even more treacherous. Even given all that, they pushed through the area to get at the real prize, which was a spawning ground that was cranking out level three hundred lizard beasts. The place was a bit like the breeding ground that still existed just north of Beth's neighborhood, but it wasn't its own little instance, just a place of concentrated mana that was producing a huge quantity of the same kind of beast.

The place was actually a treasure trove because of the lizards themselves, or would have been for any other team. The beasts' bodies were highly valuable and every part of them could be used for a variety of things, from weapons to armor to alchemical concoctions and more. For Beth and the team, just killing one or two would be enough, as Beth could then spawn them in her gate power. The beasts themselves weren't the only thing in the area, though, which is why it still held value for the team. The breeding ground produced several other things, the first of which was eggs, which were valuable for several reasons. Beast tamer classes would want powerful eggs to raise a beast from birth, while other businesses and professions would be interested in the eggs for a variety of reasons. The other thing present besides the eggs were small crystals that were a byproduct of the combination of breeding ground and beast. The crystals weren't as good as mana crystals, as they were simple gems with some mana aspect imbued into them. Things like eggs and the crystals wouldn't appear in Beth's gate, at least not at the current level it was at, so it still made it worth it for them to fight at that place for some time.

That wouldn't be right now, as they were still scouting. They took some measurements, did a little analysis, made a few notes, got a couple kills, and then went back to the open area outside the valley and deployed the airship again. They were away in a moment, arriving at the next destination nearly as fast. They spent a couple hours like that, going through another three places before they found one that really slowed them down. The last place, which is what Beth decided it would be for that weekend, was a dungeon with level four hundred creatures right outside the entrance and beasts in the high three hundreds just bit further out from that. The three of them fought their way through much of that to get decently close, allowing them to both observe the level four hundred beasts as well as get some good readings on the dungeon entrance. Once they had enough data, they decided discretion was the better part of valor and retreated, getting to a safe place to deploy the airship before returning to the Hall.

Beth wrangled Baelvyr again for a bit of time on the training stage, still trying to work out the last little bit of adjustment to her new level in her weapon skill, though that was mainly in really getting used to using her skills while swinging her blade. It was particularly good to get a chance to fight against a rational, intelligent opponent while doing so, allowing her to adjust better to skill use and to get some proper feedback. Beasts didn't really bother to sit down and give a person a small dissertation on everything they were doing wrong in a fight, unlike Baelvyr, who would talk somebody's ear off if he really got rolling on the finer minutiae of weapon combat and battling against other sapient beings. Beth often let him roll, letting his lectures roll over her much like water over and off a duck's back, taking advantage of his rambling rants to get herself some water and even a protein bar. Not that it was all random nattering, as even his somewhat legendary tirades produced a gem every now and then.

The rest of that weekend they spent leveling, a routine that was very easy for them to fall into, and one they constantly got better at. The next big challenge for them would be fighting beasts in the mid three hundreds, though that was something they had already proven they were well capable of, just coming down to whether they could do it for hours on end. That wasn't going to be necessary for a little bit yet, as they were just hitting the level two hundred threshold and their leveling would slow down there, regardless of the fact that they were fighting quite far up in level. Every hundred levels after the first hundred was a big increase in required experience for sapient beings, and that was often a real struggle for people that weren't as skilled or powerful as Beth and her team. Needing ever-compounding amounts of experience while having to fight vastly harder beasts, or even monsters, to get that experience was something that posed a challenge, often a lethal one, to many Wayfarers.

Beth and the team weren't just any Wayfarers, however, and they were able to easily fight up a hundred levels even when they hit level two hundred. It was only once they were in the middle of the two hundreds that they would have to slow down and be more cautious, and they weren't getting thirty or forty levels this weekend. They might not even hit it the following weekend, depending on just how much time they devoted to leveling.

It also wasn't a major rush, either, as they had a ton of things that they needed to work on, including their crafting skills, which had been gathering their fair share of rust for a bit now. Sera and Beth still needed to punch through to Expert in smithing, while Blood needed the same, though the wolf was closer, as she had been dedicating some more time to her leatherworking than the other two had on their smithing. Beyond that, there were several other things that were pretty important that they needed to spend some time on, including continuing to study runes, and Beth was glad she had a cheat engine that let her duck in and stretch out the hours whenever she wanted.