Optimizing Your Isekai - Progression Fantasy w/ Slice-of-Life and Biz Building Elements

By the start of the sixth day of actual delves, the seventh day of our sojourn around Pitola, things had settled in again.

The second group of delvers had arrived though it was seventeen teams instead of the originally scheduled eleven. That gave each of Steve, Vesna, and I six teams to work with when adding Ileana's team.

Every day, each group of six would split into two sets of three teams, so the rest of the day involved simply swapping the groups for each carried delve.

While a few people grumbled at not getting four or five delves in a day, most were quite happy to have a steady and stable group that they learned to work with.

Once we added Steve being carried on his own with Pavel early in our trip, we were able to do six more delves a day, which meant we had increased capacity. Norbert had added a number of delves that were farther away from Pitola, helping out many smaller villages get rifts back to manageable levels.

With how many delves we were doing, our readings of the area's rifts were getting more precise. It was always a bit hard to get concrete numbers on rift readings for a wide area for many reasons. The first was no one really wanted to go around and just measure rifts all day. Also, the devices used to measure the rifts were typically handmade and therefore a lot of readings weren't all that easily comparable. When mass manufacturing was impossible, the enchantment scripts too precise and hard to scale, you made do with what was available.

But since we had just three sets of tools, we got accurate enough readings as we could compare them on multiple rifts a day.

I ran some numbers and things weren't looking great.

The null essence concentration was increasing faster than anyone had predicted; soon, many rifts near Pitola would be over 60% null essence. At that level, for someone early in Tier 1, rifts would have to be kept nearly at zero extra essence to ensure the null essence didn't hurt their cultivation.

The measures from a few cities on the edge of the null essence area were still showing the null below 20% concentration but we didn't know how fast the issue would spread throughout the null essence zone.

There was also a rather bad dilemma for anyone who owned rifts, and really anyone involved in delving. If rifts were kept at levels safe enough for most people in Tier 1, that meant far more delves but also far worse rewards. Could rift owners lower the price enough to make it worthwhile for people to delve when the upside of great rewards just wasn't there?

Keeping rifts lower on essence also meant that for higher-Tier teams, to continue to advance but also to make enough money to safely start doing Tier 2 delves, they'd either have to increase their rate of delving, stay at Tier 1 for far longer, or just move to a different part of the Kingdom.

So far, many teams had already left the null essence area but not most. If there wasn't something that was keeping those capable Tier 1 delvers in the area, the former green essence zone was facing a very bad catch-22: keep the essence levels in rifts safe enough and the good teams will leave, meaning you have to lower the essence levels even more, and the rewards just keep getting worse. Alternatively, they could let the rifts stay at higher essence levels and, as the null concentration increased, fewer teams could handle those rifts and some teams will still leave but the rifts would now be far more dangerous.

One reason so many delvers parked at the peak of Tier 1 was that the rift entrance fees for Tier 2 rifts were much higher and the chance of getting hurt and needing expensive healing increased for most teams. That meant Tier 1 teams that wanted to advance had to plan very well to make the economics work.

Inga asked me to keep our readings and the analysis under wraps for a while as her team ran the numbers themselves and started to come up with a plan to spin the info.

But our potential savior had come in an odd, dancing package the night before in the form of Ratmir.

The crazy scientist had returned to Velez after making the trip to Chazin Mark. The fact a number of the rifts around Chazin Mark were causing some spells to fail – or at least cost more mana than usual – had intrigued him greatly.

I was surprised the city would let him work on their rifts when there had been so many issues with Velez residents. My own challenges there paled in comparison to when a noble from The Monetary Might Kingdom had been executed by the head of the Velez Council.

But when asked about it, Ratmir simply said, "I do good work, why stop that?"

It was an interesting point but I doubted others were getting that treatment. There was likely something in the researcher's past I didn't know about.

On that morning, Ratmir was sitting with us in Tiesa's tent, stealing food from Steve's plate while the sugar glider did the same to Ratmir's.

They were almost universally stealing the same food from each other.

I ignored the quiet war of pilfering and said, "It sounds like you possibly made some progress? Do you have any ideas as to the cause, why the spells needed more mana?"

He scratched at his chin, not eating the handful of scrambled eggs in his grasp before doing so. "I've been over and over it all. Can't find anything specific that would cause it, at least naturally."

"So more people that are interfering in some way?"

Ratmir started to look agitated again, nodding and pulling chunks of egg from his beard.

He and I had spent the previous night poring over facts and figures with Romie, much to Ileana and Steve's annoyance.

I severely missed having access to Excel.

There had been more incidents of the total essence in rifts suddenly spiking, often causing rift breaks. There was a more remote area in the southeast of the former green essence zone where two smaller cities had been nearly destroyed from rift breaks.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Possibly more worrying was the number of rifts where the null essence concentration inexplicably spiked, often without the essence level changing. It seemed to be random at first but we were noticing a pattern.

When we started to map it out, the increases always seemed to be relatively random. But a more concrete pattern started to show the more pins we placed on the map, indicating it almost certainly was human-caused.

There were pockets over a longer period of time that emerged, likely a person or group working in a specific area though doing their best to remain hidden.

The actual rifts impacted looked random but it was just like any human idea of randomness: far too uniform to actually be random. A rift ten miles to the east, then one to the southwest, then another in the northeast, back-and-forth around a more central point.

"I slept on it and I still don't have any idea why someone would want to cause rift breaks," I said, circling back to something we discussed the previous night.

"Assholes?" Romie suggested.

Ratmir laughed but shook his head. "I think we're dealing with researchers." At my raised eyebrow, he clarified, "Not good researchers but they seem to be trying for a specific result. See this original cluster here," he pointed to the map, the rift near Velez where Steve and I had gotten hurt just at the edge of a larger ring. "Once that delve happened, they moved here." He pointed further down to the southeast, just at the edge of the null essence zone.

"Is there a reason they aren't working closer to one of the bigger cities?" I said, then answered my own question. "Far easier to get caught, I get it."

We continued to chat about why someone might be messing with rifts but it always came back to what were they getting from causing the issues. Outside of interesting experiment data, we couldn't think of anything.

"Do we set up a sting?" I asked. After explaining what a sting was, then what a police procedural show was, we debated the merits.

"Who would run it?" Romie asked.

Nodding, I said, "Good question. Especially in this grouping in the southeast. Seems like there's not even a city in the area so we could probably have someone like Inga assert our authority but it still just feels like a nightmare. This cluster is a bit closer to Struva by the mountains, that might work."

Tiesa returned after briefing the teams for the day's delves. "We've got the head of Struva's Council meeting us soon, let's talk to her about it then," she said.

It seemed settled so I turned back to Ratmir. "You mentioned there might be something for the increasing null essence concentration in general. Something for our delves specifically?"

"Yes, let me show you!" he said excitedly, getting up from the table in a mess. Tiesa grumbled at all the food now splayed across the floor of her tent.

***

"You want me to do what now?" I asked, incredulity and confusion warring with each other.

"Take this into the rift and detonate it," Ratmir said with a smile. "What's hard to understand about that?" He had pulled a spherical object about the size of his head from spatial storage and was holding it aloft like he might spike it on the ground.

Maybe 'detonate' means something different? Just a translation error?

"Does detonate mean trigger an explosion?" I asked.

"Yes, of course!" he said with enthusiasm, doing a small dancing twirl with the device in his arms.

I looked to Tiesa for help. Instead, she just shrugged at me like I was the one who had to handle it.

I guess he's my monkey and this is my circus.

"Ratmir, I am not going to be near something when it explodes," I said, plainly stating my view on the matter.

"Of course not, that would be silly."

"But you said— no, okay, walk me through this," I said with exasperation.

Ratmir had learned a lot of potentially useful information from his time in Chazin Mark, studying their rifts. The phenomenon, where at least some spells cost more mana than typical, was a worrying one and the city gladly allowed him to pair with their own rift experts despite everything going on.

"Well, the idea is to excite the null essence and only the null essence so any new beings or rewards the rift constructs will be made from null essence, or at least use far more than it normally would. You see here…" Ratmir started explaining details that were way over Romie's head and they had far greater knowledge on essence and rifts than I did. "… and that's why I designed these new essence allocation bracelets to test."

Ratmir tossed the bomb to Romie who deftly caught it, though looked horrified. He then took out a number of essence allocation bracelets that, to my spiritual sense, were sparking like a live wire.

"When you say 'test', how much testing have they gone through so far?" I asked, fearing I already knew the answer.

The crazy researcher's eyes lit up. "Oh, very extensive. Of course, none of the animals survived but they died exactly as I expected. I didn't have the essence excitement exploder yet but I'm sure it will be okay; the theory is sound."

I looked to Romie who shrugged which I took to mean it was at least not completely insane BS.

"We're not going to do the bracelets at the same time as the bombs. Got it?" I said to the scientist's mild dismay.

Some of what Ratmir was talking about sounded slightly similar to what Gabby had done when we delved the dungeon twice. She especially increased the percentage of null essence she used in the delve I'd done alone. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell them about Gabby and didn't know any details of how she did it anyway to help Ratmir. I did mark it down to ask the dungeon core later.

The enthused researcher smiled at us. "You are doing three tests today. First is setting off the device in the rift instance you are delving; second is setting it off in the instance before the instance you delve; and third is setting it off in a new instance just after you emerge."

Ileana had come over to investigate the cause of the commotion. Upon seeing Ratmir again, her eyes narrowed slightly. "Did I just hear you are going to blow him up?"

"No, he'll be fine. They all will be. Or at least should be."

"Oh, that's totally fine then, no worries," she said sarcastically.

"See, she gets it!" Ratmir said.

Tiesa headed off a fight and started escorting us away.

***

"Well, that sucked," I said as we emerged from a team delve. Inara had decided to take on the 'bomb in this rift' experiment, not wanting to risk other teams. Mostly because no set of three teams all agreed to conducting the experiment so it couldn't happen in a carried delve and she had a soft spot for the odd scientist.

As I expected with a massive noise, the essence excitement exploder attracted a huge number of the rift's monsters, giant turkeys that were so dense, my morningstar was nearly ineffective. It did give me a bit of sword training, which I liked. But it also netted me more than a few bruises when the giant beasts bowled into me.

Upon entering the rift, we placed the bomb and got a good distance away, fighting our way through the mountainous forest for over twenty minutes. Unfortunately, Ratmir didn't place a timer on the bomb so we had to stay in range and activate it.

That meant after the explosion, about fifteen 'terror turkeys' were in one area, agitated and alert. Because of the nature of the essence test, we had to kill all of them. Only a full rift clear would give us the data we needed.

Inara and Romie tag-teamed on drawing them away one at a time but we still had three battles with two at once and almost one with three, it showing up to the battle just as I beheaded one of the monsters.

They weren't the most dangerous monsters, which was why we chose the rift, but it was still difficult to take what felt like a truck smashing into my shield every few minutes for an hour.

The final fight involved two smaller but far more agile turkeys that each had a skill to empower their claw strikes with enhanced cutting power. They flanked and supported a turkey that would make an elephant look small. Its stomp attacks were pretty telegraphed but any mistake could be incredibly costly and often deadly.

We chose a slow and methodical strategy which left us safe but physically drained by the end.

Our rift reward was some lightly-enchanted turkey feathers which felt absolutely not worth the effort.

As soon as we emerged, Ratmir started taking some readings. "Hmm, interesting."