Chương 202: Limitless Path Chapter Two Hundred Twenty-Six

"Hold on," Beth interrupted, getting a glower from him that she ignored.

"Exactly how strong are we talking? Can you remind me again of the tiers or whatever? And what do you mean, exactly, by that immortality comment?" Jaq sighed again, deeply, before answering, "When I talk about someone's relative power, like many other powerful people, I'm referring to their stage of rebirth.

I will remind you, under five rebirths is Awoken, between five and nine is Empowered, between ten and nineteen is Enlightened, between twenty and forty-nine is Ascended, and between fifty and ninety-nine is Exalted."

"And what about after that?" Beth interjected after he paused for a moment.

"After that you don't need to worry about," he replied coldly.

"But-""But nothing," he said with clear exasperation in his voice.

"Baelvyr, much as I hate to admit, is talented and rather hard-working. He's been at this for over a thousand years and he's still only partway through Exalted, as far as I know. He certainly hasn't made it to the next stage, Manumitted, and I doubt he'll hit it within the next century, but you never know."

"It's really that difficult, huh?" Beth asked.

"Yes," he replied, deadpan, before moving on.

"As I was saying, those are the basic stages, and they are more than just made-up brackets, though they sometimes work out a little oddly early on."

"How so?" This time it was Blood that asked.

"The first four rebirths are categorized as Awoken," he replied with a glance at the lupine woman.

"And this is a bit arbitrary. You see, many of the later groupings of rebirths, stages as most refer to it, are grouped that way because they are separated by hard limits. There is a strict requirement you must pass between Exalted and Manumitted, the same with Manumitted and the near-mythical realm beyond that, Absolute Authority. But a few of the earlier realms don't have that hard limit."

"What are those hard limits, exactly?" Beth asked.

"I will explain the early ones," he replied coolly.

"The first of the two exceptions is between Awoken and Empowered, but there is still a reason for the distinction. If you continue to level and rebirth, you can move all the way to nine rebirths with no impediment, only stalling at the hard requirement before the tenth rebirth. The reason we differentiate between the two is that at your fifth rebirth, you have an opportunity to build your Mana Physique.

What I mean by that is that the Path grants you what is essentially a free chance to build your Mana Physique with slight assistance. It provides no guidance but does temporarily place you in a special subspace conducive to building your Mana Physique and no, I will not elaborate further right now, if you're that curious you can go look up the basic information about that on your own.

"The first hard limit, as I just mentioned, is at ten rebirths. You must build your Mana Physique at that point, or you can't continue. I mean that quite literally; if you do not build a Mana Physique, you will be stuck on nine rebirths. Forever."

"I take it there are people like that?" Beth asked.

"Plenty," he said with a frown.

"Building such a thing comes easier for some than others, but it is still an incredibly complex task. Many people who consider themselves elites or better view this as the first great filter that blocks people's progress along the Path. After that, however, is the second time there are stages differentiated without a hard requirement.

To move from Enlightened to Ascended requires only time and effort and, at the key moment of undergoing your twentieth rebirth, you have an opportunity presented to incorporate an Ideal into your soul. Once again, no, I'm not going to explain that. What follows that is thirty long rebirths, culminating with a requirement to do as I just said, incorporate your Ideal into your soul.

"After that, it is requirements basically all the way. I won't go into it anymore, but there is a hard requirement that you must pass before moving from Exalted up to Manumitted and so on. You can perform many or all of these tasks early, and you can do them without any assistance from the Path, but the difficulty is, of course, far greater."

"So, you can do all that Ideal stuff or whatever at any time? Like, I could make an Ideal now?" Beth asked.

"Yes and no," he said.

"You can, as I'm sure you've been told more than once, do basically anything. There is a reason it is called the Limitless Path. But just because it is possible, doesn't mean that you can actually do it. You could form your Ideal right now and incorporate it, you could fly to the moon and make a billion gold, you could just suddenly drop dead and save us all the trouble. Who knows?"

"Fucking rude," Beth snapped.

"I'm not your personal library, girl. You could look this all up without bothering me with it," he replied caustically.

"Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the Lord of Traversal is an odd fellow. He is at least functionally immortal, and knows of quite a few mysteries, which should not be a surprise based on his title. He is a master of spatial and dimensional magics, one of the few genuine masters of such in our entire galaxy." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"So…this invitation is a good thing?" Blood asked.

"Yes," Jaq replied with a shrug.

"Though I would wait to act upon it. Like I said, you should finish getting your Silver Emblem before anything else. Was that all you wanted to bother me with today?"

"Yeah, I mean, how do we use this?" Beth asked, gesturing at the little metal plate.

"The Hall has a long-range teleporter. You can use the card there to teleport, but it will also cost you a decent bit of coin. I can show you the equipment when you're ready," he answered.

"Right, well, I don't have anything else. We're off to finish your request next," she said, getting only a snort from him before he left through one of the doors and they went back out the main entrance of the shop.

"Where now?" Blood asked as they walked down the hall.

"Now to Jaq's task. But first, we're gonna make a little stop," Beth replied.

"A little stop?"

"Yeah, back to the pit," Beth answered.

"Do we have to?" Blood asked a bit petulantly.

"You don't have to do anything, but I want to practice my new skill," she said.

"Fine," Blood growled out, following the slightly shorter woman out of the arena section and southward. It took only a couple minutes for them to be at the field where the kobolds were emerging. Beth had already started practicing her new skill, using it to teleport short distances forward as she ran. It was a little hard to use at first, but her slightly increased INT and greatly increased DEX allowed her to adapt fairly quickly.

Highly boosted stats wouldn't make up at all for hours or months of practice, but they did allow her to compensate after a few uses, so she wasn't ready to fall on her face as she disappeared from somewhere and appeared somewhere else instantly. She didn't want to use it too much, either, as it was still rather draining on her mana even at copper[0]. She also knew, without even checking, that that was a good sign that the skill was above a tier one skill, as even inefficient skills didn't soak up as much mana.

Beth refocused on what they were doing as they paused at the edge of the field, seeing kobolds emerging from the shaft to join the ones that were already on the surface. After observing for a minute, they got to work, chewing through the kobolds above ground before diving down the shaft. Beth repeated her earlier feat of leaping down most of the distance of the shaft, barely feeling the impact of falling dozens of feet.

Blood followed her down, but instead of falling straight down, bounced from one side of the shaft to the other, nearly beating Beth down even though she started higher up and after Beth had leapt. Beth led the way down to the massive cavern area at a quick trot.

She didn't want to mess with the maze-like area again until they were a lot stronger, which might be a little paranoid, but she wasn't afraid to admit that knowing there were extremely strong beasts at level two-fifty and above down there made her very nervous. She dismissed such thoughts as she crushed the head of a lower-level kobold, at least, lower-level compared to them, teleporting behind the corpse before it finished falling.

Continuing down to the cavern they spent an hour or so fighting, different from the last time they were down here where they were just scouting. Beth practiced using the new skill in combat and found that, having gotten used to using it without tripping or getting disorientated, it was immensely powerful.

She could disappear from where she was standing and instantly appear beside a foe, which was often even better for her than appearing behind them, as she could knock one beast sideways into another and get them both tangled up. When she felt she was sufficiently practiced, they retreated back to the surface, emerging into the late morning sun. They turned southeast, heading for the first location that Jaq's mission had for them to investigate.

All of the different locations were farther away than the area with the kobolds and spread out in a fairly wide pattern as well. The farthest they would have to travel would be into what used to be other states, though she had no idea what the old governments were up to at this point and hopefully she wouldn't be having to deal with that. At least, hopefully she wouldn't have to get involved for a while, but she had a sneaking suspicion she would be doing that diplomacy mission in the not-too-distant future.

Blood led the way as they moved across some open fields and through a small wood before hitting a medium-sized town. Here they got to see just the kind of state some other places were in as, though they were only a little over twenty miles from the CRA Hall, the place was half a ruin. It appeared that they hadn't been able to fortify the whole town but had instead fallen back to part of the central neighborhood around the square.

Curious, they approached the fenced-off area, some of the paths blocked by stone walls or even piles of logs and dirt with a flat surface presented to the outside. As they got close a shot rang out, Beth flinching slightly as a bullet smashed into the force screen from her helmet and stopped. She and Blood didn't speak or shout or try anything else similar, they both merely darted forward at their maximum speed, Beth teleporting forward a second later right as another shot rang out.

She wasn't sure where the person was aiming, likely at her, but her immense speed combined with the teleport meant the bullet didn't get anywhere close to her. Blood still beat her to the building where the shot came from, a four-story block of apartments that appeared to be just a street over from the square and part of the northern barricade of the town, if the filled-in windows were any indication.

Blood stopped against the wall and waited a second for Beth to catch up, being at an angle whoever was firing from the roof couldn't see. As soon as Beth was there, they both flexed their legs just slightly and shot upward in a massive leap, easily clearing the top of the building. The person who had been shooting at them had just leaned over to take a shot downward and let out a frightened yelp as the two girls flew right by his head, twisting in the air to land on the roof.

Beth glanced at him as they passed, seeing he was level twenty with a rather generic sounding class, and made the decision to try a bit of a less bloody approach to start. She had to work for a second to overcome her instincts to flatten the man into paste, her time in the Trial not having done much to make her forgiving of anyone who would try to attack her.

Instead, she took several steps forward at a speed that was likely little more than a blur to the man and grabbed the gun, wrenching it from his hands with a quick twist. The man cried out in pain, but she didn't hear any popping or snapping noises, so likely nothing was broken or even badly strained from her divesting him of his weapon.

She looked at the gun for a moment, guessing it was some kind of hunting rifle based on her limited knowledge gleaned mostly from video games, before tossing the weapon back to Blood, who inspected it curiously. The man seemed to have recovered a bit, or more than a bit, as he pulled out a knife and said, "I won't go down that easy!" Beth rolled her eyes and grabbed his wrist as he lunged at her, twisting his entire arm rather painfully without doing any serious damage.

The man struggled and swore and grunted, trying desperately to break free of her grasp. Beth reached up, cringing slightly as she felt like an anime protagonist, and flicked the man on the forehead with her right forefinger. The motion produced a loud smacking sound and caused the man to reel back, or reel back as much as he could with Beth twisting his arm in a painful lock.

"Hey, you wanna calm down, or you want me to toss you off the roof?" she asked him crossly.

"I'm not falling for none of your bullshit," the man ranted, trying again to twist out of her grip. She looked back at Blood, who had her mask on, and the wolf just shrugged and flicked an ear twice. Beth didn't actually want to throw his stupid ass off the roof as, if he hadn't put any points into END, it would very likely kill him. She reached up and disarmed him, not something she had practiced with her time boxing and kickboxing in high school, but she had practiced such things with Baelvyr.

Her Unarmed also gave her some knowledge of how to do such things, which was always weird to her; she had to learn how to fight with her fists better to raise her Unarmed, but as she raised her Unarmed, it taught her how to fight better with her fists.