Chương 494: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred Sixteen

Beth just wanted to get the ship work done, and with a functioning cruiser, they didn't have much to worry about. Not only that, but the airship was strong enough to fly around in Jupiter's atmosphere at the depth they were working, which gave them two mobile platforms to work from. The other nice thing was that all of her pocket Ascended from the Reliquary could fly, all in humanoid form, and that also greatly sped up the work.

Mostly, Beth was waiting for the center of the ship to be little more than a handful of support beams that Erosh and Zel had marked as needing to stay until last before the group took the shell apart. At that point, she'd use the airship and cruiser and have the Ascended mainly do the work as they could fly and take apart the outer hull at a blistering pace.

Sera and Kris could help by flying around and grabbing the larger pieces in their beast forms and moving them back to the ships to go into the Reliquary, the gate, or other various storages spaces. That work took them a year, during which they advanced rather slowly in level, especially considering the group's normal pace, but they did get most of the ship broken down. They had some trouble when it was just a shell with the engines left, as the thing wasn't designed to fly like that.

Starships had pretty precise designs, and while they could be modified, removing seventy percent of the mass of the ship did some pretty wonky things to it. They had to jury-rig a system between the airship, cruiser, and several anchors that Zel made to keep the whole thing from tumbling deeper into the atmosphere.

Again, the atmosphere of Jupiter transitioned into a liquid metal at some point; anything getting caught in that wasn't something they were going to be able to salvage without more complex and better tools. They were, in large part, using power and knowledge to brute force the deconstruction; there were tools and, indeed, entire ships that were specialized in the work they were muddling through without such things.

The final deconstruction, as much of it as they could do with the tools, materials, and ships they had, took another two months and was a giant pain in the ass. Beth really wanted to punch Jaq in the face, as, even though it was his mission and his work that discovered the ship, thirty percent for the amount of tedious, awful, dangerous, difficult work they had to do was not that great.

She would get Jaq back eventually, but right now they were finishing the deconstruction, a tricky bit with getting the engines taken apart and stashed while holding them aloft.

It took almost all of Beth's pocket Ascended working together with Sera and Kris to keep the last of the frame and the engines in the air and get them disassembled and into Beth's gate, the reliquary, Sera's storage power, and stashed in the cruiser, which they had left empty all along in case the last pieces needed to be slammed somewhere quick. With the dreadnought now in tens of millions of pieces spread across at least seven different storage spaces and items, it was time for another break.

Beth said they had two objective weeks to do nothing before they all needed to reconvene and get moving with their next task, which was fine with everyone. They hadn't leveled all that much, or fought all that hard, but the deconstruction effort, even with all the Ascended helping, had been very mentally draining and overall left them all exhausted. Bjorn and Kris disappeared into part of the larger suite they rented when they returned to Beth's home Hall, Beth glad for the heavy insulation within the suites.

Val and Blood, while not getting too extreme, didn't bother with a room, sprawling naked on the couches with their pipes and favorite drinks, limbs partially tangled together as they smoked and watched shitty TV shows that Val introduced Blood to. Beth and Sera ducked out for a couple days to visit Selene and Alex, finding the angel present this time, though she was still working hard to catch up.

Beth privately thought it would be a very long climb, not that she was disparaging Alex in her head, but the angel had already been behind, coupled with the fact that forming one's Ideal was pretty damn difficult and time-consuming. After their visit with Selene and Alex, they returned to Earth to travel around a bit. Beth could at least pilot the airship, even if the cruiser was technically not allowed (not that she would listen to that if she had to fly somewhere), and she could fly them anywhere they needed.

Operating the airship on Earth was extremely cheap as it could siphon up ambient mana for all its needs and rarely needed fueled by beast cores or anything else. They didn't take the cruiser as it was a little too obvious, Beth wasn't qualified to pilot it, and it did guzzle down mana and energy like nobody's business. Flying that thing around, even without using the FTL system, was burning money, a lot of money, so Beth left it parked for now.

With their scrapping job done, they didn't have anywhere to fly in stellar terms, and they couldn't really take it through teleporters. It didn't fold up and it was far to big to use any of the standard teleporting networks, which was one more pain with the ship; if they wanted to use the ship in a system, they had to fly the ship there. The only workaround was that some systems had jumpgates connected to distant systems, but they were not at all cheap, making teleporters look like spare change by comparison.

Beth and Sera visited a lot of coastal areas over the next week or so, enjoying taking in the sun and walking along the sand. They didn't have much competition, as the beaches were certainly not safe places these days, not even considering that real horrors sometimes surfaced from the deep of the ocean to attack the shore. Anything like that, however, would find itself out of its weight class if it stumbled on the beach Beth and Sera were walking along.

Beth was well over ten thousand points in Strength again and a single punch from her, without considering any skill use, could shatter even the mana-hardened rock and stone of Earth with ease. Add in a little Celestial Annihilation or Spatial Obliteration and she could level mountains with one or two swings. Even a kraken would have to think twice and count its tentacles quite carefully before starting a fistfight with somebody like that.

When they, or rather, when Beth was all vacationed out, they group reconvened to go over their plans for the near and mid term. Beth wanted to focus on two things now that the little distraction with the dreadnought was behind them, mainly getting her looting power up, not to mention just skill progress in general, and working on getting them all to Enlightened. The first would happen as they pursued the second, or vice-versa, it was really all the same thing.

They had to kill a mind-numbing amount of beasts to reach their goals, and that was not even considering the climb up to Ascended and beyond, but Beth wasn't really concerned, either about the grind or about the time. They had plenty of both and her gate power was still a cheat that let them have unlimited access to leveling and fighting with untold depths still to plumb. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The first part of the plan didn't require them to go anywhere or do anything than fight, which they would make use of aforementioned gate to do. That meant they could just stay in the five gold suite, an unthinkable luxury even a few years ago for Beth, and open the gate in the living room. They had to go all the way to level three hundred and sixty this time, which was going to be a real bear as hitting that middle three hundred range was going to be a big slow down.

Level three hundred fifty wasn't an enormous leap, but it was a leap in beast strength, and the levels around it were a steeper climb in terms of experience required. The only good news to keep in mind, at least for those other than Beth who weren't quite as obsessed with fighting and leveling, was they had a bit of this rebirth and one more to go before hitting Enlightened.

Beth didn't restrict things to just her team, as there wasn't any limit to her gate, as far as she could tell, in terms of number of people in the gate at once and fighting. With the new settings from leveling the skill another time, she was able to have more beasts in larger, more densely clustered groupings in the gate even without engaging any of the new dungeon-type settings.

That meant that there was always plenty for people to fight, especially if Beth and some of the others went very far out to start and left things closer to the gate, and therefore lower level, to the people who weren't quite as strong. This helped when Kim's team stopped by to take advantage of the gate on one of their trips home, and it even helped when Beth invited Adam and Andrea to take advantage of the farming session and they needed the beasts at a little lower level than Beth's team.

Still, the two of them had been making good progress while taking care of their own business and they weren't all that far behind. And yes, Beth did invite Veren and he, quite literally, laughed at her before hanging up. He did not, as might be guessed, show up after that, but Beth was sure he was doing just fine; he also still did technically owe her at least one, if not more at this point, so she wasn't worried about him not showing up again.

She was a little curious about what Jaq and the others were up to at this point, as it had been more than a year since he had jetted off. It was a bit of a difficult task, considering they needed some piece of incredible lost technology from a fallen empire to even have a chance. She wasn't going to ask what was going on; best not to put anything about it on the comms network, and she didn't really need to nose that far into Baelvyr's business.

She was sure she could get some answers later on and was much more focused on their leveling for now. She did find that all the original group was gone, meaning all the Senior Enforcers that had followed Baelvyr to this remote place had moved on to new work or their own business. Beth wasn't sure exactly who was read-in on the tasks, either, so she couldn't really going digging too deeply into who was up to what.

It did feel a little strange being in the Hall now and seeing no familiar faces, especially on the arena floor and at the front counter in the lobby. She knew a couple of the people that were taking care of the daily tasks there, having worked with some of the Golds when she was getting her referee time in, but it wasn't the same as 'here' people doing the work. She was also familiar, just a bit, with the Platinum that had taken over the Hall from Baelvyr and was overseeing the local area.

It was some big shoes to fill, both figuratively and literally, and Beth wasn't sure the man was quite up to it, but then again, he was a Platinum and it wasn't like Earth was in all that much danger or all that dangerous. Besides, the Hall was pretty stacked, almost entirely due to her group. It was hard to find many Halls that had a loose group of Golds that possessed multiple Masters, multiple pre-Enlightened with Mana Physiques, and several rare or very specific mana types.

Not to mention the composition of a titan descendant, dragon, phoenix, kresnik, and wolf queen wasn't something that you could find many places and represented an awful lot of power. Bjorn alone, despite not having made his Mana Physique yet, was a real force to be reckoned with, and Beth had personally witnessed him shrug off hits that would have broken her with little more than a light grunt. The session of farming went on for quite a while, though they weren't getting quite as much out of it in terms of loot.

Another mid-term priority of Beth's was to grind her looting skill up to at bare minimum Silver, but those things only really started to show their true value at Gold. That was a long, long grind that would take years, but she had ten-times time compression in her gate, so she could shorten the many years to Silver into more like a year or so objective time. That was assuming she was spending twenty-four/seven in the gate with doing little else besides killing an looting.

That was basically what she was doing at this point, and she was also using Spatial Step to bounce around to the piles of kills the others made and loot them. Their earnings would be way down for a while, but they still had plenty of money, plenty of money rolling in from the consistent sale of ship parts, and they had quite a nice stockpile of materials even without harvest.

Beth's looting skill, like all others, basically shredded most corpses to nothing, leaving a small pile of bloody pulp and some excess mana fading away. Even the beast core from the beast would be gone, and one couldn't just cut the beast open and take stuff out; other than combat damage, the corpse had to be undisturbed or the looting power had a zero percent chance of working. Months passed, objective time, and various people cycled in and out.

Beth's looting power was so slow it was almost agonizing, but their overall leveling was going much better. With the fervor they were devoting to the task, they had rapidly torn through the two hundreds until they were very close to three hundred, at which point it started slowing down. After three hundred was a big jump in required experience and three-fifty would be another big jump.

Beth was really not looking forward to those last ten levels, even with how much she loved fighting, and they would have to do it again before they were at Enlightened. Not only that, but the next time they would have thirty levels after hitting three-fifty before they hit max. The cap continually increasing by twenty levels every time was a real grind, but it really increased their overall power quite a bit, especially with True Rebirths.

If the max were always two hundred, they wouldn't have nearly as much room to grow stats as their rebirths increased. It would also make everything a lot crazier, considering that everybody would be level two hundred or below; it would be way harder to tell who was powerful and just how strong they were, and that wasn't even thinking about if the same were to apply to beasts.

Beth was a bit glad, in a way, that the levels did increase over time, as it made it a bit easier to gauge who had made at least some progress.