Chương 578: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred

The huge corpse of the beast started falling back into the atmosphere, the blue and white and green clouds eager to reclaim what should belong to them, but Beth stopped it with a use of spatial mana. She was at the point where she had enough mana, and enough skill with manipulating mana, that she could use raw mana, transformed into other types of mana at her whim, to manipulate the world around her.

It was highly inefficient and the only reason she could really do so with spatial mana was due to her vast expertise and intrinsic understanding of the mana type, but she didn't need to hold the beast for long, anyway. She just had to get close enough to it to throw it in the reliquary, which had plenty of room; the beast was large and its body mana dense, but it was still less powerful and complex than the cruiser, putting it within the bounds of what she could stash in the reliquary at this time.

She watched the cruiser bank around a high column of clouds and fly over to her as she stored the corpse and then floated there in space. She boarded once Blood had brought the ship close enough, teleporting into the cargo bay and then walking up to the bridge, where the others either gave her impressed looks or congratulated her.

"Level six hundred," she commented as she sat down.

"Impressive," Bjorn grunted. Uncharacteristic for him, he continued, "To kill a massive beast of that size at level six hundred at our current rebirth. You'll be able to handle a lot of difficult work as we go forward."

"Not sure what that means, but I'll take it," Beth said.

"Good work on firing off attacks right down its gullet," Sera added.

"A secure, if messy, way to kill large beasts and monsters. Many of them have defenses that are far harder than what we'll have, even including our armor, for a long time. The best way to destroy high level beings like that is to hit them with damage that bypasses their outer layers, or get the damage through their outer layers in some fashion."

"I remember the first time we encountered a Legendary Beast," Beth said, glancing at Blood.

"They're very rare," Val commented, glancing between Beth and Blood.

"I'm surprised you even encountered one in the Milky Way."

"Well, it was in the Trial of Celestial Awakening, so it wasn't necessarily in the Milky Way. Just a simulation, really," Beth explained.

"That makes a lot more sense," Val said.

"I haven't heard of a sighting of a Legendary Beast in recent memory."

"Well, at least we know the sort of level I can fight up to now," Beth said with a shrug, dismissing thoughts of Legendary Beasts for later. They conversed a bit more as Blood started flying them around, though they were more concentrated on work, specifically on trying to find something like the previous planet. Of course, several hours later Val was ready to throw in the towel, or throw someone out the airlock, as they had discovered nothing like the previous planet.

No lines of mana connecting nodes, no nodes, no strange movement in the mana in the atmosphere or anything else similar. Val was convinced they just weren't scanning on the right frequency, but that would be pretty unusual; the scanners didn't really have modes that they could toggle between and the scanners on the cruiser covered a very broad range of mana types and energies.

It was possible there was something very specific they were missing, but they weren't exactly going to do a retrofit in the atmosphere of a gas giant. Besides, Beth was pretty sure that it wasn't that there was something outside the range of the scanners, but rather it was just something small that they would have to hunt down. While her prediction turned out to be correct, they did eventually find what they were looking for from the disturbance it was making.

The gem was housed in a huge block of metal, or that was what it looked like at first glance, and was drawing in all the mana and gases in the atmosphere for a dozen miles around it. Now, the gas giant had an atmosphere that was hundreds of miles deep and stretch for countless thousand of miles, so finding the twenty or so miles that was being disturbed by the gem was still a needle in a haystack type endeavor, but they were able to do it in the end.

Then it was all about trying to break the gem out of the block it was trapped in, which proved a lot easier said than done. Beth was really, really tempted on this one to just smash the whole thing and be done with it, but she was told just what a bad idea that would be in no uncertain terms, including by several of the Empyreans. The fortunate part was that the Empyreans were interested enough now that they popped out and helped with decoding the capture sequence, making the work go a whole lot faster.

The fifth gem was a diamond, Beth was pretty sure, though the gems' description didn't actually say what type of gemstone they were or were based on. She tossed it in with the other four, ready to move on, but this is where they had a real problem. They knew, and had it confirmed by resonance the gems were producing, that there were two more of the gems to find, but they had no idea where the gems were located, other than not on the planets or the sun.

Val recommended setting the scanners to a low energy mode that would let them sweep vast ranges while flying at relatively high speeds, but Beth thought that was a bit of a loser's game. The Empyreans seemed to agree, which turned into a big arguments between a big group of people on the bridge.

"And I'm saying that, pardon me for doubting Your Excellencies, trying to create such an array would take weeks if not months," Val said. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Ye of so little faith," Zel scoffed, getting an agreeing noise from Odorra and Mikhael.

"I can whip together something that will find these gems in a day, perhaps two. That will be much better than just randomly flying in circles."

"It wouldn't be flying in circles. Have you never had to conduct a search pattern before?" Liveria shot back, backed up by Erosh and Aodene, the elven woman nodding slightly.

"Of course I have, which is why I know that doing it with one small, underpowered ship that can't even fly all that fast is a fool's errand," Zelmainne returned.

"We'd be much better off just creating a simple tracking array attuned to the seven gems. We'll use the resonance of the five we have and matched the wavelengths to the gems that are missing. At the very least, even a crude attempt will allow us to track their general positions. If you want to do a detailed search at that point, you can feel free to fly aimlessly for a few weeks."

"The five gems we have barely have a resonance," Erosh argued.

"It's like we have five tuning forks that barely vibrate and we're trying to find two more that don't vibrate at all. Oh, and the arena for the search is a whole solar system."

"So, of course, blindly staggering around that solar system would be a much better plan," Odorra bit back, the phoenix's white feathers quivering atop her head.

"You can even start now, if you think it will help. We'll be done with a working prototype before this little rust bucket even gets to the asteroid belt."

"Hey, don't talk about my ship like that," Beth snapped, glowering at the phoenix.

"Well, I mean…" Odorra stammered, feathers laying flat on her head.

"It is not very impressive," Erosh muttered, turning to examine a console when Beth glared at him.

"Make this array you're talking about and stop arguing," Beth closed the discussion.

"Blood, start on searching in the meantime. It's like it will be a waste even if they get the array done in a day."

"Right," Blood said with a grin, only too happy to get to do more flying. The ship was humming along merrily, and Beth was quite happy with their decision to look for the gems, with their decision to work for two Manumitted that would point out interesting things. She was less happy with the mess that was happening at the back of the bridge, where a group of peak Ascended, alongside Val and Kris and Sera, were making something of a mess, or so it sounded like.

There was a noise like cloth tearing and somebody saying something about it not being good and the coordinate system bing misaligned. Much as she wanted to spin her very comfortable chair and look at the ongoing disaster, Beth resisted temptation and observed the flying, concentrating on what Blood was doing. There was a sound an hour later like a small explosion and someone who sounded distinctly like Zel saying what sounded very close to "That's not a good result," but she continued to steadfastly ignore it.

Eventually, three days later, which she noted was a bit longer than Zel's more pessimistic two day version of the time line, a group of rather nervous and tired people informed her it was time to try to sense the other gems. They needed Beth to pull the gems out of the reliquary and put them in specific position, and it was at this point that she saw the random mess they had made of the back half of the bridge for the first time.

She gave the entire group a slow, fierce glower before pulling the gems out and walking around what looked like a version of 'My Drunk Uncle's First Pentagram,' placing all five of the gems they had so far in the proper locations. After they were set, Zel did something, almost instantly getting into an argument with Val, one which Beth didn't understand, but she waited for them to sort something out before they activated the array and started hunting the two remaining gems.

The array itself glowed with a bluish light, emitting a strange humming noise as the five gems all vibrated and pulsed. Beth could feel the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand up, not from an instinctive fear reaction, but from the amount of power the array was not just manipulating, but also sending out in directed pulses.

One of those pulses went right through Val, causing all the woman's hair to stand up in odd directions, something Beth would have found a lot more amusing if the array wasn't also causing the ship to start to rock, rattle, and roll around. Blood started quietly cursing the group at the back of the bridge as she wrestled with the controls, having to fight to keep the ship from randomly spinning and rolling while still flying forward.

The next issue came when the array started actually working, but then Zel and Val needed to interpret what it was telling them and feed that into some kind of coordinates Blood could work with to steer the ship to the next destination. An hour of wrangling got them headed in the right direction at the right trajectory, after which point Beth told them to turn the damn thing off before the ship was upside down and flying backwards.

Zel argued that running it while they flew there would make triangulating the position of the sixth gem easy, but Beth wasn't having the ship slew about like a drunk toddler for the next so many hours, and pro-array group eventually agreed. The array being shut off gave them some measure of peace, and they flew to the general area they had figured out after that hour-long coordinates debate before pumping mana back into the array.

The array made the ship go wonky again, but they were close enough now that they only needed about an hour of Blood cursing and fighting the controls before they had identified the only place that the gem could be located. There was a large planetoid, something very similar to Ceres, as Beth had been thinking just a day or two ago, which had to be the location of the gem.

She was glad their wacky group of Ascended and Enlightened could figure out the tracking array, as their first attempt would have been to go to every moon around each of the five planets and do very thorough scans of all five of them. If their current estimates were right, the seventh gem wasn't on any of those satellites either, so that would have been a truly huge waste of time and effort.

The sixth gem, which they were definitely now at, was located at the center of the planetoid, with no particularly clear way to get down to it. That meant they would be going through caves, which they determined after everyone shot down Beth's idea of blowing up the moon. Once she had been settled down, mainly being distracted by Sera, the others started mapping out the moon and figuring out a way they could get down to the gem, or close to the gem, by already established paths.

They would likely have to do a little blasting and smashing, which perked Beth back up, but they could also get down within spitting distance of the gem without having to smash much of anything. The Ascended weren't going to be helping them in the spelunking effort, of course, but they could certainly still observe the mission, though only Beth would be getting most of their comments as they were back in the reliquary for much of it.

Beth was always glad that the cruiser could hover or maintain its place without any other input or somebody having to stay on-board to monitor everything, though she knew Blood would be more than happy to stay on the ship and keep it running and, in particular, flying. The team started with landing on the moon, which was its own hassle, considering the place had only a small fraction of a gee of gravity.

It was something that a lot of people never experienced, fighting in low gee, as most people fought in normal gravity. In fact, more people had some kind of experience with high gravity worlds or dungeons, as low gravity wasn't something that really showed up in most dungeons people experienced.

Flying around in space was also something that most people didn't experience, considering it was expensive and many people would take teleporters when traveling far distances, so low or zero gee maneuvers weren't something people had much training for or experience with. On the other hand, a lot of the frustration of low gee could be ameliorated with brute strength, though Beth handled it with skill.

She was cheating, in a way, but a master of space really didn't care about how much gravity there was or what direction it was hauling on the person.