Chương 616: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Five

It turned out not, which wasn't all that surprising, considering there had been no fusion mana or attacks, and not much if any solar about the beast when it was still alive. Beth supposed they would just have to keep trying, but the team was due a good break, and they would get it after they finished with the cleanup. She made the area rather cool, though not freezing, for the cleanup for the team while she claimed the rewards for defeating the final boss and clearing the dungeon.

It still amused her how the plinths or pillars formed with the rewards on top of them, Beth hoping for something crazy valuable from the dungeon, though she did find herself a bit disappointed. There were three plinths with items on them, one of them being some kind of potion or liquid, and two of them being weapons. Beth's terrible weapon luck held, as one of the two weapons was a dagger with a thin, narrow blade.

Not that any other kind of dagger would have been any better, but this looked like one that even wasn't to the style that Sabs or anyone she knew used. The other weapon was little better, a hammer that had a broad head and a blunt wedge on the back. Certainly an interesting weapon, but nothing that their group would likely use, and another thing to throw on the growing pile of loot to sell.

At least that was where there was a bit of good news, with the spiked dungeon producing items of level five hundred fifty or more. Anything at that level, even common gear or simple materials, was already incredibly valuable and highly sought after. If they continued to pull weapons out of the dungeon, they could fill several monthly, or even yearly, auctions at a place like Seven Lights just by themselves with the loot.

And this was, again, unusual for a group, even one as strong as theirs, as a dungeon like this one would usually need multiple Ascended to tackle, even just for the un-spiked version. Disassembling the corpse of the boss had taken thirty or so minutes, the massive beast having quite a lot of body to chop through, and they weren't just doing plain butchering.

The group wanted to salvage every single piece and part, with several of the Empyreans helping out and making sure that not a drop of blood was wasted, if they could help it. Even a group of people with skill and experience, and plenty of stats to go around, still had to take their time and be careful if they didn't want to damage, destroy, or waste parts of a valuable kill.

Beth could have thrown the corpse somewhere else, or one of the others with storage could have, but that was just kicking the can down the road. The group would have to dissect the corpse eventually, and tossing it in storage just moved that time from now to some time later, but the work would eventually need done.

"Anything good?" Sera asked Beth as they finished and exited the dungeon.

"Dunno; some kind of potion or elixir and two mediocre weapons," Beth said with a shrug, getting the vial out with the liquid. As soon as she did, Kris and Neph practically tackled her to get their hands on it.

"Easy! Easy, easy. The hell's wrong with you two?"

"This is amazing!" Neph exclaimed, ignoring Beth as she held the vial up.

"I can't believe it just dropped as a reward."

"It was a spiked dungeon," Kris commented, examining the vial herself.

"Even still, we can make so many things with this. I don't even know where to start."

"Maybe by explaining why you're so excited?" Beth asked, raising an eyebrow at the two as the rest of the group spread out around the portal to the dungeon. They hadn't had to deal with too many beasts, but the dungeon was still like many other dungeons in how it produced beasts around it.

They would have to constantly be clearing the area around it, though something about the level of the dungeon, the mana amount, or the fact they were clearing it with spikes was causing the amount of beasts produced to be much lower. Counterbalanced, of course, by the fat it was beasts over level five hundred that were popping out or spawning around the entrance.

"Right, this is a catalyst," Kris explained.

"We could use it alchemy in making potions or elixirs to force certain reactions to happen or happen faster. It's a kind of fire mana based liquid that forces endothermic reactions to happen at a much greater speed, or even at all in the first place. Even just this vial could be used for at least half a dozen reactions; this might be even more valuable than the bit of rare mithril we found."

"Well then," Beth said, staring at the vial with some surprise evident in her eyes, "looks like we have even more reason to do spiked runs of this dungeon, is stuff like that can drop."

"Even this one vial is enormously valuable and a great find," Neph confirmed.

"If we were able to have a stockpile of them? Well, the possibilities for our alchemy increase by many times over."

"Alright," Beth said with a clap, grabbing the vial and making it disappear.

"Everyone take twelve hours and rest. I will be going in Val's house and gating from there, if anyone wants the extra time." Beth did exactly that, entering Val's portable house and then opening her gate in a small side room. Val's portable house had plenty of shielding, as one would expect of the heir apparent of the Milky Way's kresnik clan, and Beth was little worried about deploying her gate within.

When she had given the team twelve hours, she had meant that in objective time, but with her gate, that would be a hundred twenty hours, or five full days, of subjective time. Considering it was supposed to be time for them to rest, she had the gate set to the residence area, but they could still work on their crafting if they wanted to. Beth knew that Kris and Neph were eager to do some alchemy, but she hoped they would at least be a little cautious with the catalyst.

It wasn't like they couldn't get any more of it, but it also wasn't as if it was going to be guaranteed as a drop every time they did a run. She made sure one of the Empyreans spared a little time to watch them, not that she wanted to babysit, but having an experienced hand there wouldn't hurt anything. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Beth herself spent time with Sera.

She found herself in this slightly unique position where she was the strongest and most advanced of the group and, while that did often force some more work onto her, it also meant that there were other times she could relax. She didn't have to train or craft or fight right now, considering she was more than enough to handle the dungeon even on her own, though that would have been very slow going, so she decided to focus on something arguably more important: her wife.

The two of them spent most of the downtime together, Beth glad the walls in the residence were insulated enough that a bomb going off wouldn't even be heard elsewhere in the house (though that did raise some concerns about the alchemist group), as she was sure she and Sera both were making some noises, and quite loudly, that the rest of the house wouldn't exactly be happy hearing.

After the alloted time had passed, which also gave the dungeon a bit of time to recover, though that was hardly necessary at this level, they were out and ready again. They had set up their little impromptu camp a couple miles from the dungeon entrance itself, on a hilltop that was sheltered by a few large rocks and some thick foliage.

It was a place where they could have a good defense against any random beast wandering up, especially with the actual defenses they had deployed, and also out of the way enough that it wouldn't be targeted by beasts emerging from the dungeon, and hopefully not by any others that came to try the dungeon during this time. Beth wasn't sure it was really necessary, but Val had insisted and she was the one with a lot of experience in these worts of endeavors, so Beth just went along with it.

Worst happened, it was Val's fancy portable house that would be ruined, and she was sure Val could afford another, or five, or just have her ancestor buy her one. The next run of the dungeon was also spiked, and they spent a long time clearing this one, as they wanted to both gather materials and try and clear out more beasts. It was also excellent leveling, to the point where they wouldn't need to use Beth's gate to level at all this rebirth.

In fact, they would all hit max level with a dozen runs or possibly less, depending on just how much they cleared each run, but fighting enemies at level five hundred fifty when they were only in the three hundreds was incredible experience. It remained great experience even when they surpassed four hundred and continued pushing them towards their new max, which was level five hundred itself.

Beth found it amusing that their new max was the base level of the dungeon and that they'd be getting there from spiked runs, but she certainly wasn't complaining. Especially not given their profits, which were already looking to be immense, as this was a very lucrative dungeon to run with a spike, though it was time consuming. Her only current concern, or rather, her two current concerns were based around time.

Mortaine had put them on a bit of a short schedule for his order, a schedule that they would have to really press hard to make. That didn't seem so at first, but if every single clear were taking them up to a couple days, and they needed more than a hundred clears, the math started leaning towards a year of doing spiked clears pretty quickly.

She knew they would have at least a little buffer room, but they would be cutting this one close at their current pace, which was also why she was considering if they should do another rebirth while working on this. The problem with that was the materials they would need, but that tied into the second problem she was pondering, which was the fact they they definitely were going to need more spikes to get everything Mortaine required from the dungeon.

The money wasn't so much the issue, but actually finding them and getting their hands on them would be a concern. The dungeon continued to be rather random with its rewards when they cleared the boss, though it was much more consistent with everything else, including said boss. The big lizard never really changed much, only changing its attacks and mana a bit depending on the variation.

The rewards, however, changed almost constantly, from ingredients like the catalyst, to more random weapons, to armor pieces, to skill crystals and single use items. Much of it was interesting, but Beth wasn't really drawn to anything in particular, though the rest of the group did make use of some of the items to bolster their strength.

In particular, several other members got one or more skills related to controlling or manipulating fire and fire mana, which greatly eased the burden on them, and the entire team, when they were in the dungeon. It was something the team was going to have to get used to and adapt to going forward, as long as they kept fighting above level five hundred, which was certainly the plan.

Dungeons were going to contain a lot more mana, which would make the environment far, far harsher, to the point where it would even affect people through Platinum skills. Beth felt like a person might be fine with Diamond resistances, but nobody on the team had quite hit that yet, though some were close. The other thing that alleviated it, and not something Beth was thrilled about as a strategy, was getting a skill to manipulate that type of mana or its counter.

Someone with a fire skill would be able to handle overheated environments like this dungeon with a spike with greater ease, while the same would apply if the person had an ice skill or cold-based ability. The part she didn't like about that was that she wasn't a fan of skill bloat. Skills took time to level, and time to incorporate into a person's fighting style and kit.

She really never liked the idea of having hundreds or thousands of skills clogging up her status screen, despite the obvious pros including the greater utility. She just found the idea of having twenty 'extra' skills that weren't leveled very high, and themselves maybe weren't a high tier, was just bloat that was distracting. She would rather just focus on becoming more powerful, which was a proven, winning strategy, versus spend a lot of time working weaker skills to try to become slightly more versatile.

She herself was proof enough of that theory, as even without her fire skills, she still would have had very little to no trouble in the spiked version of the dungeon with her overall power and mastery of spatial mana. True, spatial mana was rare and a strong mana type and a cheating, one could argue, but the Path tended to play by similar rules over time, and one of those was that more power just meant being able to do more things.

Beth didn't really subscribe to the idea that having a thousand skills really brought more power, though she supposed with her group, several of them already being immortal, they had plenty of time to hone and polish skills, if they so desired. Still, there was something to be said for taking one or two more skills to increase one's overall power and deal with difficult situations. And like she had just pointed out, one skill could, if leveled decently high, cover a plethora of issues.

A strong fire skill could, in theory, help in a fire environment, an ice environment, a water environment, and even with a few more esoteric places that would be challenging without any skill to handle the environmental impacts. It helped greatly that they weren't just pulling tier one or tier two skills out of a place like this; in fact, they hadn't found anything less than a tier three skill, and that was considered a bit of an unlucky hit on one run, the skill also being a bit useless.

Others, she knew, would really enjoy having it, and it was definitely going in an auction, but the skill allowed a person to move faster in bursts using blasts of fire or fire-based mana propulsion. Interesting, but not something anyone on the team either needed or wanted.