Chương 623: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Forty-Two

The quiet moments were nice, but they had a job to do, and Beth was already starting to look forward to getting it done. It had to be remembered that the spiked dungeon was under time compression, and they were spending their rest time under even more powerful time compression; despite it not having been a full year yet in objective time, it had been a couple years for them already.

She was eager to get the task done and get on to all the other things they still had looming over them, including starting their long, difficult trek to rescue her friend's wife. Rebirth sixteen came for the team and, as she had basically suspected, not a whole lot changed. Their stats reset, though their base numbers were frightening at this point, but nobody ran into any trouble or had any big surprises.

Not outside of Blood, who's time to shine was basically rebirths, as that was when calculations for just how much progress a sapient beast had been making in their humanization were tallied. Every time they did a rebirth, Blood would have at least a little improvement, which was already unusual in and of itself, as not every single rebirth saw a change for others. Sera, Neph, and Kris were no exceptions, with some rebirths passing without any noticeable improvement in their humanization, but Blood was different.

This rebirth, it wasn't just a small improvement, which was already very good, but a huge leap forward. A whole group had gathered to see the changes, and Blood happily disrobed and demonstrated just how far she had progressed, showing that not only was she entirely human with no wolf features when she pushed her humanization, the runes that showed her progress through the second stage covered about sixty percent of her body.

She had runes on her forehead and cheeks, one on each earlobe and one on each auricle, runes down her neck and across her shoulders, down her arms all the way to her fingertips, across the entirety of her impressive breasts, down her spine, and then a trail down the outside of each leg to her ankles. Her back was only partially covered, branching out from the spine, and her butt wasn't fully covered.

Her legs had the lines down the outside of her thigh, around her knee, and down the outside of her calf to form a band around her ankle.

"You've progressed farther than I've ever seen," Sera said, not at all uncomfortable with getting close and running her hands over Blood, tracing the runes.

"I don't know of anyone in my family that has progressed so far, even the one Exalted we currently have."

"S-same," Kris added, though she was standing back with her hands folded over her stomach and staring at the floor, stealing glances at Blood between her lashes.

"Nobody in my clan has, uh, made that much progress."

"I guess you're going to have the best stats of the group going forward?" Beth said, crossing her arms as she leaned against the wall and examined Blood. With how good their stats were, she didn't need to get all up close and personal with Blood like Sera was doing, knowing that her wife was just using it as a bit of a thinly veiled excuse to feel the lupine woman up.

"A really powerful combination," Val said, also inspecting Blood, though she had less interest in a similar manner to Beth considering kresniks weren't sapient beasts.

"She's going to have extremely high stats, even when compared to our group that already has high stats, and she has crazy skills. Tier five, six, and even seven skills and at Platinum or Diamond; that's a lot of power."

"Feels normal," Blood said with a shrug, curling her right hand into a fist and clasping it hard before flexing her arm and back muscles.

"I feel strong, but I always feel strong."

"The runes on your spine are interesting," Sera muttered, now crouched behind Blood.

"I wonder if… no, maybe not…" Blood waited for another minute while Sera hemmed and hawed over her runes before reverting to her usual look, her human ears disappearing in favor of her wolf ears, her tail popping out the base of her spine, her nails growing into claws, and thick fur appearing on her shoulders and tracing down her spine to her tail and between her breasts to down below her navel.

With the show over, Beth wrangled Sera for a little testing of the dragons few small improvements before they went back to leveling. Other groups wouldn't have rebirthed like they did in the middle of their mission to farm the dungeon, but Beth having her gate power made any problems moot. They were able to spend just a few objective days to push over level two hundred, only taking a little over a week to be around level three hundred again.

Such a thing would have taken a lot longer for other teams, even with access to compressed time instances, which few teams readily had, most teams just not having the stats and skills to level quite so far so fast. Despite them now having passed the halfway point of Enlightened, they team didn't really treat it like all that big of a deal. Instead, they buckled down and focused on their current mission, wanting to get the last of the cores and materials for Mortaine and then pack it up.

They had taken some breaks, but the team was going to take a longer rest after they were done here, and likely do something a bit more fun after endlessly grinding the same dungeon for months and months in a row. Beth was going to check out the City of Mended Dreams, but that didn't need the whole team present, and she was just going for a look, so the rest of the team was going to be at loose ends for a bit.

She had a mind to stop by Earth just briefly, though the tower was the only really big attraction, and she felt like that was going to become a point of contention at some time in the not-too-distant future. Well, if someone contacted her to mediate, which might happen considering her connections and her connections' connections, she would help, but otherwise she was content to stay out of the struggle for control of access to the precious Trial.

That was still a couple months out, and now they were slaughtering their way through the dungeon in earnest. They were strong enough that they could get through the dungeon in just under thirty-six hours subjective time, which meant they were doing about four runs every three days. Considering they only took breaks every couple weeks to rest at this point, that meant they were getting close to ten runs done in a week's time.

They weren't just blasting through to the boss, either, though they weren't fucking around and wasting tons of time. They were almost exclusively using Beth's looting power at this point, other than on the boss, and it was showing some real results. It had finally not just hit Gold, but gotten a couple levels in Gold, all the level five hundred fifty and higher beasts giving copious amounts of experience on every single use.

With the rank the skill was at now, she was successful in harvesting about half the time, which sounded bad, but compared to when she first got the skill and wasn't even hitting a one percent success rate, it was a massive improvement. It just went to the double-edged nature of looting skills; extremely, extremely expensive and time consuming to level, but once the effort had been paid out, insanely rewarding. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

It was both that the looting power was giving them crazy good loot, and that it was so efficient. The team could kill a thousand beasts in just a couple minutes, and, with the speed their resident space mage and skilled teleporter could move at, Beth would have everything looted before the fight was even fully over. All she needed was the briefest of contacts with the corpse and her looting power would either turn it into materials and items, or it would vanish in a puff of dust and mana.

If the power succeeded, Beth would just toss everything in one of her mana storage spaces, able to manipulate the items even without touching them. That was still a bit tricky, but she could pull things into her necklace or the reliquary from over a hundred feet away, something that only she could do. Without being a space mage or spatial expert, it would be tough for a person to pull something in from even a foot away.

Even Sera, who had an actual spatial storage skill and not an item, was extremely limited with how she could use it. It usually just acted like a much larger, slightly more secure storage item; only someone like Beth, a rather rare breed, even outside the Milky Way, could do such extensive manipulations with storage items and skills.

Beth did have a bit of a secret plan, or not all that secret, but something she wanted to try after they were officially finished with their task, and that was just messing with the boss a bit. They were still a little too afraid of the boss, by far the most precious kill in any run, just disappearing into mana, so Beth wasn't looting them each time, even when they didn't have the proper mana alignment, but she wanted to try it.

She figured, once they had the minimum number of cores, the only thing they were missing after just under two months of runs at rebirth sixteen, they could do another dozen runs in a week and test what the boss produced when looted. Bosses were always stronger than regular beasts in dungeons, often far more so, and they produced more valuable materials just when harvested in the 'traditional' way.

With a looting power, the possibilities really opened up, the most exciting of which was that a looting power would sometimes transform a fallen enemy directly into a skill crystal. That was very, very rare, even with the looting power at a high rank, but it also produced powerful skills. They wouldn't be getting some tier two or three skill from a level five hundred fifty boss beast, that was for sure, though beth didn't think they were pulling any tier seven skills out of it, either.

It was more just a small hope, a little flame they all burning in the back of their minds, as the odds were so low. It really did feel like hitting the lottery, and they already had it happen once on the regular beasts of the dungeon, a tier three skill crystal forming from one of the super annoying wurms that hide in the lava lakes and burrowed through the earth to attack them. It wasn't a particularly crazy good skill, and the crystal was of the one-time use variety, but it was still really valuable.

A lot of early Wayfarers would only have tier one or two skills, and even a lot of Empowered, working their way to rebirth nine while focusing on their Mana Physique, might not have a tier three skill. That sort of put in perspective both how valuable even that crystal was, and their shifting perspective on wealth, or Beth's shifting perspective. Compared to her wife, a damned dragon princess, she had come up form nothing to now be on the level of a tycoon, and her attitude had undergone a slow shift over time.

Sera, on the other hand, just shrugged and said it would fetch some nice cash but didn't seem overly impressed. The only other thing Beth had been keeping an eye on was the elf's team, which she had learned went by the name World Walkers. They had bumped into them twice when the two teams were out of the dungeon and compared some notes, but there wasn't a ton of value in that.

Beth's team was doing a much harder version of the dungeon, and their experiences could only help the World Walkers a little bit, while the elf's team hadn't found anything particularly interesting in the 'regular' version of the dungeon. Beth did explain about finding the dragon in the instance, which had really perked up the other team at first, but another score of runs later, the second time they talked, the other team still hadn't encountered a dragon or other powerful sub-boss.

Such instances were very rare to start with, and they wouldn't likely encounter something at the kind of rarity and level of the dragon without using a spike, which would be way beyond them. Just for a comparison, Beth's team was now clearing the dungeon in about thirty-six hours or a little less, subjective time, while the World Walkers were clearing out the dungeon in about three days, subjective time.

Most of their runs they got done in about sixty hours, but the difference was really stark, considering Beth's team was doing a much harder version of the same instance in as little as a quarter of the time. That wasn't to say that the other team was awful or anything; far from it, as a matter of fact. Any team that could consistently clear a level five hundred dungeon was already an elite group, let alone when all but one member of the team was still at Enlightened.

Beth was also pretty sure their one Ascended wasn't giving them all that much help, either, though he was still the most powerful member of the World Walkers. It was a little crazy to think, but hitting the level five hundred line meant that a single Ascended, unless they were hyper powerful, just wasn't that much of a game changer.

It was less about the elf being shit, even though Beth did think he was a bit of a loser, but more about just how impressive the rest of the other team was, even with them doing just the 'regular' version of the instance. They also hadn't seen anyone else in all the time they were out there, which was more than fine with Beth. Two teams didn't really feel like a crowd, but she was already wary enough with a whole other powerful group with unknown connections that she had to keep her eye on.

Adding a second or third group that she had to stay cautious of while they were focused on what was, still, a very difficult delving expedition would have really set her teeth on edge.

Fortunately, as Mortaine had off-handedly informed them, the dungeon just wasn't that popular; anyone who could run a dungeon like this confidently could get even more out of either doing expeditions or going through one of the mega instances like the Eternal Depths, something Beth's team was gearing up for right now, ironically enough.

No one wanted to tromp out to a place that was practically the ass-end of nowhere just to fight through a rather tough dungeon with moderate rewards, at least when the 'normal' version was considered.

Sure, Beth's team was pulling some very nice stuff out of their runs, but they were doing spiked runs and had someone with a high-tier looting skill that was partially through Gold rank; other teams, running the non-spiked version and lacking a good looting skill, would have been pulling far less value out of every run. It was actually a second reason the World Walkers took so much time on their runs; to make them worth it, they would comb almost every inch of each spawned instance for anything of value.