Chương 629: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Forty-Eight

"Now, your actual pay," Mortaine said, communicating with Laselle for a moment before making a stack of coins and a crystal appear.

"Seventy adamantine coins for the work, and a skill crystal for World Sense. It's a rare tier four skill, highly prized, that lets the user have a good sense of what's around them. It's named as it is because, at a very high rank, the user can practically, or truly, sense an entire world. Sensory skills are quite rare, even eye powers are rather rare, if you were unaware, and though this is a tier four skill crystal, it can command up to tier six prices."

"Single use?" asked Beth, though she doubted it would be multi-use.

"Yes," said Mortaine with a laugh.

"Even I am not so rich as to give away a multi-use crystal for such a valuable skill. Whoever you have that is best at tracking, or likes the work the best, or some combination of the two, I would recommend giving the crystal to them. I would also recommend you not using it."

"Generally makes sense, but what's your reason for me not using it?" Beth asked.

"Your Ideal," Mortaine replied simply.

"Unless you're lazier than my daughters, you should have found your Ideal gives you a lot of feedback about what's around you," Laselle added.

"Not that a good sensory skill or detection skill would be a bad thing, but if nobody on your team has one, having the person that already fully realized their Ideal use the only crystal you have for one wouldn't be very efficient. You should really only pick one up if the rest of your team is situated or you find a multi-use crystal of a highly valued skill."

"The logic makes sense," Beth said, and it really did. She could, to an extent, sense things even up to hundreds of miles away with some level of clarity. She also got some sense of the place she was going when she was getting ready to use her Ideal to teleport, which, while exhausting for her mentally, was a way she could peek into things up to hundreds of light years away; thousands, if she was really desperate.

"Do you two have anything else? Or do you need time to work on that?"

"We don't have anything that your team can help with," Laselle immediately denied.

"Not as a group, but I have a small request," Mortaine said, handing Beth a small envelope.

"Take this to these coordinates. The important part is who you deliver it to. Old Bertram should have what I need and, if not, he should give you a written response. I'll send you his details so you know exactly who to hand it to. Only to him and no one else. This should be a quick little jaunt, something you can do in just a minute or two if you use your Ideal, but I wouldn't go tossing that around all that often.

There's a reason that even I am not teleporting all over the galaxy on a whim, and it's not nearly as taxing on me."

"I'll keep that in mind," Beth said, standing.

"If that's everything?"

"I'll contact you if I need your services," Laselle said, sitting back in her chair. Clearly, she and Mortaine had business that they had yet to finish, but Beth wasn't privilege to the exact details of what they were working on or what they were attempting. That was fine with her, and she gave Mortaine a nod, one he mirrored, before she decided to flaunt his advice just slightly.

Hey, if he could make grand entrances, or more like weird appearances, with flashing pink lights and gentle guitar riffs, she could be a little fancy herself. Maybe she was already developing the attitude of an Exalted, or the idiosyncrasies of one, anyway, as she disappeared from Mortaine's home in a burst of white flame, reappearing in their dining room on Zephyr Prime.

Rather fortunately, the room was unoccupied, though she wouldn't have teleported into anyone, just startled them if they were at the table eating or working. She did a quick scan, looking for where people were, finding only Val, Blood, and Andrea present. Andrea went off on her own business the least out of just about anyone, having no living family of her own left and nothing much she wanted to do, other than party, away from the house.

She didn't push her senses hard enough to intrude but, considering Val and Blood were in their shared bedroom, she had a pretty good guess of what they were up to. She was going to give the skill crystal to Blood, pending some consultation with the rest of the team, but that could wait. Once something was in her necklace, or especially the reliquary, it wasn't going to be going anywhere unless she sent it there, and she wasn't throwing that crystal around haphazardly.

She had other business to be about, and hopefully this wouldn't turn into some crazy slog that took weeks. Even though she had left Mortaine's in spectacular fashion, she did take the other Exalteds' advice seriously and made her way to the CRA, using their teleport network to get close to the destination. Mortaine had given her a planet and the best connected teleporter network, and she bridged into that from the CRA network.

Not directly, as the CRA network didn't directly connect with any other network, but she left a Hall and walked over to a general teleportation service and got on the second network from their. Her time as a fake handywoman was still with her, and she was noticing more and more when teleporter pads were misaligned or lacking in maintenance.

So far, she had yet to see anything that was truly concerning, and the CRA pads were better than the rest, which is what she used most of the time anyway, but after even doing fake work on pads for a day, it was now something that was on her mind. Whenever a jump took a little long or had a little excess energy as light and/or sound, she would notice it and examine the teleport and the mechanism.

She still wasn't brilliant with runes, even spatial runes, but she had progressed enough that she could analyze how most of the pads were set up, which was a lot more than many Enlightened could do. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Enlightened was a weird bracket because there were people like her and her group, still rather young, even if they were both powerful and decently experienced, but then the bracket also contained people three, four, five, or six centuries old that had been Enlightened for hundreds of years.

There were Enlightened that didn't have as much experience in terms of not having the time to have extensively studied multiple topics, a situation Beth found herself in, and then there were Enlightened that had deeply studied multiple skills, their weapon, crafting, runes, magic manipulation, mana behavior, and so on and so forth.

Even saying something like 'most' Enlightened was painting with a pretty broad brush, but then again, she and her group had had it hammered home very, very early on just how important runes were and had devoted way more time to their study than many other groups would have in their early years of adventuring. There were people who never, in thousands of years of life, would delve into studying runes much beyond a surface level; again, things got complicated.

That was a problem for a later time, and Beth shook off the thoughts as she followed the instructions Mortaine had given her to find the man he wanted the letter delivered to. It was a bit ironic, in an age of starships and intergalactic communication networks (though the intergalactic comms fees were outrageous), for her to be delivering a paper letter by hand, but privacy and security were big deals to people.

She also suspected that part of it was that she could move goods back and forth discretely; if this Bertram fellow wanted something taken to Mortaine, she could do that quietly and quickly without any eyebrows getting raised. She found the old fellow in what she could only describe as a log cabin, and she meant that quite literally.

It was big, for a log cabin, at least as far as Beth understood these things, probably being a hundred feet long from left-to-right when staring at the front door and nearly fifty feet deep, giving Beth the impression that it was more a luxury home than a cabin. She wondered if it was something like that, with a faux exterior that had been done up to look like a log cabin, but knocking on the door and getting let in by the old man proved that wrong.

Now, was the construction of an extremely high quality, clearly done by Masters or a Grandmaster? Sure, it absolutely was. But was it still a big, one-story log cabin? Also absolutely yes, down to the exposed rafters and visible chinking even from the inside of the home.

"You've got a message for me, young lass?" Bertram asked. His manner of speech reminded her a bit of the mannerisms of Elana and the dwarves she knew, but he was very clearly a human, and an old one at that. It was always hard to tell with these things, but Bertram wore his years on his sleeve, not attempting to change his appearance in any way.

His hair was all gone to white, kept long and braided into a thick single braid down his back, while his weathered face bore the deep valleys and crags of wind and sun and age. He wasn't liver-spotted or anything like that, but he really did look like an old man that had lived many years in the wind and the sun, enduring the weather while he worked.

"Was told to deliver it to Old Bertram and no one else," Beth agreed, producing the letter and handing it to him. Bertram chuckled on see the wax seal on the letter, a small, casual sound before he flicked it open and extracted the paper from within. He frowned as he read through whatever Mortaine had written, getting a distant look in his eyes as he became lost in thought. After a minute, he flipped the page over and read the small amount that was on the back, scanning through it with a certain level of intensity.

He folded the letter slowly after he was done, staring off into the distance as he was lost in deep thought. Beth wouldn't say that the letter had disturbed him so much as surprised him with something meaningful that he hadn't thought about in a long time and, now, it was clear he needed a minute to get his thoughts in order.

Beth said on a bench by the door and popped a cup of hunting spice out of her necklace and started slowly drinking it while Bertram chewed on whatever Mortaine had told him or asked him to do, clearly slowly coming to some kind of a decision.

"Give me a few minutes, girlie. Sorry for the lack of hospitality," he said with a bit of a self-deprecating chuckle.

"Just make yourself at home for a moment. I've got to go get some stuff. The old coot picks now of all times…" He muttered the last part while walking deeper into the cabin, which had a large central areas with hallways on either end leading further back to other rooms. Beth assumed that there were likely bedrooms and bathrooms on one side and possibly storage or work rooms on the other, and Bertram had headed towards where she would guess the work rooms or offices were.

She sipped her drink and admired the homey feel of the place; not somewhere she would necessarily want to live, she liked their current house just fine, but it was a nice place to visit with a very warm and open atmosphere.

It was helped by the fact it was cold outside, hellishly cold on this planet, though Beth didn't much notice, even with the temperature near where Bertram lived exacerbated by ice mana in the air, but the roaring fire in the massive hearth at one end of the room helped with the rugged warmth of the place. Bertram was back in a few minutes, handing Beth a letter a package with strict admonishment not to open either but just to take them to Mortaine.

She was rather intensely curious what this old man could have for the 'old coot,' as he called him, especially since the package seemed to weigh a metric ton while only being about a foot square, but she'd learned already not to stick her nose into other powerful people's business. She thanked Bertram and was off again, making her way back to Mortaine's home through multiple different teleportation networks.

She could have left in a flash, working on her impressive mystique as an Exalted, but she didn't think Bertram would have been much impressed. She had gotten a very deep feeling from the man, even in the few minutes she was there, and thought he would have a dim look on 'kids these days showing off.' She returned to Mortaine and handed him both things, with Mortaine asking her to wait while he checked the letter just to make sure he didn't need more errands run.

When it turned out he didn't, she almost asked about the contents of the box, but managed to hold herself back. She just repeated the mantra 'not my circus, not my monkeys,' to herself a few times as she once again left in a flash, quite literally. Mortaine wasn't going to be impressed, but that was far from the point. In fact, it was likely going to devolve into a contest between for who had the flashiest entrances and exits.

She was betting he still had an edge, as she had no idea how to change her entrance and exit from a flash of white fire to anything else, but she would work on that. There were several next orders of business to take care of now that the Mortaine and Laselle work was done, or done temporarily, knowing the two of them, but the first one was a break. Well, not a full break; people were still going to train and work on various things, but they were taking a little time off.

Some of the team needed it more than others, but everyone needed time to unwind now and again, and Beth also needed time to get some of their goods processed. The fortunate thing, considering the level and quality of the goods, was that they could dump an awful lot of it in Illiem's lap and have him sort it out and sell it for them or buy it from them for the Black Ships' use or resale, but she would still have some running around to do herself.

That, and it was time for a Seven Lights yearly auction, and she wanted to see what they had cooking, dragging Sera along to see if anything piqued her wife's interest.