Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Sixty-Nine (Patreon)

Beth had to admit, cleaning up after the missions was sometimes the most painful part, and this final mission was no exception. While they were getting updates on their communicator about how Val and the others were doing on their own little outing, Beth was working to calm people on the planet, assuring them that everything was safe now. It turned out, when one had a hyper-powerful, at least partially intelligent being with bad intentions showing up in the middle of the night to snatch people away, the populace could become a little spooked by that. It took some time to calm even the local governor down, let alone some of the other officials they had to interact with before leaving. Thank heavens it wasn’t on them to calm the whole populace; they could leave that to the actual powers that be on the world.

With that, they had one mission still open, but Val had said Beth and Sera needn’t bother coming over just to see the tail end of a few fancy parties as the last details of the big trade and joint-exploration deal were hammered out. Considering it was between two polities that had recently been at each other’s throats, it made sense why the CRA wanted someone of Platinum, or near-Platinum, rank to attend the gathering, but they didn’t really need their full force there. That let Beth and Sera take care of a little bit of business while the others were wrapping up, namely getting some of the last money they were owed from a few sales here and there. They had the very last back pay from Seven Lights and a few others, and now anything they wanted to sell would be a fresh transaction.

They stopped at the Black Ships last, as they had only really been harvesting from the highest level beasts, or at least keeping track of that loot. They had stacks and stacks of low level beast cores and some materials and flesh and blood from the low level beasts that had been part of the couple tides or large masses they had taken out, but that was stuff they would sell in bulk later. Seven Lights or someone could take care of that, and even with the volume they had, it would maybe be a mithril coin or two. Beth could still remember, a couple decades ago now, when even a gold coin had been a massive amount of money, something she had to work for weeks or more to earn, apart from getting lucky finds. Now, the trash that they were too lazy to sort through for a bulk sale was probably worth one-and-a-half or two million gold coins.

The real winners were the parts and pieces and bits from the monsters, at least the stuff they weren’t hanging onto for their own crafting or to be used by a crafter right now to make them something. That left them some cores and a few odds and ends to sell, including the mostly intact body of a couple of the stronger undead the lich had raised to lead its armies. What people wanted with undead bodies, Beth wasn’t really sure, but as long as they weren’t getting up to some strange, turning-a-city-undead-conquest-plan, she didn’t really care all that much. Besides, that was another great point about working through a trusted, licensed broker like the Black Ships. Many of their customers were vetted quite highly; Beth had a good assurance that they weren’t turning around and dealing arms to psychos or selling dangerous materials to madmen.

After their errands were taken care of, they didn’t have to wait all that long for the others to be done, at which point it was a quick stop by Arbitus for the five that had been doing missions. They had sent reports when each mission was concluded but now, especially after having done so many missions together, they had to stop in in person and do a debrief. That was a lot more tedious than anything else; Beth understood the missions were important, sure, but they had already filed a mountain of paperwork and even sent in recordings and communicator logs on top of verbal reports or narration of certain sections. Having to sit through what was split into two days, nearly full days, of debrief was not the greatest experience, but it was also a part of their quest for Platinum Emblems. There would have been at least somewhat less scrutiny if they were either already Platinum or were somehow approved for Platinum missions at Gold but weren’t going for the higher rank.

That meant it was a whole bunch of questions about not just the missions themselves, in a strict sense, but an awful lot of ‘what were you think here?’ and ‘why did you attack this building but ignore this location?’ and ‘why didn’t you arrest these certain people at detain them in the local CRA Hall jail’ and so on. They had to go over not only what they did, but a lot of why they did it, and there was a long session debriefing Beth for her ‘stealth’ session where she infiltrated the ‘rebel’ group that had wound up being backed by that powerful corporation. The infiltration was gone over fairly thoroughly, but it was her fight with the Ascended that their handlers spent the most time on, not that that was all that much of a surprise. The rest of her team didn’t got off the hook for that, either, as the debrief, that specific one on the stealth mission and fight, was considered valuable for the whole team to sit through all of it, despite their more minor parts in that mission.

Several days of debriefing later, they were summarily dismissed, as they had cleared out quite a lot of a backlog at the Platinum level. It was as Beth had suspected; they weren’t going to be getting any more Platinum missions for a while. Their team had proven both competent and fast enough that the senior officials overseeing their promotion didn’t mind dishing out mission in blocs to them, which they considered more efficient. It was also something where stringing them along by assigning one or two missions every two or three months meant they would, essentially, always be on call. Even if they got a mission or two done quickly, they’d just be waiting around for the next one so as to not be interrupted in the middle of something else. There was also the factor that others did need Platinum missions for various reasons, including just that there were actual Platinum Emblems with seniority that needed the completions and contribution points.

Beth was perfectly happy with that, however, as their team had plenty to do, not least of which was a visit to the place they had been talking about for what seemed like ages by this point. Beth had decided to go about doing it through a contact rather than stumbling blindly around, which was a wise decision, in retrospect, after they started on the process. She contacted the Black Ships, got an intermediary from their, and then had the whole team join the intermediary as they went to Millennia’s Echo, the planet that hosted the City of Mended Dreams.

Yes, it was finally time for them to look at earning, or purchasing, or otherwise securing a spot in the City, even if it was at the very edge and somewhere not highly desired. Beth was sure, given their combined wealth and level of connections, that they could manage to scrape together something that wasn’t all that shabby, but she had no illusions that they were going to be buying one of the massive floating palaces near the very heart of the City.

The City itself was a wonder, a testament to uncounted ages of toil and improvement. Beth would never forget that very first time they stepped out of the CRA Hall they had used as their endpoint for teleporting to the world. The City of Mended Dreams was absolutely unlike any place that she had ever been before, though it wasn’t the size that overawed. The whole city was burnished with a light that shone directly into the soul, a presence that awed and humbled. Everywhere she looked, there were palaces, often separated by grand places, the tiles of the plazas all of precious materials and forming massive, intricate murals depicting great battles and legendary feats.

There was much of that everywhere; here, a shop that the entire outside of was made of precious gems, glass, and exotic woods, all sculpted together to form a dazzling pattern that drew they eye and heightened the mind, a form of mental excess that wasn’t due to any spell or formation but the pure height of the art itself. Over there, a building made entirely of metals, but crafted as if the entire building was forged as a single piece by a master of the craft, every single wall and surface with complex etchings, filigree, carvings, and masterful joins that left no seams. And over there, a floating palace made of what looked like gold and diamonds, glittering in the light of two suns, beams of light of every color, rainbows twisting through complex shapes, and reflected images bouncing around in a riot of color and visual noise. And yet further, there, an oasis, complete with palm trees and tents, but hovering inverted in the air, none of the water falling from the pond at the center, and everyone treating it as if it were both the most normal thing in the world and something not worthy of awe.

That was by far not the end of it, and the wonders stretched as far as the eye could see. It was breathtaking in a way Beth simply hadn’t been prepared for, a crazy city, a city built of individual wonders stacked together to create something that managed to be yet greater than the sum of its many disparate parts. And disparate they certainly were, no matter how amazing each individual piece was. The floating oasis was neighbors with a marble edifice that gave Beth some vague impression of the Taj Mahal, but twice as large and twenty times as ornate, while on the other side was a building that looked like if someone had designed a modern skyscraper, all steel and titanium and glass, but done it with the sensibilities of a twelfth century castle architect. It was, to a greater or lesser extent, overwhelming to behold all at once, though it didn’t rate a second glance from many on the streets.

That was another thing that felt like a wonder in itself; everywhere Beth looked, there were people, people of all species and sizes and types and vocations. Wayfarers of unimaginable power navigating a crowd of business professionals in well-cut suits, all of whom were making their way to a floating restaurant for lunch now that a massive group of craftsmen and artisans had finished their meals. There were men and women wearing some of the most complex and powerful gear Beth had ever seen, stuff that was heading in the direction of the suit of armor that Zane had on display in their space station fortress place, while others wore basically nothing. Clothing rules and standards often varied different places that Beth and the team went, but here the rule seemed to be if others weren’t bothered, do whatever you wanted.

Even after all the adventures she had had, Beth still felt like she needed a minute just to wrap her head around what she was witnessing. The rest of the team was in various states of the same, though Andrea was focused on the various bars, clubs, brothels, and gambling halls that they could observe just from the first street they had walked out on. The most affected was Neph, who seemed some level of shell-shocked, while the least affected was Val, who seemed like she had seen and done it all before, though Beth knew the tells at that point. The kresnik could play it as cool as she wanted, she was still impressed and a little off-kilter herself by just how crazy the city was, though crazy didn’t do it justice.

What really could do it justice? How to describe a city that seemed to have no limits, that expressed emotion and ideal and soul with every turn, every twist, every building, every cobblestone? Trying to come up with some way to quantify it seemed…crass. Crude, even. It was trying to describe color to the blind or Mozart to the deaf, it was a place, a visual and auditory experience, an experience that defied convention. And it wasn’t some crazy faire or great secret gathering or something; it was a functional city, one that was likely far older and more storied than the history of humanity on Earth. Beth’s ancestors hadn’t made it out of the trees yet by the time that this place was a wonder of the galaxy, and the power and prestige gathered here were both on display, as well as swirling under the surface. Beth could almost feel the currents in the air, though she wasn’t one for intrigue, but so much wealth and power gathered together had an almost tangible effect on physical reality.

And there was plenty of power, of course. Beth was able to Identify Enlightened everywhere, so common that they were just the regular citizens and workers. Seeing anyone below that, Empowered or Awoken, was rare, and it wasn’t just because they were close to the center of the city. Even after walking for some time, Enlightened was more the baseline than a rarity, and there were plenty of Ascended sprinkled in with them. So many, in fact, that just walking down two blocks had the team passing more Ascended than Beth had interacted with or even seen so far in her entire life on The Path.

Beyond even that were the Exalted. Where they were a rarity in the rest of the Milky Way, something talked about in hushed whisper, beings of extraordinary power, wealth, and knowledge that were rarely seen and oft discussed in hushed whispered, here they could be encountered on the street. True, there weren’t thousands of them everywhere, not even dozens of them going about their business, but it was enough that walking around for half an hour would lead to one spotting at least one Exalted, if one was scanning everyone they passed. Beth wasn’t sure how it stacked up overall, but she was quite sure there were more Exalted here than the rest of the galaxy combined, and that wasn’t even in question. To think that the city likely hosted over a hundred of the legendary figures was pretty shocking, especially when thinking about how the entire galaxy had less than twenty native Exalted, but they weren’t even the top of the food chain here. One didn’t just bump into Manumitted on the street, of course, but they were definitely there, and their presence could be felt throughout the city, even when they weren’t blasting it out with their will.

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