Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Eighty-One (Patreon)

“Well?” Val asked, walking up to Beth now that the danger had passed. 

“Well…that was certainly something,” Beth said before showing Val the crystal. “And so is this.” 

{This crystal holds and transforms spatial mana into an illusionary form. The depths swirl with a power that redirects to other places and, possibly, other times as well.} 

“Well, that really is fucking something,” Val muttered, her habit of cursing as strong as ever.  

“Come on, let’s go see what the rest are doing,” Beth said, grabbing Val, both literally and with her Ideal, and whisking them away.  

They found the group making their way down a broad, though low-ceilinged, passage a couple miles from the city. They had been heading towards what the array would have been pointing towards had it activated in the city in its current position, but progress had been slow. They had encountered some spaces where they couldn’t teleport or fit through a narrowing of the passage, and had to double back more than once, looking for alternate routes, some of which went in almost the opposite direction before bending back the way they needed. It was what exploring caves was like, and a good reminder that having Beth with them let them cheat in a way that most others simply couldn’t.  

“Finished?” asked Sera as the team stopped and relaxed for a moment, though Bjorn stayed in the center of the tunnel and just crossed his arms over his chest, facing towards the dark. 

“Yeah, another good crystal,” Beth said, showing it briefly. “If nothing else, we can likely offer these, maybe even as one lot. Two of them, one of space and one of time, would be enough to pique anyone’s interest.” 

“Not a bad plan, but they might be valuable enough on their own as lots,” Sera said, scratching her scalp before running her hands through her hair.  

“Well, we need value, but we really need a big hit,” Beth said, putting the crystal away. “One lot with both crystals might be enough to really impress, considering their mana types.” 

“True, though we’ll just have to wait and see,” Sera said.  

The group resumed after a minute, able to navigate a lot easier now that Beth was there. Technically, she could just teleport to their destination, or very close to it, but that was pretty dangerous for a couple reasons. There was a lot of stuff underground that could circle around them or come from different angles, but the team liked to keep their back trail clear as much as they could. On top of that, Beth could sense some things at a distance, but after a mile or two, she was getting mostly shapes and some vague mana types. She had enough to be able to teleport relatively close, if not right at a specific location, but if there was some level one thousand beast there or something, that she couldn’t pick up at distance. Spatial senses weren’t exactly great at that kind of fine detail, and, considering they were underground on a fairly high mana world, she’d rather not leap directly into something she couldn’t handle without looking first.  

The place they eventually reached wasn’t as grand as Beth expected; she hoped that they would stumble into some kind of amazing lost temple or a massive trove of gems and precious metals. Instead, they found a fairly plain cavern with a small seam of ore in it, though that ore was mithril, which was still incredibly valuable. Mining it, however, would be a time consuming and tedious process, even for Beth and her team, especially considering they didn’t want to bring the cavern down on their heads while they excavated.  

“I never realized just how much of adventuring is menial labor,” Andrea said at one point, having helped carve away some of the excess rock around the ore they were trying to pull out of the cavern wall. 

“Well, there’s a lot of fighting,” Beth said. 

“But there’s a lot of digging, carrying, sorting, filing, counting and measuring, and even standing around and watching something or someone,” Andrea replied. “I figured it would be a lot more, you know, big action and major fights. Big bosses and other Wayfarers trying to steal your things and stuff. I didn’t think I’d be spending hours digging out some rock in a cave two miles underground.” 

“Life takes us strange places,” Beth replied, shrugging as she continued to carefully hammer at specific spots on the wall.  

“I guess it does at that,” Andrea said.  

“Stop,” Blood interrupted.  

“Didn’t think our conversation was that bad,” Andrea muttered as everyone stopped.  

“Not that,” Blood grunted. “Something behind the wall.” 

“Something? Something isn’t very specific,” Beth huffed. “Anything better to go on?” 

“It’s something old,” Blood said, sniffing the air. “And something weird.” 

“Old and weird, great,” Sera said. “It’s not uncle Terrimane in there, is it?” 

“I don’t think your uncle’s trapped in a cave on a random planet,” Beth replied.  

“Never know,” Sera muttered. “Could always get lucky.” 

“That seems…uncharitable,” Kris said hesitantly.  

“You didn’t have to spend a lot of time around the man,” Sera replied, though she ran her claws through Kris’s hair to remove any bit from the retort.  

“It’s far back,” Blood said, having her face pressed against a part of the wall. “Like, really far back.” 

“Then let’s keep going how we’ve been,” Beth said. “No reason to bring this place down on our own heads for something, and I quote, ‘old and weird.’” 

They did just that, though with a bit more excitement given that they were now doing a little bit more than just gathering some valuable ore. Whatever was behind the ore seam, it was pretty far back, as they spent a day excavating a good chunk of the seam and found only more rock and stone behind it. There wasn’t even any gap or crack, not that Beth could see, though Blood swore there was something, and that the smell was getting stronger. She had the best nose by far, though Sera was no slouch in the smell department, either, but not even the dragon could pick up whatever it was that Blood was after.  

Beth had stashed all the ore they got in one of her spatial items, sometimes losing track of what she had where. Luckily, everything but the gate power was easy to scan through, even the medallion that contained a whole solar system, though that did take at least a bit of time to look over everything. The gate she couldn’t see into, even the residential section, without opening it and walking inside, which is also why they usually kept a very standard stock of things in there, including crafting supplies and extra general supplies. They had gotten basically all the stuff they wanted to sell out of the gate a while ago, so now it was just their stuff, and most of that were things they had more of at that house on Zephyr or had other copies of themselves. Everyone on the team had some kind of spatial storage, though Beth was the only one with a list of storages, though some of the others had both an item and a skill.  

Having a solar system’s worth of storage, speaking of that, was pretty handy in a variety of scenarios, such as when one was going to dig many tons of rock out of a cavern wall and didn’t want that rock to pile up in the cavern itself. It took but a thought for Beth to send that rock into her necklace, where it landed on one of the moons with little fanfare and left even less of an impression. She could also do the opposite, though pulling a bunch of things out of the necklace didn’t really do all that much, other than when they needed air somewhere. Nothing came out of her storage spaces with much force, so she couldn’t really use it as an attack, and even the really mana dense stone wouldn’t be of use even if she dropped it from high up. Having a couple planet’s worth of breathable atmosphere and clean water at the ready was really handy, however, and it helped that she could open the portal for the medallion at a small size and choose what went in and out.  

She had also thought of just teleporting the rock away, either with her powers or storage items, but that was a pretty tricky endeavor for a couple reasons, not least of which because even stone on a world like this had huge amounts of mana running through it. All that mana was linked, even if loosely, and trying to teleport a chunk of rock away would have to overcome the mana resistance of much of the surrounding rock, plus the mana movement in the air and other factors. It got all too complicated all too quickly, so that idea was out, not even mentioning that teleporting away big chunks of stone when they were already concerned about the stability of the place might not be the most stellar of ideas she had had.  

Using something like the medallion wouldn’t really work, either, as it was subject to several rules that really hampered that plan. Moving the portal was almost impossible for the medallion, and she couldn’t just move her gate around willy-nilly, so that was already shooting that idea down. Even if she could move the portal, and there were items that made portals into a separate space where the portal itself could be moved, it still wouldn’t work because of the mana bonds and such. Sure, if she had a big enough portal she could just grab the whole wall, but then she might as well have a portal big enough to just grab the whole planet and, no, she wasn’t going to do that because that was even more of a complicated undertaking, with even more attendant complications than she could shake a stick at.  

They had to just keep going the old fashioned way, much as Beth would rather magic everything away, or just hammer her way through in a minute and get to whatever it was. Since none of them wanted to be buried in millions of tons of rock, they had to go very slow and use various mana and materials to reinforce the area as they moved. They did a combination of only carving a narrow tunnel and reinforcing the walls alongside creating supports from materials they had, mostly metals from their enormous stockpile of bars, to help hold up the ceiling. It was still a bit of a risky prospect, but Beth could grab everyone and teleport them if a collapse started, it was just about speed. If they were haphazard about it, the collapse could be sudden enough and fast enough that someone could get seriously hurt or even killed before she could grab everyone and move them.  

After about three hours, they were close enough that everyone could detect it now, and not just from smell. Beth could feel it, a palpable sensation like an old cloth was being slowly run over parts of her skin, the cloth dry and smooth but starting to fray. She hadn’t felt anything like it on any of their adventures yet, but that just made dollar signs pop up in her eyes, as if it was something extremely rare, that meant extremely valuable. Hopefully, whatever the city had been after was back here, as she was sure there was more to the story than they just wanted some ore or gems. That was assuming that whatever the city was after had been teleported here as well, which was a bit of a big assumption, but it made sense to her.  

They found something only a few minutes later, though it was just a crack in the rock, or rather it was likely the crack in the rock. This was likely what had been carrying the scent and sense of the object all the way out to the main cavern, though how Blood had smelled it when it had narrowed to be so thin as to be undetectable to their senses was still a mystery. Still, they were absolutely on the right track now, and it didn’t take all that many more minutes of work before the crack started to widen, at which point the stopped for a minute.  

“Whatever’s back there, no reason to rush in headlong,” Beth said, cautioning the team. “We need to take this slow and steady. It doesn’t necessarily feel dangerous, but it could be some kind of sleeping monster or a level two thousand beast.” 

“You wouldn’t get a level two thousand beast on a shitty planet like this,” Val scoffed, but Beth just gave her an eye roll. 

“You get the point of what I was saying,” she huffed. “Even if it’s not some level two thousand super beast, it could be something extremely dangerous. Does anybody have a better feel for what it is?” 

“I have no idea,” Sera said, shaking her head. The rest joined her, giving various negatives and denials that they had ever encountered something like it.  

“It’s real fucking old, whatever that shit is,” Val muttered, focusing on the feel of the mana coming out of the crack.  

“Then let’s make sure we don’t wake something we can’t handle,” Beth cautioned before directing Bjorn and Sera to start widening the crack, which was more like a narrow tunnel at this point.  

Despite having gotten close, they still proceeded slowly now, taking another hour to get to a point where the crack had widened so far they didn’t need to carve it out for Bjorn to pass through. Funnily enough, that was always their marker of ease of passage; if Bjorn could get through an area, then it was good enough for the team. If the titan couldn’t walk through, even crouching a little and shuffling, then they would need to widen the passage at least a little to accommodate him. They were at that point now, the point where Bjorn could walk without difficulty, or much difficulty, and the sensation was almost overpowering now. Whatever was up ahead, or whoever, was incredibly strong. Beth had never felt mana at this level, or not from an object, at the least. The only time she had ever experienced something that had this kind of mana output that wasn’t just an entire star was when she had been around Zane and Fallon, more particularly when she had sparred with Zane.  

They moved down the last couple dozen feet of tunnel, going through a little hook turn near the end before coming out in a room about twenty paces across and half that high. Bjorn and Sera had stepped out first, one after another, and taken a step forward while assuming a defensive posture, scanning the room. Beth was right behind them, followed by the rest of the group, but they didn’t see or detect any creatures or people present. In fact, the cave was empty, and Beth might have assumed it was natural, but the walls were a little too even and smooth for it to have occurred naturally. At first, she thought they had either struck out or not gone far enough, but it took only a second to realize they had arrived at the right place. 

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