Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Eighty-Two (Patreon)

She hadn’t noticed it at first, because it was even with the level, smooth floor, but there was a pool of liquid in the center of the cave that was a dark silver color and didn’t seem to reflect any light. It had made it, on very first glance, look like a part of the floor, which is why she hadn’t noticed it until she looked just a bit closer. It was the pool of liquid that was giving the sense of power and age, and it was definitely the liquid itself that was doing it. The way the mana radiated from the surface of the liquid, and the way the liquid triggered several of her senses told her this wasn’t like the first of the two crystal they had found. No, instead the liquid itself was what was conducting all that mana and what they had sensed from so far away.  

“So, our resident alchemists have-“ Beth began but was interrupted. 

“Stop! Don’t go near it!” Kris cried out.  

Sera, who had taken another step forward, froze for a second before slowly taking a step back, saying, “Not going near it.” 

“What is it?” Beth asked, staring at the liquid intently. It felt like her pores were starting to open up. 

“Something extremely powerful and dangerous. And, no, do NOT jump into Beth; it would be too much, even for you,” Kris said, her usual stuttering gone in a serious situation.  

“Well, that’s lame,” Beth said, getting some eye rolls and sighs from the group. 

“Is there any way you can, uh, contain it with spatial mana?” Kris asked 

“I could, hmm, maybe cut an area around it out, though it’ll be really tricky,” Beth said, frowning now as she examined the space. “I don’t know how precise I can be. It’s also hard to figure out the depth. Do you know how much of it is sitting there?” 

“It should be about a hundred stron,” said Kris. 

“So that’s, what, a hundred thousand liters? Like, something a little over twenty-seven thousand gallons or something like that?” Beth asked, though she was muttering to herself by the end of it.  

She hadn’t ever tried anything like what she was about to do, but the concept was pretty simple. She had mastery of spatial mana, as well as a good grasp of several other types, though things like fire weren’t going to be good to use here, and she could use that spatial mana for a variety of tasks. Here, she was going to use a combination of mana types to carve out essentially a tub around the liquid that had Kris so on edge and then lift that entire tub up, quite carefully, before stashing it somewhere. The other option was to suck everything up into a spatial item or power, but someone would have to get close to the liquid to do that, and that clearly wasn’t a great idea.  

She had to be careful, which was actually a good thing, as it let her focus on using her skills in, if not new, then challenging ways that normally didn’t get much of her intention. She was usually using things like Light Beyond the Edge and such to blast away powerful enemies like liches, not cut a millimeter wide line deep into heavily mana infused stone without disturbing an extremely valuable, and possibly highly volatile, liquid right next to where she was working. The added tension of not messing up, including not letting any mana leak out at all to interface with the liquid in a negative way, made the effort a lot more trying, but also more rewarding.  

The only one that could help any was Bjorn, who used his abilities in manipulating earth and stone to help clear the little bit of debris she made away from the liquid. He also helped correct her cut alignment a little, but even focusing on finite manipulation, he couldn’t be quite as precise as Beth was currently being. His new, incredibly powerful chest armor made things worse, not better, as World Manipulation was a massive force multiplier. Trying to use that skill to help with something like this would have been like trying to whisper through a megaphone cranked all the way up in volume; not really a practical effort.  

The only good thing was, even though the amount sounded pretty impressive, twenty-seven thousand gallons wasn’t all that much, considering a lot of home pools held something between twenty and twenty-five thousand gallons. A competitive pool held far more, so what she was trying to carve out was much smaller than most pools people swam at for sports or in public, and was wider and shallower than most people’s home pools. That did present the problem of having to carve out a large area under the liquid without being able to see what she was doing, but Bjorn being able to clearly sense her powers destroying the stone let them coordinate on where she was and how much she had cut.  

The process still took hours, but Beth felt it was absolutely worth it. She was killing two birds, or even more, with just one stone; she was getting in a good workout, flexing her powers, while at the same time retrieving an item so valuable they were scared of going near it. She was also working on team coordination at the same time, or so she convinced herself, so that could be counted as three birds with just the single stone, though maybe it was best not to stretch the adage too much. Her skills were likely not to jump a level just from this, but the practice in fine control was always beneficial, especially with skills she normally just blasted massive areas with. Being able to create piercing attacks or thin blades with a skill that didn’t lend itself well to such attacks was a good advantage to have, though part of that was just her familiarity with the skill letting her manipulate it so carefully.  

When they finally got the pseudo-tub carved out of the stone, they still weren’t out of the woods yet, because now they had to lift it. Well, she should correct herself, because she had to lift it, since nobody was getting close to it and nobody else had any skill in their back pocket that was particularly useful. Bjorn could help a little, but they needed to be very slow and precise as they had very little margin for error; the tub was thick enough to handle moving without much issue, but the liquid was perfectly even with the edge of said tub, and any sudden movement was going to cause some rather terrifying sloshing. Not only did Beth not want to spill a drop of the precious liquid, Kris still hadn’t explained what it was other than it was extremely dangerous, which was a good incentive to keep it in the makeshift tub. 

Beth opened a portal to the medallion, large enough that they could easily slide the tub in, and then she used spatial mana to lift the entire tub, very slowly. It took several minutes, even given that it was shallow, to lift the whole thing, Beth feeling the beads of sweat forming on her forehead. It wasn’t strain from the amount of power, but from the amount of precision and minute corrections she need to do to keep the whole thing level. Bjorn added in just a little, Beth feeling his mana attach to the stone and keep it even and properly aligned, but she was the one doing all the lifting and moving, even if his stabilizing was helping a good bit.  

Moving the tub into the portal was agonizing, considering how slow and careful they had to be, and everyone else had to clear out of the room for safety’s sake. Even after getting it into the portal and making sure none of it was in the room, they still weren’t done, needing to very careful set the still levitated tub down on the ground. Beth had to wait a minute as Bjorn prepared a large, flat area for them before carving out a rectangular space that Beth could put the tub in to keep it from going anywhere. She had to be very slow in setting it down as she didn’t want the liquid to bounce and slosh up out of the tub or even stir up too badly.  

Once that was done, they then constructed a huge room around the tub to shield it from anything on the planet they had picked, one which did have plant, animal, and beast life on it already. Beth and Bjorn spent almost another hour reinforcing the place so it wouldn’t be attacked, or easily succumb to an attack, before they were satisfied everything was okay. They left the medallion space and re-entered the cave before rejoining the others, needing a minute to rest and recover their mental state.  

“Kris, water,” Beth demanded, and the phoenix got her meaning right away.  

Beth stood with her back to the cave and made her armor disappear for a moment, letting Kris blast her with a deluge of fresh, clean, cold water, clothes and all. She was sweaty and grimy and dirty but didn’t want to take time to take a even a quick shower, though they certainly could have deployed the gate for a little. Still, this was the next best thing, and she eventually had Kris stop and dried herself with a quick puff of flame before again donning her armor and gauntlets. She didn’t even notice the weight, or the very slight restriction, of her armor these days, but she did sometimes realize that it was damned hot and that she was stewing in her juices, to put it mildly, and needed to clean up. She wasn’t a neat freak, but she didn’t like tromping around covered in sweat and dirt; Kris’s firehose solution worked just fine for her, though the others would sometimes insist on using the gate to take a ‘real’ shower. 

“Alright, now that that’s done, what the fuck was that?” Val asked.  

“I was taking a shower, thank you very much,” Beth said in an aggrieved tone. 

“Not your propensity for open nudity, you fucking dolt,” Val snapped back, causing Beth to make a spluttering sound. “I meant, what the fuck was that liquid? And why was Kris shitting herself over it?” 

“It’s, uhm, a little difficult to e-explain, but it’s a kind of incredible catalyst for body alteration,” Kris said quietly. “Um, think of it like this; it allows a person to re-mold their b-body, uh, in a way that isn’t normally even possible with elixirs, letting them increase their stats and change many factors about their body. Bone size and d-density, organ health and function, even things like genetic makeup can be altered easily with the liquid.” 

“That sounds pretty good. Not sure why we all freaked out,” Beth said with a frown.  

“Because getting some of that, in its undiluted form, splashed on you could have terrible consequences,” Neph said brightly. “Like, think turbo cancer kind of consequences. Or, you melt into a puddle and have to be rebuilt from the ground up with a lot of healing and alchemical aid and intensive magical manipulation.” 

“Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty bad,” Beth said, shuddering.  

“The good news is, uh, that the liquid is probably the most valuable thing we’ll find l-leading, uh, to the auction,” Kris said quietly. “Knowing our luck, uh, we could, uhm, find some a-ancient relic or something, b-but that liquid is worth a hundred times its weight in mithril.” 

“It’s really that valuable?” Beth asked. 

“Right, right!” Neph cut in. “She sent me the study she found that she thinks matches the liquid. If it’s used as a base in elixirs or certain, high-end alchemical products, it produces an item that is peerless in its effects. Even Grandmasters would kill to use some of that, but Sages or above would sell their whole life away to use the liquid. It doesn’t just make products that are crazy, using it is a massive challenge to a highly skilled alchemist. A Sage using it can push their craft to a whole new level with something like that. Of course, the items someone like that would make would be incredibly valuable, like, super duper mega valuable, but the experience is what would really count.” 

“So, should we keep it for the two of you?” Beth asked, scratching her head. 

“It’s a little tempting, but, uh, it’s too much for us, I think,” Kris demurred.  

“She means there’s too much liquid for us to use even if we were Sages,” Neph added in. 

“Well, it is tens of thousands of gallons of it. How much would a normal elixir, or something like that, use?” Beth said.  

“You could craft something like five, or maybe even as many as eight, batches with a gallon of the liquid,” Neph said. “At least, based on the info Kris found. And that’s batches, not five to eight items; sometimes, even elixirs can be made in batches of ten or fifteen. That liquid is enough for hundreds of thousands of crafting attempts, when even one crafting attempt with it would be considered an enormous, super crazy awesome good thing.” 

“So, we could sell a thousand gallons and it wouldn’t have an impact on the two of you crafting in Grandmaster or Sage?” Beth just wanted to make really sure she clarified where they stood. 

“That’s right,” Kris confirmed. “You could sell half what we just got and there would still be too much for both Neph and I combined.” 

“Well, that’s three really good money makers,” Beth said, grinning.  

“I don’t think you get it,” Kris said, being firm for once. “Those crystals you got? They’re not even trash compared to the liquid. If you put just a thousand gallons, as you call it, of that liquid up for auction, Sage and Divine crafters will be selling everything they have and borrowing against their futures just to bid on it. The value of that liquid is probably more than everything else we have, including both of your insane, soulbound spatial storage items.” 

“Uh, I feel like I need to reinforce that room we built for it,” Beth said, suddenly sweating again. 

“Open the portal,” Bjorn said seriously. 

“Stop, stop,” Sera said, waving her hand. “There’s nothing high-level on that planet and the two of you spent an hour reinforcing it the first time. Nothing’s going to get it in the next month, and besides, you can just monitor it, Beth. You can watch anywhere in the medallion at any time. Just make sure nothing gets close to it and we’re fine.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Beth said, though all the tension hadn’t quite left her body at Sera’s reassurance. It was one thing to hear it was valuable, it was another to hear it was worth more than everything else they had combined.  

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