C_Mantis

Chapter 426

Chapter 426

Tim sighed and put his head down on his desk, placing his pad in the holder on the side. He could hear as his teacher, Mr. Hasta, started tapping at his own pad to check on Tim’s work. But when Tim didn’t hear him say anything, the boy let himself drift off into a blissful daydream.

It almost turned into a full-on nap, but he didn’t finish quite early enough for that.

He was woken up when Mr. Hasta called out, far more loudly than was actually necess...

Chapter 425

Chapter 425

Matt and Liz threw themselves into paperwork as they returned to their duchy, and there were sadly several things they needed to address.

First and foremost was the counterfeiting problem.

Despite all of their efforts, another group of counterfeiters seemed to have sprung up and had been adding their false coins into circulation.

Digging deeper into it, Matt found that several of the most affected businesses were the various gambling halls, and he br...

Chapter 424

Chapter 424

Seasaidh wasn’t quite how Matt remembered her.

In his memory, she was a brash young woman who had a chip on her shoulder and something to prove to pretty much everyone.

The current her wasn’t that different; she seemed eager for a fight despite still being Tier 20, but she at least had the restraint to not attack them the moment they walked into the room. 

That restraint seemed to slip as Aster smiled at her. Matt felt that Aster hadn’t me...

Path of Ascension Light Novel Book 1 (1/4)

PoA now has a light novel!

https://www.amazon.com/Path-Ascension-Light-Novel-Vol/dp/1638492441

This is BOOK 1 but in light novel form. IE it has some art and is only 1/4th of the Kindle Book 1. (The publisher is trying to use this to get both the light novel and print normal books on retail shelves.)

NOTE THERE IS NO NEW CONTENT (beyond the art) so I unde...

Chapter 423

Chapter 423

Aster felt excited, nearing the end of their trip as they were being brought to one of the Clan’s inner worlds.

With the war just a few years out, the world was bustling but that was part of why they were here. The world was one of the Clans’ military resupply hubs which acted as a gathering point, healing station, and weapon repair depot.

They normally wouldn’t have been allowed into such a system. But Wun rightly pointed out that they had been prom...

Chapter 422

Chapter 422

Upon exiting the rift, Wun immediately noticed something was wrong with how Matt was walking and he cycled through expressions of disbelief as he realized what the reward must have been while also not believing it at all.

“Seriously?”

Ellen realized it a moment later and nearly spun in a circle as she looked from Moe’s storage ring to Matt’s and back again repeatedly.

That clued Moe into it and he started laughing.

Before anyon...

Chapter 421

Chapter 421

Matt rubbed his hands together as he looked at the rift in front of him. 

It might not be the most famous rift of the dwarven Great Power they had been delving, but it was definitely on the list. In fact, it was one of the ones they had been explicitly told they needed to delve by both sets of Clans Ascenders, and was a pair to another rift they would hit just before they met up with the allocated Domain trainers, said to be made by a Talented aperologist f...

Chapter 420

Chapter 420

Wiping the streak of blood away from his face, Matt laughed as Allie had to be dragged away by Aster.

“Round four! Come on, you cowards. Now that we figured out how to beat you guys, you can’t just stop fighting!”

Seeing they were all done, Matt expanded his Concept to encompass everyone.

Brian’s sigh rattled his loose jaw. “Now that's amazing. I don’t even need to chew on mana stones to refill.”

Krodag crawled over to them as he ...

Chapter 419

Chapter 419

The group of them moved out of the house and onto the flying island before Wun put his staff down. “Nope, no fighting on the island. Let's move to somewhere else. One of the hidden areas.”

The four younger Clan Ascenders chanted in unison, “Mysteries, mysteries, hidden in a sock. Mysteries, mysteries, find ‘em in a clock.”

Jumping off the island, they devolved into more bad rhymes before they reached the edge of where two of the ...

Chapter 418

Chapter 418

Five years passed in the blink of an eye, with Susanne, Zack, and Allie each reaching Tier 27 and all six of them pushing deeper into that Tier.

They had been pushing themselves to the limits. They didn’t delve for fun, for profit, or even to gain combat experience but instead for efficiency, which meant they just rushed from the entrances to the exits, only deviating for any mini bosses they found along the way which were better sources of es...

Chapter 417

Chapter 417

Matt was still heated enough that the moment they left the estate, he opened a [Portal] to a Tier 28 rift and entered inside, with Liz hot on his heels. 

Once he had killed the first dozen monsters, she asked, “Feeling better?”

“Not really, but good enough I guess. This whole thing just pisses me off and I feel helpless.”

Liz just opened her arms, and Matt hugged her for a long minute before pulling back. “I get it. Ho...

Chapter 416

Chapter 416

Quickly finding Liz’s location, Matt compressed space and stepped to her side.

It wasn’t particularly hard, as she wasn’t all that far from him. She was at their spaceport, standing with a Dobrescu ship captain and a trembling young woman who was apparently a runaway debtor. 

The captain was only Tier 20 but was accompanied by three Tier 30 guards, which struck Matt as strange. The discrepancy was explained by their status as a ...

Chapter 415

Chapter 415

Matt reached out and grabbed Liz. “Before we both go nose down into our work, it's time for a date. We haven’t done so in too long.”

Liz tried to play it straight, but phoenix Liz gave the game away by cooing and jumping over to his shoulder instead.

They kept it simple, just going on a small walk around a newly constructed park in a Tier 20 refuge, part of an otherwise flame-filled desert. They even tried a local specialty made from...

Chapter 414

Chapter 414

A few days later when everyone was tired of losing to Liz, Manny, and Yilek over and over again, they split up. Most just hung out in the room, simply turning the back portion of it into a lounge, but Matt had other plans.

As much as he hated it, he needed to venture into the horror of the open floor.

He, however, wasn’t alone. Carissa stepped beside him as he moved to leave the room.

While he wouldn’t mind her addition, he raise...

Chapter 413

Chapter 413

Matt dealt the cards, ensuring each landed with a snick. If he didn't, Lyre would complain again, and he needed his full attention to keep the rest of the table from cheating.

Aunt Helen’s Concept repair party had turned from a large event into a planet-wide event with seemingly every cultivator over Tier 20 arriving to congratulate the old bird.

Matt and the other Ascenders had uniformly stayed to congratulate Aunt Helen but they had qu...

Chapter 412

Chapter 412

Qin Jiang brought his hammer down on the circlet in slow and steady beats, following a rhythm he felt more than heard.

It was instinct and experience merging into one in a familiar rhythm he had done a thousand times before.

More than that really but Jiang liked how the round number’s cadence fit with his own hammering.

It may have been hundreds of thousands of years, but when he was alone for long stretches like this last forging ...

Chapter 411

Chapter 411

Emmanuel was surprised.

It was quite the strange feeling, given his frequent use of his father’s Tier 50 Talent for future sight, but he had been genuinely caught off guard when Carissa used the emergency contact while he was occupied. Upon returning to the Empire, he was immensely happy she had done so, but that only contributed to his surprise.

His Ascenders had created a mess.

No, mess was the wrong word.

They had done som...

Chapter 410

Chapter 410

The moment the last guard landed back onto their floating island, Matt and Liz immediately began moving through the Empire at unprecedented speeds once more.

Matt was sure that even if it hadn’t started quite yet, the rats were about to start scurrying. But he was equally sure no one was ready for what they were about to do.

Eighty two planets later, they arrived at a world adjacent to their target and Liz called out, “Get in formation...

Chapter 409

Chapter 409

Liz and Allie came back just a month after Melinda’s testing got off its feet, but with less than stellar results from their own raids.

The few results they had gotten from Raffi’s data storage had proven to mostly be dead ends. Not because the leads Titan’s Torch’s spies found were bad, but because all of the people had vanished within days of his capture.

Not that they would let that stop them. Esmeralda immediately led an effort...

Chapter 408

Chapter 408

Returning to the Empire, Matt prepared himself for a much larger round of quarantining. But after being checked out by the healer on duty, he was told, “If Cosmind did something to your mind, we would have no real hope of fixing it, assuming we could even identify what she had done. If you feel outside impulses, report it; but there isn't anything we can really do.”

Slightly bemused, Matt underwent a typical three month quarantine, practicin...

Chapter 407

Chapter 407

Returning to Max’s suite, Matt found the entire layout different from what he had sensed when he first arrived. After reviewing the information his spiritual sense had passively picked up, he found that a team had come through and manually rebuilt the suite into its current configuration over the course of his conversation with Max.

“What?”

Matt gestured to the room. “Was it really necessary to rebuild the room? I feel any training...

Chapter 406

Chapter 406

Matt didn’t dawdle in leaving for the Corporations, even though he felt like he should be helping Liz and Aster instead of leaving to deal with a personal endeavor. It just felt selfish, even though that wasn’t true at all and they wanted him to go.

Liz had cajoled Allie into the two of them helping Melinda track down the remaining blood research facilities, but Matt could tell Allie was eager to do something ‘real’, having been removed from future wars....

Chapter 405

Chapter 405

Quarantining sucked just as badly this time as it did the others, but there was a bright spot. A few actually. 

The painting of Aiden was easy to lose hours of time looking at, as one constantly found new details they had missed before.

Normally he and Aster would analyze such art based on their shared Folded Reflection lives as siblings but she was entirely entranced with Winter Hornet’s exit technique of turning into mist and trying to recreate it...

Chapter 404

Chapter 404

Viviana wanted to go practice outside, but her parents told her she needed to come inside and watch Ascender Indomitable Titan’s news broadcast live. But she wanted to be a delver, and she needed to get better if she was going to make it, and wasting possibly hours wasn’t how she was going to do that.

The five local guilds who had been recruiting through her prep-school hadn’t seemed impressed with her abilities, despite being better than quite a few of he...

Chapter 403

Chapter 403

Giving Esmeralda and Jericho the devices they had stolen from Raffi, the six of them sat in the suite just decompressing for a long few minutes after the last stressful few weeks. It felt much longer than that, but, in reality, it had only been a short few weeks.

Allie sighed as she popped to her feet. “Want me to start digging once we get any leads? Once I get something, we can start making them really hurt.”

Phoenix Liz fluttered off Matt’s shoulde...

Chapter 402

6k chapter. Enjoy.

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Chapter 402

Matt just blinked at his bond, waiting for her to crack.

With a slow smile, Aster broke before he did, adding some much needed levity to the gathering.

Liz flopped onto the long couch in the suite, letting an arm cover her eyes. “Good luck. He's not able to describe much. I pestered him for days.” 

Matt held up his hands as everyone, even Susanne and Zack, both heaped insults onto him.

Allie’s might...

Chapter 401

I'll see everyone on the 11th with the start of the new book! I hope you enjoyed this one as there are even more cool things yet to come.

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Chapter 401

Watching the raid in reverse was a unique experience.

Things started normally with the guards arresting people, but as they watched further and time rewound, they got to watch as the scientists working at the facility destroyed evidence as fast as they could. More interesting than all of that was the person fou...

Chapter 400

FYI end of this book is looking to be 411 (Manny chapter). Might be 412 but thats where its looking to shake out. If its 411 I will be taking off April 4th and 11th for my between book break. Just wanted to warn you guys as soon as possible. For RR the dates are the same just shift to your chapters but I'll be taking everyones break a the same time.

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Who would have thought we’d ever reach 400 chapters? Fun fact: that's over two million words with my minimum 5k word chapter bu...

Chapter 399

Chapter 399

Matt shot to his feet even as his mind and [AI] raced.

He found dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of news companies reporting on the incident. Currently, everything was limited to Tier 35 and higher broadcasts, but that just meant they could speculate more than the lower-Tier media stations were allowed to do.

That meant they had some time until the information was ‘confirmed’ to get ahead of it.

“What appears to be Ascender Legion perf...

Chapter 398

Chapter 398

The commotion was so loud Matt automatically dampened the sound around the children. Even with the masks they were wearing, the sound wave was nearing a dangerous level.

Activating a function of the ballroom, Matt started rearranging the rooms into a more traditional layout that would best accommodate this many people. It would take a few minutes for the rooms to make the changes safely, but that just gave him time to deal with the initial rushing waves of p...