The Path of Ascension Chapter 521

Chapter 521

No matter how much Matt wanted to return to Empire space after losing a team member, he and the others knew their duty.

Having not just broken free from the Federation’s trap, but causing serious casualties and dispersing their pursuers, they were suddenly free to go on a rampage. There was no one near them with enough power to stop them anymore. So, while the Federation scrambled to rebuild and repair their elite strike force, the three of them destroyed four primary war targets.

The two shipyards’ losses were more of an inconvenience, but were still useful in the short term. Their loss meant that the Federation would have to send their ships deeper into their territory for repairs for the next several decades.

And those decades would matter. Everything mattered on the scale that the Great Powers operated in. Doubly so when they were hitting less hardened targets, being away from the expected frontlines.

Where other units would be swarmed by armies until they were worn down, they’d spent the first part of the war proving why that wouldn’t work. The three of them were experts at widescale destruction, and any armies sent their way were being thrown away.

In the lower Tiers that was the goal, but it was very much not in the higher Tiers, and the Federation leadership wasn’t about to waste entire armies that had no chance of successfully repelling them.

The only chance to force them out was to send an overwhelming number of peak and pinnacle elites, but that meant they couldn’t be used anywhere else on the warfront, weakening their overall effectiveness.

Matt knew the value in one unit being able to effectively neutralize so many just by being on the field. It was a role only Ascenders could play because only they had a chance of surviving.

Not that being deep in enemy space didn’t have its own advantages.

In their efforts to create distance between raids, they were using the occasional [Portal] to bypass obstacles and scout ships.

During one of their teleports, they ran into a lone Tier 35 supply ship not hugging close to the tethers of calm that connected the world nodes in chaotic space. A military ship cutting between vertices to save time wasn’t all that unusual, but it was far stranger for a lone supply vessel to do the same.

Liz didn’t want to spend too much time on it and offered them the chance to surrender. They only intended to blow it up and move on, but the ship fled, despite knowing it was them, which piqued their interest. It didn’t take them long, but when they ran it down and Aster snatched the crew before they could try to destroy the ship, they discovered they’d hit the jackpot.

Despite it being a Tier 35 ship, it was transporting critical lower Tier war supplies using its larger storage capabilities and the higher Tier ship’s inherently greater speed. Doing so wasn’t against the rules, which only cared about the reverse, but it was something all of the Great Powers tried not to do. It simply offered too much of an incredible opportunity for their enemies to affect multiple war Tiers at once by legally ‘punching down’.

Liz recognized the opportunity a beat faster than anyone else and turned to Matt.

“Hurry up and crack the encrypted logs! We are on the clock now, so let the mana batteries run low if you have too. We need to find out where they resupplied and see if it's close by before anyone realizes we hit this ship.”

Matt didn’t need to be told twice and threw his Insight at the problem.

The encryption was some of the best the Federation military had to offer, but with access to a fully intact ship, he was able to work with minimal fear of safety measures. It helped that he didn’t need to go in too deep, only needing the vessel's flight logs, and those were stored in multiple places.

Less than a minute later, they found exactly what they were hoping for. Best of all, they weren’t even that far from their destination, only two months of travel.

It was so perfect, they were half expecting to run into a trap.

It wasn't. It was a box of peak and pinnacle elite war supplies for all twenty war Tiers. Alchemical reagents, reactive life saving measures replacements, passive life saving measures, there were even high Tier and clearly custom armor and weapon replacements. Each and every item was one meant for the Federation’s most elite lower Tier troops and grouped up for the taking. Best of all, it was perfectly legal loot due to being transported by a Tier 35 ship.

They even found a cache of rare and valuable bloodline resources meant for the few Federation elites who could burn them for momentary effects. It was only a smaller part of a larger bloodline enhanced cybernetic stash, but the rest were useless to the three of them.

The only thing that prevented their immediate destruction was they hoped some Empire analysts might be able to glean something about a particular elite's weakness from them.

After all, each and every vial represented a heavy investment or the death of a bloodline cultivator. Given from which Great Power they found the bloodline items, it could have gone either way, but Liz and Aster didn’t care.

They took it all.

Then, just to be thorough in their resource denial, and maybe a touch petty, they chucked the cleaned out base into the emptiness between star systems via [Portal]. They hadn’t done anything more than loot the place though they debated rigging it to explode. However they knew that if the Federation found nothing, they would need to confirm that over and over. A task made all the more difficult as the three of them worked together and pushed the Tier 20 structure to its limit in a random but hidden direction away from the inhabited system.

They didn’t know how many people would end up searching blindly in the emptiness of space between star systems, but it was another annoyance.

Or, that was supposed to be the extent of the idea.

Right before they sent the empty station off, Aster wrote a message inside one of the now empty Tier 15 vaults that said, “Ha! I bet you wished you let this go without the chase!”

Matt was quite disappointed in both himself and Liz for not thinking of their own comments, and the two of them spent an idle few hours on the bridge trying to make each other laugh with quippy banter.

Not that any of the crew minded. The unexpected victory buoyed their mood, which was a good thing, as the Federation wasn’t too happy about their success. The second attempt at extracting them began shortly after.

They sent out Ronni Gal, who specialized in long range magical attacks. Armed with a modified teleporting ship that had dedicated the entire crew area to house his ballista, he delighted in taking pot shots at them as they exited a world and running away before they could catch up.

That little game of cat and mouse ended when chaotic space exploded.

Like detritus caught in a storm, chaotic space surged and the ships that floated in its miasmic currents were sent scattering.

Matt sat in his throne-like chair and kept himself steady with a touch of magic as the ship was pummeled by a dozen waves from seemingly random directions, before they were picked up and shoved almost a quarter of the way to the next world in an instant. He only noticed any of that through his connection to the ship, its sensors, and, most importantly, the shield’s mana reserves.

He had no idea what had caused the sudden surge, beyond the impossibility of a surprise breach, but its all-encompassing scale meant there had been very little direct damage from it. They were little more than flotsam,carried and moved by a tidal wave; they didn’t get directly destroyed by it. That prevented the turbulation from destroying ships unlucky enough to be caught outside reality when it occurred, but it did greatly stress every ship's shields as they were battered by greater than normal chaotic space energies.

That, more than the wave itself, was dangerous. For everyone except them at least.

He gave Liz one look and she immediately ordered them to chase Ronni’s ship down before he could flee into a real space node.

It took two [Portal]s past Matt’s self imposed yearly limit, which caused the edges of his spirit to start to fray, but they caught the peak elite’s ship. Once they were close, it didn’t take Aster long to tuck him away in her spirit space, where he could be traded for war score.

She’d gathered a healthy collection of frozen cultivators chilled almost to the point of death, and he was almost a little afraid of how he’d ever catch up to her war score if she kept it up.

As everyone else hunkered down in real space as the sudden chaotic space storm passed, they went hunting. They abused the storm and their advantage of being able to stay active in it.

To keep his mana generation nice and muddled, Matt had spent most of the war cheating. Just slightly. From day one, he’d included the crew in his Concept, but now he pushed it and asked the crew to donate more of their mana generation in an effort to obscure his own contributions, while also reframing their remaining in chaotic space as a team effort. He could have paid the entire cost without much of a thought, but his move had the side effect of keeping the crew involved. That, in turn, helped mollify their very rational fears of chaotic space storms.

Or the not-storm as they quickly found out.

The Ascender Chat gave them an answer before any official news source.

Olivier was the closest to it and got to see the cause before scuttling away. Not that any of them blamed him after learning the storm had been created by Allister and Winter Hornet battling each other. No one knew why they decided to slug it out, but that didn’t matter.

Knowing there was a time limit, they redoubled their efforts. A light battle between Tier 50s could last months, as neither party dared use too much power for fear of ascending, but they rarely lasted more than a year.

Contrary to their hopes and expectations, the battle only lasted two and a half weeks before chaotic space returned to its normal energy levels.

With the end of the fighting and return to calm, everyone in the wars sprung into action, eager to reclaim the lost time.

The Federation elite squads sent to hunt them was no exception. However, unlike after their first encounter, Liz had their ship head back to Empire space rather than restart the game again.

They’d done their job better than anyone could ask and it was time to go home. They’d fought off a wave of pinnacle elites, all while doing serious damage to the Federation war efforts in the general areas around the war front.

The Federation may have thought they chased them off, but that wasn’t exactly true. They didn’t return because they weren't willing to continue fighting, but because Matt needed to visit the army base where he could safely attempt to form his Aspect.

***

Johannes Fillion sighed as he saw the condition of Dankor Three. He and his team of craftsmen descended on it after its third activation in half as many years, and he could already see they wouldn’t make it to the expected six uses before needing to pull it from rotation.

Sometimes they got streaks of smaller or more delicate Aspects, but it seemed something was in the water this decade because the last three had been continental-scale.

He and his had only just come from repairing Dankor Two, and from orbit he could see signs that Three’s repair wasn’t going to be as simple as Two’s touch-up had been. The Empire normally liked to keep the usage of the large moon formations to a minimum, but as with all wars, they’d upped the amount of elites they allowed to attempt to create their Aspects.

Johannes reached the surface layer with his crew of fifteen and went through the same inspection they’d all done so many times, they’d lost count. That didn’t stop him from repeating the same words he said every time, or his crew from listening attentively. That was partially because his words were good reminders, but more because his Talent helped keep them operating at their best with far less mental overhead than what such high intensity concentration would normally demand.

As he worked on the more critical spots that required a crew chief, he couldn’t help but reminisce that Dankor, whoever they must have been, had to have been a particular kind of brilliant. He hadn’t only come up with the method to protect a Tier 35 from the consequence of a failed attempt at an Aspect, but he actually managed to create such a complicated formation in reality.

Johannes had a complete diagram, [AI] overlays, and had been working on the system for twenty thousand years, and there were still parts that boggled his mind as to why they worked.

The moon's outermost surface had been completely converted into a dense weave of enchantments, twenty-foot thick, seven layers deep. Each was a complex spiritual stabilization formation, with the outermost layers there to act as a shield and prevent outside influences from interfering with the cultivator as much as possible.

Like every part of the Dankor formation, the outer layers were subject to incredible forces as the cultivator inside attempted to form their Aspect. It was inevitable really. The formation had to meld a tiny human spirit with the much more robust planet’s spirit and do so without making the cultivator crazy.

It took them almost a day to inspect the outer layer, but the news was better than he could have hoped for. Only six percent of the layers needed to be swapped out, which was less than he expected from his initial estimate. Thankfully that wasn’t his or any crew's problem. The outer layers only needed to be removed and sent to the off-world specialists who would make the repairs.

He’d risen to the position of crew chief because, having been on the job long enough, he had the skill, knowledge, and experience to do on-site repairs. But that was only done in desperate situations. Ones they rarely had to deal with, being a back line and heavily protected asset.

As one of the Empire’s most important bases, their system and unit, unlike most places in the military or government, never had to deal with supply or funding issues. They had what they needed, when they needed it.

The good news was that it ensured Johannes and his teams could always work. The bad news was that Johannes and the nineteen other teams like his could always work. They were perpetually behind too. Not because they fell behind, but because anytime they got ahead, the schedule shifted forward.

Tired as he was, he couldn't truly complain. Anyone at this base was an exceptional crafter who was well compensated for their expertise and time. Additionally, they’d all known what they’d signed up for well before they got here. That didn’t mean the constant and endless work didn’t drag on them, but he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

He only hoped the war calmed and fewer people settled on an Aspect. It wouldn’t, he knew that the lines were millions long, but he still hoped for it.

He could only count his lucky stars that the outer layers of Dankor Three weren’t too badly damaged. It was the largest single layer and one of the most fragile. He hated when it was damaged, as it meant the worst kind of fiddly work to swap out the sections.

Johannes tried to remind himself that they hadn’t had a failure in long enough, he didn’t want to think of how long. That nearly always meant a full rebuild but he, like most, never minded those times. So long as the cultivators themselves survived, the moon had done its job. Repairs would have to be made, beams melted and reformed, enchantments reinscribed, but that was what it was there for.

A layer deeper, things didn’t get any easier or less complex. They were more interesting though. From that point on everything relied on Johannes’s crew and those like them.

Seventeen pillars dissected the moon from its heart and were the core arteries that connected the formation's center to its edges.

Johannes entered one of the pillars as his people ensured none of the secondary branches had warped from the most recent activation. While they measured and tested, he did the same, ensuring the main arterial hadn’t twisted.

Warping on them was inevitable, as even Tier 35 materials struggled to channel so much power, but they’d just replaced a tenth of the primaries on Dankor Three last maintenance cycle. He’d hoped to eke out another five before they needed to replace any more, but that was looking doubtful. Pulling the entire fifty mile wide tunnel out of the moon was a lot easier than reintegrating the replacement, but that wasn’t saying much. The end result was days checking welding points atom by atom, which took weeks. Some days he fantasized about scrapping the moon and building a new one.

Logically, he knew it wouldn’t improve things, but he’d been there long enough to have personally replaced every piece of the moons at one point or another, and was pretty sure he could manage a new build if he had all the components. In reality, nothing of the moons was original by this point, except maybe some of the substrate.

After he ensured

the main arterial was within tolerance, he withdrew a spiritually locked storage ring. From it, he carefully rebuilt the core conduit of the relay with powdered Tier 35 essence stones. The line was only a few molecules wide, but he’d empty the ring in the countless miles of channeling that needed to be replaced every activation.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Dankor moons were resource pits with a cost to use even during successes, let alone the catastrophe that was a failure. He was sure High Command would love to switch to a cheaper alternative, but the core relays could only be made from one, very expensive, thing.

Essence, or rather essence stones, were incredibly good energy conductors and one of the only ones that could interface safely with a human spirit. While the edges of the formation could use lower Tier essence, the core regions had to use Tier 35. Spot replacements were made every activation, but a full clean out happened every few cycles, where they replaced all of the essence throughout the planet to ensure there weren’t hidden dead spots.

They were halfway down the planet and three quarters of the way done with their work, when Johannes called for a break.

One of the few perks of their jobs was that they got to watch every attempt. Success or failure, someone trying to create their Aspect with a Dankor system was always a show due to the way the formation manifested and amplified the Domain through the moon's spirit. Given that they had to repair the damage even success caused, he always tried to take advantage and appreciate the few benefits.

He got to witness things most people would only get to see recreated in movies, and he knew how even the best imitations failed to capture the majesty of a Domain’s first unveiling.

It was raw and primal in a way that could never be recreated, as training and understanding refined and perfected what was there.

Johannes appreciated the sight even as he bantered with the other crew leaders. Together, they watched as Dankor Two seemed to catch fire as an orange glow chased itself around the world. Step by step, the flames grew from small specks to intermittent waves that turned the moon into a strobe light as the cultivator harmonized with their desired Aspect, piece by piece.

The crews provided color commentary but no one suggested the attempt was a bad one. They rarely saw those. There were too many rigorous prescreenings required to get a slot for someone without a clear idea in mind to make it this far. Every once in a while it did happen, but they were rarer than outright failures.

The lightshow culminated in one of the continent-sized sections of Dankor Two bursting into flames that stretched miles into the air. It lasted almost a full minute before petering out, as the Aspect was formed and the cultivator got themselves under control.

It was a strong showing.

So much so that Johannes was able to see the signs of damage from his vantage on Dankor Three. It wasn't enough they’d need to intervene, but he knew the back-up crews would be doing emergency repairs before the next cultivator got their attempt.

While failures were always destructive, successes were too, though to a lesser extent. Usually.

It was just reality that a cultivator who formed their Aspect while within the Dankor formation was connected to the entire planet as their Domain formed. As a result, manifestations were common and inherently destructive to both the planet and the formations that linked the two. Thankfully, on the scale of most Domains, a moon was more than robust enough to handle a cultivator's manifestations. The damage was generally surface level, with outer sectors or secondary stabilizers doing their job and breaking before the more important arteries or the direct essence formations deeper in were overly damaged.

The very ones he needed to check over now that the show had ended.

He and everyone else returned back into the underground labyrinth that was Dankor Three. There they rushed to get the moon back into rotation before Dankor Two was inevitably pulled from service.

Johannes was just heading to check the interior cabin along with Brenda, the most senior crew chief, when they were interrupted at the door by their boss' boss. Cinni’s arrival had pulled them up short. He immediately knew something was wrong, and he didn’t have to wait long for her to give him the bad news.

It just wasn't the news he expected.

“Dankor Three is being pulled from commission temporarily.” Before he could ask why, she continued by gesturing to herself and the mechanic uniform he’d only seen her in a few times before during his tenure at this station. “Ascender Titan is dropping in.”

She could have stopped there, but she continued, even as she levitated her tool boxes and entered the core. “Orders have come up high to make sure everything's in perfect shape, so spread the word that double inspections are the new norm for this repair. Brenda, take care of that, Johannes I know it strains you, but make a circle and put a pep in everyone's step. We can’t afford any mistakes here.”

Johannes cursed silently the entire way, even as he hurried to complete his orders before he got his people to recheck everything they’d done three times over. They didn’t find any mistakes, but none of them complained about the wasted effort. They didn’t need Cinni to know that if something went wrong, they wouldn’t be able to survive the repercussions.

The only good news was that with the news spreading at the speed of gossip, they had all hands on deck. That allowed them to finish their final inspections with almost a day to spare and fuss over the smallest details.

Johannes avoided most of that tedium by virtue of being sent to work on Dankor One. It was mid-rebuild after its latest teardown a decade ago, when it had been replaced in circulation by Dankor Three.

When it was repaired, Dankor Two would be pulled and rebuilt, where the cycle would continue for…. Forever most likely, but Johannes’s contract would eventually end and he’d be freed from the repetition.

They at least had a show to look forward to, though he wasn’t sure he was prepared to see it. He’d heard all the same rumors and speculation about Ascender Titan’s Domain, and he had a sinking feeling he wouldn’t like seeing the newest form.

***

Matt floated through the central shaft to the center of the planet, escorted by the heads of what felt like half of the local army departments. Given that they were all experts of their very specialized fields, he didn’t mind too much. If they wanted to kiss his ass and annoy him, he only felt it was fair that he get to pester them with technical questions about the Dankor formations as they descended.

He was fascinated by what he saw, as both a crafter and as a Domain expert. He’d done some large scale formations in reality, but it was only in his Domain that he’d experimented on a truly planetary scale. Seeing something as complicated as the Dankor formation made physical, he was inspired as much as he was challenged.

The part of him that enjoyed the chase and battle for dominance, liked to know there were others thinking at such scales. Others who dreamed up possibilities that were only normally feasible in things so much greater than themselves.

When they reached where the core of the world should have been, he found it blocked by a massive vault door made of a Natural Treasure alloy. It both housed and protected the most important pieces of the formation from disturbance, as well the cultivator inside.

The door took both the head of security and a director to open, but he didn’t comment on them taking over the roles of their underlings. He simply thanked them as he entered the containment core alone.

He stepped into what looked like a wall of metal, but instead of running into it, it parted around him like a living liquid. It never quite touched him, but it kept close enough that it was mildly claustrophobic with how it restricted all his senses.

With each step he took the walls melted out of his way, even as the artificial gravity weakened and his weight lessened correspondingly. By the time he exited the mass of Natural Treasure alloy, he was entirely weightless. Inside the very core of the moon, he found a person-shaped coffin made up of a thousand and one suction cup conduits preshaped in a general silhouette.

It reminded him uncomfortably of the suckers on an octopode’s tentacles, and he made a mental note to yell at Aiden when he got out of here for that little phobia. Or bribe Gabby to pinch the idiot extra hard.

Matt was just thankful they weren't sticky. They were still firm as they pressed against his naked flesh and made microadjustments to his floating position. Due to his mass, it still took almost fifteen minutes for the suckers to find their positions, but he didn’t mind as he used the time to center himself.

He was sure his augment didn’t make things easier, but the sensors slowly adjusted themselves until they fell into place. The Dankor system had been refined and iterated on enough times that it could account for almost anything a Tier 35 could do, and his issue barely scratched the oddities that had made their way through the halls.

From the walk down, he even knew the system could handle incorporeal bodies as easily as large beast forms.

Then, like a light being flipped on, all idle thoughts were shoved away as he became enraptured with the sensations of connecting to a celestial object's spirit. His own Domain was so interconnected with such objects that it felt a little like returning home for the first time.

With every sensor that found its place, he felt the connection widen and his senses expand. There was even a part of the process where he felt more like the mech pilots that were the Corporations’ answer to the larger bloodlines. He felt like a small celestial body with delusions of grandeur. Then, like a tiny human who needed to make themselves unwieldy large, he donned a scaled up suit of armor to make up the difference.

Except he was putting on a moon, which felt like a novelty he’d never be able to experience after this.

He savored the sensations for its unique perspective about himself and the Realm, but it didn’t last long as the connection deepened. By the time he was fully connected, he found it hard to know where he ended and the moon began.

Matt felt his eyes and senses shift at some point in the process, but what he saw wasn’t the room at the core of the moon, rather the moon itself. He was so intertwined with its spirit that his spiritual perception seemed to become one with the moon and he could sense everything it could.

He wanted to marvel at his new ‘body’ for a few months, but he forced himself to get to work without playing.

It was time to form his Aspect.

Thousands of years in the making, it was finally time.

He started with the easiest thing to form. The one he’d known the longest. His Truth.

It would be the guiding principle of his cultivation, of his life, going forward and it felt like the right place to start. He knew what he was getting into with an Enforced Aspect and had no regrets with whatever the consequences were. That was the benefit of his near inspirational moment in taking that step. He had no doubt or fear.

“I am the Master of my Destiny."

At the center of his merged cultivation cores, one dark and empty, one brightly bursting with essence in a place deeper than his Concept, or the Intent that resided inside it, a new space opened up. One that had been there the moment he’d finished harmonizing with his Intent, but one that had only been a pinprick.

His Truth’s solidification acted as a tent pole for his Aspect. Once he planted it, it expanded his Domain, making room for all that would follow. More than that, it took his connection to the Realm along for the ride with it.

Finalizing thousands of years of effort, he experienced the Realm in a way he never had before. A way he never could before. It was beautiful, it was dangerous, it was… weighty.

Matt had now reached a point in his cultivation journey that he’d started to become someone. Not from a societal perspective, but a Realm-based one. More than his raw essence accumulation, his Truth connected him to the fabric of reality itself in a way that fundamentally changed things.

In that moment, he realized the obvious. That’s what his Truth was. The name explained everything deeper so well, it obscured what had been right there in front of him the whole time.

His Truth was simply a fact he found so undeniable, so relentlessly true, that the Realm itself was forced to agree with him. He, his presence, his willpower, his very existence imposed change onto the Realm itself.

“I am the Master of my Destiny."

***

Johannes wasn’t the only one to abandon their tasks early as word spread Ascender Titan was going to form his Aspect. While normally there was only a show at the end of the process, he didn’t want to miss a single thing.

Besides, as the people who needed to rebuild what everyone else endlessly broke, they had the right to see those same things break. They had the second best seats in the house, second only to Ascenders Legion and Wraith, who floated just out of the moon's orbit, ready to do things he didn’t want to think about in case of a failure.

Everyone saw as Titan connected with Dankor Three. There was no missing it, though it shocked all of them.

The moon seemed to ripple, as the celestial body's spiritual sense was rallied for a brief scan of itself.

Johannes shared a shocked look with the other crew chiefs, not quite believing what he’d seen as a confused murmur passed through his crew. However, they didn’t discuss because none of them could pry their eyes or focus away from the neighboring moon.

Normally, the only people who could connect so deeply with the Dankor systems were those rare few who’d been through the process more than once. It wasn’t easy for most people to muster a moon’s spirit with their own.

It took a specific knack to usher the moon's spiritual perception into action, like making a rope wrap around something at a distance. It wasn’t normally about strength, but familiarity and technique.

Any such thoughts vanished as Dankor Three seemed as if it was about to lose its connections to the other celestial bodies and fly off into the void between star systems. He kept expecting it to slide off the multi-layered orbits that everything in a star system was normally subject to. It didn’t actually do so, but Johannes' senses universally seemed to disregard that fact.

Johannes could count on both hands the number of times someone forming a single piece of their Aspect had a reaction, let alone one that encompassed the entire moon. Worse yet, as someone who’d worked on the Dankor moons for so long, feeling as if the moon would eject itself from orbit made him clench in a dreaded anticipation he’d never before considered.

Then, like a switch being thrown, Dankor Three returned to normal. A collective breath was exhaled among the crew chiefs, but he started to fear for what was going to come. He knew it was inevitable at this point, but he also couldn’t look away for long.

***

After some internal deliberation, Matt decided to solidify his Anchor. His Phrase was nicely paired with his Truth after his recent deliberation, but he wanted to follow the order of his original discoveries. It just felt more right in the moment, and he didn’t question that instinct.

His anchor, his augment, wasn’t any harder to claim than his Truth.

Claiming it was as easy as breathing. He only needed a touch to reconnect with the oceans of willpower he’d poured into the item over the years. In that instant, it was a part of him like any other. The piece that had redefined what he wanted out of his Aspect clicked into place with a pleasant snap. He savored the feeling of it like Aster's best ice cream or the taste of Liz’s lips.

Half innovation, half miracle, it was exactly what he needed. After five Tiers and the beginnings of a war, it easily and silently filled the next quarter of the emptiness at the core of his Intent. It happened so quietly, he wasn’t sure he’d done anything until he reached for his augment as he had so many times before.

Matt’s body hummed as a feedback mechanism he hadn’t known he was missing came to life. He now not only sensed his augment through his biological and technical senses, he felt and could interact with it through his Domain. It was like taking off mittens as he tried to enchant something, and he reveled in that feeling of dexterity before moving on.

His Image.

A dyson swarm of unimaginable size, he—

For the first time, Matt felt some rejection as he tried to slot his Image into the center of his cores.

It wasn’t wrong. Not quite, but it wasn’t right either, and his Truth rejected that. It felt like there was a blur or some other sharp edge that he needed to address if he wanted a truly perfect Aspect.

And Matt wouldn't, couldn’t, tolerate anything but perfection for himself.

Following his instinct, he felt for what was wrong with his newly more sensitive fingers, like a pianist in the dark. He almost immediately found something. It wasn’t much, but he identified something strange at the very edge of his Image, in the stars he worked so hard to sprinkle in.

He paused in confusion for what felt like a long moment before he stopped overthinking. He didn’t care how hard it had taken him to connect his Concept, Intent, and Meld’s Images to his Aspect’s, he ripped out the flaw without hesitation.

The stars vanished and his Image returned to true darkness.

It immediately proved to be the correct call, as he felt his Image snap into place with a satisfying click. It only took him a moment to realize the trap he’d almost walked into by inadvertently solidifying the things his Aspect could draw from by directly naming them at all.

He wanted his Aspect to serve as his control Domain stage, but he didn’t want to have to repeat this every few stages. He wanted to do it once and be done with it, so as to only need a single stage to harness what he could do, but by working with his previous intentions, he’d nearly made a catastrophic mistake.

Thankfully, that same realization was the one that had led to him solidifying his Phrase, and he ran with the momentum, wanting to finish strong. He’d need the help, as it was his most ambitious idea by far.

He wasn’t even sure the Phrase was possible, but he knew it was right and that was all that mattered.

“I—”

Matt wasn’t sure when, or if, he’d step away from his now three times opener, but it worked for him.

He was the point of his Aspect, it only made sense to focus it around himself. It felt right.

“Am—”

More reframing, but with accepted ownership of his Phrase.

Matt wasn’t quite sure why, as he made his third word, he realized how much he liked his ‘am’s’. Solidifying it felt good, like putting on a sweater warmed by an open flame to wear on a brisk winter day. He was his Domain as much as it was his, and the declaration that I Am was a reflection of that.

“The—”

Matt felt the weight of his Phrase like never before. He’d ended his Phrases there with his Concept and Intent, but this time, he used his third word not to define himself, but to build that definition higher.

It helped serve as a jumping point to his fourth, but far from final, word. He’d gotten ambitious. Though, with each word, he felt his confidence growing, even as the difficulty ramped exponentially.

It was hard, but felt right.

“Arbiter—”

Matt had paralleled his Truth but deliberately reframed it.

He didn’t want to be the Master of his mana, nor the Sovereign, Emperor, King, Duke, Ruler, or any other word he’d tested in Arbiter’s place. He didn’t want, nor particularly need, total control of his mana.

At his core, he wanted to help. He wanted to give what he produced to those around him, similar to the celestial bodies he sought to embody with every Domain stage. Whether that be done a few billion mana a second via [Mana Beam], liquid mana stones, or dumped into a rift where it could be gently added to an essence cycle, he was fine with giving away his mana.

At the same time, it wasn't ownership.

He just wanted to have the final say in who got it. He was an Arbiter, the same way Aster wasn’t the ruler of her new bloodline. The closer they got to such power, the more they realised neither of them wanted it. They had it due to their personal strength and societal positions, but they didn’t intrinsically seek it out or crave more. Even when they inevitably reached Tier 50, it wouldn’t be to rule, but simply embody and enjoy the power which their might and abilities provided them.

“Of—”

The word carried a lot of weight because it limited his slightly grandiose title. That was good in that a more narrow scope would hopefully help apply his Domain’s effect’s, but the back to back shifts increased the strain he felt while forming his Phrase multiplicatively.

“My.”

Another reference point to himself helped him stabilize the Phrase as he continued to push its metaphorical limits higher, though what he hoped were cleverly applied limits. But to do that, he needed to sow another stitch into himself, unlike his previous stages which hadn’t needed more than the one.

“Power!”

Matt nearly changed his mind at the last minute and chose the word ‘mana’ but he held firm to his aspirations, despite the fear that he wouldn’t have enough remaining willpower to finalize the word.

He controlled his destiny, he controlled his mana, he controlled his power no matter what form it took. Whether it was his mana, his body’s strength, weight, or some side effect of his Domain, if he could make it, he would dictate its usage.

It was hard to believe sometimes, but he’d heard Manny admit to struggling with his Talent more than once. Over long timeframes, even his Tier 50 spirit started to show signs of strain from producing so much mana. It was a truth that was sometimes hard to see as he struggled to keep up with his own expectations, but one that was still true.

Matt, on the other hand, had never struggled to max out his production, even over centuries or millennia.

He made mana. It was what he did. However, he was already taking steps to grow beyond that with increasing his weight. He wanted to account for any and all future possibilities no matter what they were, which was why he used the broader, more encompassing ‘power’ instead of mana, energy, or even physical strength.

Matt felt his Aspect as it settled into place deep in his cultivation cores. Without any shadow of a doubt, he knew he’d succeeded. As he opened his new senses, he knew he’d done so in more ways than one.

It seemed obvious in retrospect, but he had to accept that he’d never be able to match Zack, or even Liz or Aster in direct control. However, he was still in control of what he had. It might have taken reforging his body and merging it with armor to do so, but he’d done it. It might not be exactly the control he wanted, but it was what he had.

That was his Aspect though. A moment of introspection on his path of growth. A place not to pause, but to harness.

“I am the Arbiter of my power!”

Matt directed his mana, his body, his magic, his life. He decided. He was the arbiter, the final decision maker for any and all of his powers past and future. Through that position of decision, he gained control as he did with his Duchy.

As an arbiter, he couldn’t direct people’s individual lives just as he couldn’t direct individual units of mana when he scaled into the billions of mana a second. It just wasn't feasible at such a number, but that didn’t mean he had no control at all.

By directing his power, he gained the ability to guide it. That was its own form of control. It was a different and slightly removed type of control, but it was control nonetheless. Where Zack was a conductor who accounted for every unit of mana, Matt’s various powers and energies were closer to a rampaging river barely contained by the banks.

And after some soul searching, he was okay with that.

That was all he needed. So long as he had even a modicum of control, he could leverage the rest himself and his Phrase was more robust than that.

As the final piece of his Aspect snapped into place with a satisfying click, he felt his Domain manifested through the moon for a moment as it fully formed.

It felt good to move and flex after having been still for so long, and like Lila uncoiling from a nap, he unconsciously stretched. He—

Matt only came to his senses as he felt the massive crunch.