Jedd assured Keynes that this friction was natural and would always be present as each head of department valued their own agenda more than others. Keynes didn’t like this. He wanted nothing to do with the operations because of this but he realised the danger of not having a leader’s voice in the argument.
This led him to call a meeting involving everyone up to rank 3 in the semi-soul space. Persephone, Jedd and Kora were also present. Altogether, 17 people were in attendance, including Keynes.
Those who hadn’t seen the semi-soul space stood in utter awe, trying to grasp how this was possible. There were some introductions as well.
The most notable addition was Frederick who became a security consultant on the spaceship. The main AI still monitored everything but a human was required to act on the intel. Frederick had a military and VIP security experience. His job was to keep the crew from rebelling. Despite the fact that every single person on the spaceship had come here out of their own volition meant little when they didn’t remember agreeing to it. Many of them felt betrayed or outrightly kidnapped and asked to be taken back home. Thank you very much Lem Solaris. Not something Keynes could do right now. Frederick was Rank 2 like Ul and reported directly to Rell.
Other additions were Callum and Adalla, both had become Willow’s apprentices, helping him with his rift research. Ul also got two garden and food helpers but it was Natalia’s newest member of the surface base team that caught Keynes attention and the reason why Rell argued so hard to prioritise spatial anchors.
Daego had a Spatial Sense Talent and presumably could advance their spatial research by a lot.
The semi-soul space didn’t have anything to sit on so everyone gathered in a half circle while Keynes faced them. A day before he’d gone over notes from each department’s head. He asked Kora, Jedd and even Persephone to give him their input.
Surprisingly, all three of them agreed that Keynes should prioritise neither request and focus on reaching Level 6 and maybe even Level 7 first.
And they presented quite good arguments. In a nutshell, until now, they had an organic and evolving system that worked perfectly well. Involving the semi-soul space would only sidetrack their development.
The knowledge in the books from the Level 6 rift was valuable but it had to be studied carefully. There was no assurance that the information in them was real. Besides, the surface base required a lot of work. Natalia’s earlier argument that without knowledge they couldn’t advance the quality of their work was sound but there was no guarantee they would find anything useful to them.
The spaceship food supply became far more robust than in the beginning but only because of Rell’s heavy involvement. Without him, they would be walking on thin ice. Food was a critical component of their survival and they needed two independent sources before they could comfortably divert Rell’s attention to other things.
Willow’s research was deemed by most as non-critical. It had merit as learning more about rifts was valuable but at its fundamental level, rifts were easily understood. They provided raw resources, rewards from treasure chest, essence from monsters and sometimes extraordinary things from special encounters. Willow searched for a deeper meaning, arguing that rifts weren’t truly random and instead had an important purpose of aiding ascenders in their journey. Keynes agreed with Willow and that was why he’d made him a head of department. But at the same time, Keynes was aware that with 57 Level 1 rifts they currently had at their disposal, Willow’s attention was stretched thin.
Keynes presented his decision, explaining his reasoning behind each point. But he was going to make a few concessions because everyone was somewhat correct in their own right and he didn’t want to punish them for their earnestness.
He prepared a schedule of him opening additional rifts from Level 2 up to Level 5. Until he delved more Level 6 rifts, he believed they shouldn’t be delved by anyone but a prepared team, involving at least two people out of a group consisting him, Kora, Natalia or Persephone. No one argued with that after learning about their experience, and also Keynes got an impression that most Low Level ascenders were rather apprehensive of going to Higher Level rifts.
The primary reason behind this was what Natalia had mentioned earlier; they all were under Levelled. And ‘under spiritual staged’. Despite having 57 Level 1 rifts at the moment, the essence penalty made it harder to progress further for the Higher Levels.
At the same time, Keynes wanted them to have enough essence to not be afraid to experiment and cultivate. He only hoped that Willow would show restraint and leave those rifts until he’d more time at his hands.
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Naturally, if Keynes found more books or any other form of information, he’d let Natalia know about it.
The final concession was spatial anchors. He asked Daego to head research into that direction, together with Persephone. She of course didn’t like it as she wasn’t a part of his organisation but he needed her to do some work and didn’t accept her refusal.
***
Days passed and eventually became weeks.
Keynes officially remained detached from the day-to-day operations but he decided to keep an eye on everything through the AI. It was easier than he expected because everyone in the surface base had to have an undeployed spacesuit in case a breach occurred. From a moral standpoint, he stayed out of private conversations unless the AI asked him to review them.
At first it felt weird to monitor everything but he finally came to terms with the fact that he had to lead them, even from the shadows. Otherwise, this whole thing would become an amalgamation of different ideas and desires, rather his vision.
***
Since their visit to the Level 6 rift, Roman and Pierre couldn’t sleep. The discovery of the magnificent air from that rift changed everything. They did calculations, they consulted with Sellana and Willow. And only then Roman and Pierre realised they’d dreamed too small. Why bother with air filters for their base if they could make the atmosphere breathable?
All they needed was a year of steady pumping of air from the rift to the surface. This could be further improved by decreasing recharge time or by Levelling up the rift. Having breathable air on the surface would be a tremendous step forward. They argued their case with Trisk, then with Natalia but neither seemed particularly inclined to give them green light to begin preparations. They considered speaking to Keynes Kid but their leader seemed to never be around. According to Willow, he was unsealing Level 2 and 3 rifts outhere.
How could no one see how important this was?
Keynes smiled after reading the report. Both, Roman and Pierre, were driven by passion. They truly dreamt of turning this planet into a habitable home. He liked their enthusiasm but even without input from Kora or the AI, he knew their plans were premature. The distance to the rift was too great, while they couldn’t use the semi-soul space to transfer mana to keep the pump running. Well, they didn’t even have a pump capable of pumping this much air per day. On top of that, who would clear this rift on a daily basis? Keynes and Kora’s schedule was so tight he sometimes wished the day had more hours. Natalia and Persephone were both busy and couldn’t commit to such endeavour. But a part of him wanted this to happen. Maybe not right now, and after they understood what kind of calamity they might bring by introducing Level 6 air with a powerful calming quality into the atmosphere of a barren, toxic planet.
There might be a lot that could go wrong with that.
***
A month after creation of the semi-soul space, Keynes and Kora finished unsealing additional twenty Level 2 rifts and fifteen Level 3 rifts. He opened all the rifts by removing the Overcharged effect to not having to deal with small outbreaks. Also, Alice had visited each of these rifts giving them a report of their content. They were fairly similar to the Earth ones with a tiny trend of toxic biomes. Which wasn’t actually that bad. Some of the rewards they found turned out to be beneficial like [Toxic Resistance] or [Toxic Skin]. They considered taking them but eventually decided that Natalia would make better use of them.
Keynes also did a bit of testing of [Touch of Elu’var] and the results were a mixed bag. Some positive modifiers were like cheat mode.
- Positive Mod: Monsters have 1% chance to drop a skill shard.
Or;
- Positive Mod: Essence in the rift is doubled.
But of course, there always was a negative mod that came with it. And they were not a joke. They could make a serious threat out of a mere Level 2 rift.
- Negative Mod: Monsters attacks have a 20% chance to blind for 10 seconds.
Or;
- Negative Mod: Monsters are invisible.
These weren’t even that hard for him and Kora. But his last attempt that convinced him to treat it with care until he Levelled up, had come with the mod Keynes and Kora didn’t know how to survive.
- Negative Mod: Movement costs life.
They discovered that the more valuable positive mod, the more dangerous negative one came with it. Keynes tried to manipulate and influence each mod pool but they seemed to be random. He even went as far as to use the Orb of Grand Insight to look into the skill and get a better understanding of it. The orb wasn’t entirely wasted but what he found disturbed him. Unlike all his other skills, the structure of this skill was alien and unfathomable to him. He checked if he could use the Orb of Perfection on it and he couldn’t. Alice echoed his findings saying that to her the spell was an unknown black box.
But in a spur of a moment, Keynes did something unexpected. He used the Orb of Perfection on his Vitality.
Your Vitality was perfected into Vitality (II).
The process was less painful than when he’d used the orb on the Untraceable buff, but he still lost consciousness for a couple of hours. Strangely, or not, the change also affected Alice making her more tangible and resilient. When Keynes woke up, he felt like never before; refreshed, and energised.
He also realised he fucked up in a big way. Vitality (II) improved his body on a qualitative level. Now, each point of Vitality (II) gave him more profound benefits, but at the same time made it HARDER to master the attribute. What had started as ‘let’s see what will happen’ turned into ‘shit, I’m screwed’.
The AI recalculated how much Vitality (II) he now needed to survive the atmosphere while activating [Pure Body] and using [Purify] as aura. The last time the number was 100 points. It now dropped to mere 50 points.
One more Level and Keynes wouldn’t need a spacesuit to survive out there. He just didn’t know if he liked that idea. But now, he didn’t think he had much of a choice. How else could he master his newly upgraded attribute?