They spent something like a month working on their skills, just trying to get a couple levels while they had a little free time with no crisis on their hands. That month, of course, was objective time, making it closer to ten months that they spent focused solely on their crafts. Even with that, Beth was seeing a long, long road ahead, as they had all managed just two levels with their profession skills in that time. If that was the kind of time sink they were talking about at Journeyman, she couldn't imagine what it would be at Master, let alone Sage or Divine.

She had given the other empyreans a chance to get out of the box and stretch their legs, but they hadn't really done much, which wasn't a surprise, considering there wasn't really much to the living area of Beth's gate yet. Each of the empyreans had a grand palace inside the reliquary with every comfort imaginable, so stepping out to sit in someone's very sparse house for an hour wasn't exactly the height of thrilling new experiences. The change of scenery was nice, but it was also boring, though Beth did discover some of the limits of the reliquary through doing that. Namely, she figured out she could give blanket permission, total denial, or some mix and match for the empyreans to emerge from their prison, and they also found out that distance was a factor. Funnily enough, it was Erosh trying to go back into the suite and then further through the CRA building that led to that discovery. The gate was apparently not a fully limiting factor, but if Beth were on one side and an empyrean on the other, the empyrean could only move a very limited distance from the gate.

They stopped working on crafting for a while to go back to another important priority, that being their next rebirths, which were still on hold. Selene and Alex had been working on gathering materials for them, not for free, obviously, but they had managed to secure several more of the materials on their lists. It left just a few things to get, which Beth had some mind to try to secure themselves, so that was their next step. It wasn't urgent to do either one right now, technically, but Beth hated for their leveling progress to be blocked for so long. She liked always having that as an option of what to do now or next, and she was also a bit worried about getting Sera and Blood to the point where they wanted to try making their Mana Physiques. It was such a gamechanger in terms of power and toughness that she didn't want to be the only one of the group to have one.

Gathering the materials themselves hands-on proved to be…problematic. Most of what they still needed was extremely rare and came from either extremely dangerous places, places that were very hard to get to, or both wrapped up in one. Blood needed one group of materials, Sera needed one and a few pieces of another, and Beth needed two entire lots of materials before they could do their rebirths. The problem, further, was that Blood's items were rare and it was her highest required number of items after beast cores, the blood cores, while Beth needed the singularity cores and space-aspected monster hearts, and Sera needed the void ruler hearts and some of the void-aspected monster hearts. The singularity cores, as well, were exactly what Beth had thought, the heart of a singularity, something that was based on the magic of the Path and was extremely difficult to harvest. They weren't impossible to find, but the difficulty and rarity meant a truly massive price.

"What are we doing now?" Blood grumped when they packed up and moved out.

"Selene and Alex are still hunting for stuff for us," Beth explained. "While they are, we're going to try to get our hands on some of the materials ourselves. Sera is first just because we have a solid lead on both of her items, despite the rarity, and I think we can get almost all of her stuff within a few weeks. You're next, because the blood cores just take time to find; it's a lot of searching and investigating, so we'll be relying on your skills a lot to sniff them out. I'm last because my stuff is really valuable and we'll likely have to buy it, meaning we need more money and that we need to wait for Selene and Alex to secure the items."

"This sounds like it's going to be tedious," Blood grumped.

"It's going to be very tedious," Sera said. "But it's necessary. You're just going to have to get used to all the boring, tedious stuff. The other option is to slow down and not push so hard, but there's definitely something to be said for maintaining momentum."

"We need another vacation soon," Blood growled.

"We just had a month, nearly a subjective year, of time off," Beth shot back, exasperated.

"That wasn't time off! That was work!" Blood retorted hotly.

"You know, much as I hate to disagree with you, dear, she is right," Sera said to Beth. "Working day and night, for hours upon hours at a time, for months on end, isn't exactly a vacation, per se. We could also use a little time to unwind."

"Fine. We'll take some time off," Beth said. "But! We finish our rebirths, and get at least to level one-fifty first. After we do that, then we can take some time to relax for a few days."

"A few weeks," Blood bargained.

"A week, and that's objective time. If you want more, I open the gate and you sleep in the accelerated time," Beth said.

"That's boring," Blood whined.

"That's the deal. Now hush, we're about to teleport," Beth said, leading them onto the first teleporter pad of their journey.

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The first of the items for Sera was to track down monster hearts, which wasn't quite as bad as it sounded. They needed to find an area where there was a lot of void mana to influence the monsters, which was a much trickier endeavor, but even that wasn't particularly bad. They had a lot of information available to them, even as Silver Emblems, through the CRA, and they used that network to find a place where they could hunt.

Fortunately, they didn't need to do anything crazy like with the devils and harvesting the essence; they just had to kill a monster that registered as void-aspected, something in the name or description giving that away, and then carve out its heart. Unfortunately, they couldn't use the gate for this, as the gate both didn't recreate monsters perfectly, which was a problem for a lot of materials, and didn't recreate monsters with rebirths, which was another factor. Since monsters underwent rebirths like sapients did it changed a lot of things, with the most obvious being that some things weren't expressed in a monster's body or heritage until certain rebirths. Beth could create a monster like the devils in her gate that was level three or four hundred right now, but it was sort of a cheat, or more like it was a bit broken, because those monsters weren't considered to have rebirths.

Beth suspected that her gate was doing something strange with the monsters like the devils, in that it was creating them like copies of beasts with slightly enhanced capabilities. Her running theory was that monsters were currently too complex for her gate to recreate, or that they were simply too special with all the things that influenced them, so the gate substituted by creating something like a beast with more strength. It was good for getting them some very basic materials from monsters, those materials being stronger just a bit than something a beast of the same level would produce, but they weren't able to get certain things from certain monsters. That meant that, for now, some monster items they would either have to buy off the open market, or hunt down for themselves. The real kicker that Beth was not looking forward to were the space-aspected monster hearts when they got to her last few requirements; she really hoped both the singularity cores and those hearts had been snagged by Selene by that point.

While monsters were rare, there would sometimes be outbreaks of more than one, and these were often considered emergencies for many groups. One of the things that could spawn such an emergency was leaving a massive battlefield full of corpses for weeks or months, the primary reason why they had taken time to burn away all the bodies when they were hunting the monsters and dealing with the beast tides. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing, where monsters caused beast tides, Wayfarers slaughtered tides, didn't clean up their messes, then more monsters spawned from millions of dead bodies left without proper care. It was a vicious cycle that careless or uninformed adventurers would get caught in that could lead to some extremely serious problems. Nobody wanted their world to be a breeding ground for monsters.

The place they were going now was really on the edge of nowhere, a little planet that had recently been pioneered and was just starting to have people take some interest. And by recently pioneered, Beth meant that the place had been finished with the setup process about three months ago. They were having trouble with a monster outbreak, no fault of the pioneers or people on the planet, just one of those circumstances that sometimes happened for various reasons. In this case, it was because there was something buried deep underground, a place that was not required to be explored by a pioneering team, that had cause this.

"So, what's the problem?" Sera asked as they arrived at the single teleporter on the world.

"Ancient ruin," Beth answered. "One of those things that can just happen sometimes, that the Path puts places or whatever craziness."

"Ancient ruins are usually something left over from an earlier era," Sera said, pondering.

"Well, I'm not really a history buff, so I leave that to wiser heads," Beth said, shaking hers. "What I do know is there was some kind of void relic underground here that got disturbed, whether by the pioneers or settlers, who knows? That relic started spewing out chaotic mana all over the place, mostly void-aligned, and people didn't realize for a month. When they knew what was happening, there were monsters pouring out of the eastern mountains of the main continent."

"Go east, kill monsters," Blood grunted. "Easy."

"Don't jinx it," Beth said sharply.

"Well, it seems simple," Blood replied, a bit contrite.

"This place isn't much," Sera said in the meantime, having looked around at the…"city" they had emerged into. It was barely more than a large fort, with a high, thick wall surrounding the whole place made from a dark gray stone. The back of the city had an actual keep structure, a large, blocky construction made of the same stone and only three stories tall, barely higher than the city walls. The rest of the city was also made of the same drab stone, all two-story buildings with narrow windows and heavy, thick doors of solid wood banded with iron or steel. The walkways between the buildings were made of rough slabs of stone barely cut even and slammed into place with some type of rough cement holding them in no kind of discernable pattern.

"It's a pioneer town," Beth said with a shrug. "Luckily, we have an airship, and my power, to make us more comfortable. C'mon, let's go check in."

"Check in?" Blood asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Can't just show up and wander around a world like this without notice," Beth explained, leading them into the fort. "We need to check in and tell them what we're doing here. Shouldn't be a big deal, considering we're here for the monsters."

"Won't we have to pay a fee?" asked Sera.

"Yeah, there's a tax, but it won't be much. Literally, we can pay a few golds to equal it out, if we're fighting monsters. They don't charge the same for helping with monsters as they do for people who are just grinding or scavenging," Beth answered.

"Right, right, monsters are an emergency," Sera said with a nod.

They made their way into the fort and found a room just in and to the right with two people sitting at a table, one of them going over paperwork while the other leaned back in their chair, drinking from a large tankard. The man on the right sat up suddenly when they entered, getting the one doing paperwork's attention, who looked up at them sharply. The one who had been doing some actual work had bags under his eyes and a bit of a pallor to him, and even the one drinking had a slightly worn look to his face. The paperwork man cleared his throat before speaking.

"Can I help the three of you…?" he said gruffly, glancing between them.

"Just got here," Beth said simply. "We're after the monsters. Register us."

She took her emblem out and gave it to the man, followed by both Sera and Blood. He took the emblems with a grunt, not fazed by them being Silver Emblems, and made some notes on two separate papers. After he was done writing, he spun both pages and tapped them, indicating the need for signatures. Beth picked them up and read them before signing, not putting her name to something she hadn't read. After she had assured they were safe, she signed them, passing them to Sera to sign, who passed them on to Blood before the wolf gave them back to the tired man.

"Anything else you need from us?" Beth asked.

"Monster hunting needs a one gold fee. Each," he said calmly. Beth handed him three coins without blinking, which he made disappear. "When you're done with your work, you must stop back here before teleporting or flying off planet. You need to register your kills and your loot before leaving, and we'll take a tax percentage. For fighting the monsters, it's basically a small fee, which is sometimes waived in an emergency case, which we're close to right now."

"Understood. Anything else?" Beth said.

"Nope, that's it. Just don't try to run off world without checking back in," he said.

"Roger," Beth said, waving to him before leading their group out.

"So, what now?" asked Sera.

"Airship," Beth said, leading the way out of town. Luckily, they didn't need a Baelvyr to fly them around now, since it was a pioneer world. Blood had started her pilot's training course, but she needed more time to get the license, so they were still limited with airship use on more developed worlds.

"East," Beth said to Blood after deploying the airship just outside the city and boarding.

"Understood," Blood said, happily settling in the pilot's chair and starting to fly.

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