Blood slowed them quite a bit when they got close to that area, a section of the center of the continent that was hundreds of miles wide and over two thousand miles long. The area of the greatest mana density was around the main section of the Mississippi, but there was a whole massive swathe of land that was of an ultra-high mana density. Blood could technically, and rather easily, handle both of the tasks, but she focused on flying while Sera manned the tactical station and took control of the sensors. Blood focused on flying them just a hundred or so feet in the air and moving at a rather slow speed, not more than two hundred miles per hour at most, but often even slower than that, as low as a hundred miles an hour. Considering the airship could hover, there wasn't any danger of them stalling for having too little airspeed, and Blood expertly controlled their path, responding to corrections from Sera.

The scanning was not something that they were going to complete in just a few hours. Hell, it wasn't something that they were going to be completing in just a few days, which is why Tazeen had said they could do it in parts. They would be spending the weekend scanning the area and then head back to their home Hall in New York before the week started to be ready to referee some more. Beth, in the meantime, had very little to do, and spent much of the time studying. She was pursuing one of the things she had mentioned to Sera, which was reviewing what a Gold Emblem was responsible for and what they had to know, which was a hell of a lot. A Gold Emblem was officially considered a Senior Enforcer, which meant they had a lot more responsibilities than either a Copper or Silver Emblem.

Besides refereeing, and working the counters, Gold Emblems were expected to oversee other members, train other members, interact with dignitaries, negotiate on behalf of their Hall or the CRA, perform policing actions, and arbitrate legal disputes, among other things. Beth didn't necessarily need to know absolutely everything, but she needed a very solid foundation to pass the tests and get to Gold. She would also need that knowledge for when she was a Gold Emblem and had to do all those things, of course. There wasn't any official coursework for the different emblem levels, but there were some internal CRA guides that they had access to that defined the general areas of studied required for each emblem level.

The scanning stretched for days, with quite a few interesting things that they marked for later study. Beth wanted them to get the overall scans done first before they went down and more closely investigated any of those interesting finds. That would entail more than just the one weekend, and likely more than two, as the area they had to cover was tens of thousands of square miles, if not well over a hundred thousand. They were going to be flying for days and days, and that was going to be broken by returning home for five or six days at a time, though they could maybe come out at night and continue the work, considering they didn't have to ref twenty-four hours straight. Beth wasn't quite sure that would be worth it, but it was an option they had thanks to the speed of the airship.

The scans produced a lot of noise as well as the data, Beth paging through them after the first day of flying. Luckily, the ship didn't need any kind of fuel while they were working, not unless they did some crazy maneuvers while the shields were taking damage and all the weapons were firing. Barring that, they could easily get by with its absorption of ambient mana, and based on the readings Beth was paging through, there was plenty to absorb. The area of the scans so far was at a level equivalent to a class seven world in terms of mana, with fairly large swathes of ten or fifteen miles that had a concentration at class eight. Based on the CRA classifications, that would be an extreme danger world, as anything above six was considered very unsafe, and it was rather fortunate the whole planet wasn't like that. The rest of Earth was somewhere between class five and class six, the prevailing theories being that the planet would be judged class six by the time it fully settled. That was still quite high, but even so it would be livable at that level, especially with the CRA's support, though there would be a lot of dangerous areas that a vast majority of people, even Wayfarers, would need to avoid.

Speaking of dangers, their scans had already spotted more than a hundred beasts above level four hundred, which was something the girls could feasibly deal with, at least if they only had to face one, but was rather startling. That level of power from a beast was quite high, the equivalent of an early Enlightened from a sentient being, and their toughness matched or exceeded that level. Every fifty levels was a significant jump in strength for beasts, and Beth could attest to level three hundred already being a big leap, as they had fought quite a few beasts over that threshold up to this point. Three hundred having brought higher resistance to magic damage and overall better speed, Three-fifty brought slightly better mana and physical resistance and slightly stronger abilities that channeled mana. At four hundred, beasts had much higher strength, speed, and magic damage resistance than even in the three-nineties. This was also the point where beasts weren't just channeling mana through their bodies but were using things that were basically skills. Even if a fire breath or a frost-stomp looked like a skill before four hundred from a beast, it wasn't truly, but that changed at four hundred. Now, it was an actual skill, with actual skill levels, which meant more control and focus, meaning more damage and more reliability.

It wasn't all bad, however, as that use of skills meant that this was the point where beasts had a chance of dropping a skill crystal. Before level four hundred, beasts would only have their remaining mana condense into coins on death, but at this pivot point, they would sometimes have their remaining mana turn into a skill crystal. That sometimes was the key point, however, as the rarity of this happening was extremely, extremely high. One would have to kill into the thousands, even more than ten thousand, beasts at level four hundred to get one skill crystal, and that could be a one-time use crystal. Ten-thousand-to-one wasn't a great ratio, even for a group like Beth's that slaughtered beasts constantly, but it still meant that a group of their consistency in slaughtering beasts and beast tides would be getting new crystals at a reliable pace.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Considering how powerful level four hundred beasts were, and the low drop rate, it was fortunate that there were other ways to acquire skill crystals. In fact, there were three main ways of getting crystals, and killing beasts was the least common, considering it took an Enlightened or equivalent to farm the crystals from killing. The other two methods were creation by somebody that had the skill at Platinum (though they could have a lower level than that, such as Gold, if they had outside assistance such as an array), and as a reward from the Path based on certain conditions, such as clearing a dungeon. Most skill crystals that were in the market, and all the ones that Beth and Blood had used so far, had been created by someone or acquired through dungeon rewards. They had, in fact, encountered a few dropped crystals, though never had their hands directly on them, and those were the crystals that had come up at the auctions they had attended. A few of those crystals, it turned out, had come from beast drops, though they were only the best of those. A beast could drop something like a simple Chop skill crystal or such, which would not have people fighting to pay the equivalent of dozens or hundreds of mithril coins to get their hands on.

Beth read some of the information on level four hundred beasts and skill crystals just to try to understand what they were working with, finding that beasts at that level might be within her range, but only barely, and only if she had only one beast to fight. The thought of them dropping skill crystals did excite her, though the low rate and the fact they could drop anything, from something far more valuable than Celestial Annihilation to something that wasn't even worth the crystal medium it was imprinted in, was annoying. Considering they had finished six rebirths and had no plans to not at least get to max level for quite a few more, they would be fighting beasts in the three hundreds quite a lot coming up, and the four hundreds weren't actually that far away. It was level three-twenty this time around, three-forty the next time, and three-sixty after that, meaning they had about two-and-a-half rebirths until they were already fighting beasts above three-fifty. Hell, they were going to be fighting stuff in the three-thirties by the end of this rebirth and up to three-fifty by the end of next, so this research of hers was quite relevant.

Beyond the big, scary beasts, they had spotted or had scan data on a ton of dungeons or gathering places of mana. Some of these could be entrances to Trials, some could be pocket dimensions with strange rules, and others could be even more random and weird, like ancient ruins from a lost age teleported to Earth from some long-forgotten planet. It did give them an awful lot of stuff to explore, though Beth's recent research on just how strong the stuff they were flying over meant that caution was going to be king.

There was a lot of stuff they were scouting out now that could keep them busy all the way until they were all Enlightened and maybe beyond, depending on what some of the stuff was. It was to the point that some of the areas looked so dangerous they would either have to wait a handful of rebirths or have Tazeen or Baelvyr or Jaq come over and scout. With what Tazeen had said about them being stretched a bit thin, she felt like a lot of the scouting was going to be left to them, so at least they had plenty to do outside their other duties at the CRA.

And speaking of other duties; they had flown for a little more than two days and were now turning for home. It was good that the three of them needed little sleep, as the job required at least one of them to be on the bridge at all times, though they could have the systems work autonomously in a pinch. They didn't need to resort to that, as all three could go without one or even two nights of sleep without becoming tired, especially if they weren't doing more than simple tasks, though Blood might be a little upset if her piloting were chalked up to a 'simple task.' They returned to their home Hall and went back to their suite, Beth having paid for six months in advance when they secured the ref job there. She didn't want to pay for the whole year at once, but then again, she knew if something popped up, the CRA was pretty good about refunds for that sort of thing.

Once they had landed, packed the ship up, and returned to the suite for a few hours of sleep, they found the place was livelier than normal. Weekends and weekdays had lost a lot of distinction for many people, particularly those really trying to be Wayfarers, after the introduction of the Path to Earth, but it was still unusual for the Hall to be so buzzing on a Sunday night. A quick message had that sorted out, Beth finding out there would be a bunch of official matches happening this week, things that would count towards people's records. Other fights that had been happening counted towards the records, but this was more, as it was counting towards whether people were ranked on the Ladders.

The Ladders were the official rankings of individuals or teams in different brackets. There were Ladders for each group of power such as Awoken, Empowered, Enlightened, etc., while there were also a bunch of different categories. Like Beth had heard about long ago, and even once participated in, there were stat-limited categories, unlimited categories, doubles, teams of five, fights against beasts (though those were usually simulated), and even a special Ladder for one-versus-many fights. That last Ladder was quite a popular watch, but it had a bunch of conditions for somebody even being allowed to do those fights and they were hosted fairly rarely; rare enough there wouldn't be any of them in this coming week, or for some time still on Earth.

Beth was glad that she was at least forewarned, though she found that they still weren't quite ready for the week. It turned out, in the couple years she'd been out gallivanting around the galaxy with her friends and lover, Earth had seen quite an up-swell in the number of CRA members, even just Copper Emblems. It wasn't the first week overall that they were doing matches that counted towards points for the Ladders, but it was only the second or third, and it was immensely popular. There were hundreds of people gathered to participate and even more to watch, though the CRA was charging a fee to people who were only there to watch. Which was also another duty of Gold Emblems and up; there were systems in place to monitor the Hall, but somebody had to watch over things and make sure people weren't sneaking in or sneaking around. If there were people trying to shirk buying a ticket, it was the job of Senior Enforcers to get on them and either make them pay or give them the boot.

The week proved to be…boring. Beth was really sorry to think it, but it was the truth. The fights were more of the same she had been watching for the last week or so, with a lot of people participating having only done one rebirth. That didn't exactly make the matches the most interesting thing, at least for Beth, though the general audience seemed really into it, if all the cheering, hooting, and hollering happening was any indication. It was a bit interesting to see the group fights, both the doubles and the teams of five, though seeing ten people at rebirth one, level one hundred fight still wasn't that interesting for her. It was a good experience getting to ref those lower-level fights, Beth easily being able to keep up with what was happening in the matches and understand everything the automated monitoring systems fed her.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.