Not that it was anything bad, but they were back to their leveling, or they would be, considering it had been long enough that all their materials for their next rebirth were in. Selene surprised them while they were still staying with her and Alex with the complete set of materials that they still needed, having managed to get a few things ahead of schedule. Beth insisted on trueing up with her, even though Selene would have been happy to just give them the materials at this point, but Beth didn't want to rely on her charity. Besides, it was nearly a dozen mithrils, which was way too much to accept as a gift even from someone she was very close with, so she paid the value and would get what she needed from the others when they reconvened.

Since she was back with the group at this point, she doled out the things that a few of the others needed and they got ready to rebirth. Val was now just one behind them, and she was going to be catching up pretty quickly as she didn't really need to wait nearly as long for her rebirths, able to use her family connections to source her materials, which was also a benefit that she had earned from her work with the Young Scions. That meant the rest of them were going to rebirth and then get back to leveling, which would go even quicker this time through, at least the lower levels. This was not yet the big one, but they were on the home stretch, though Beth did keep the others grounded in reminding them just how far they still had to climb. Other than that bit of being a downer, she was very upbeat about the team's progress and where they were positioned. She and Val were going to be fine, and Adam when he caught up, as he was a rebirth behind Val with Andrea, but the others had a bit of a bigger hill to climb with still having to make their Mana Physiques.

They did the rebirths in Beth's gate again, the security of the place acting as a nice shield, and doing it within the gate provided a beneficial mana environment, or so the others claimed. Beth couldn't really tell the difference, but maybe that was because it was her gate and she was much more attuned to it. The rebirths went by without a hitch this time, as always, though that might not be the case for the next time, though Beth was pretty confident in the rest of her group. She once again felt a strong resonance with Sera, and this time she had a feeling of fire and flame in it, as well as a sense of solidity, of immovability. It wasn't exactly the way Beth thought of Sera when she was thinking about Sera's traits or characteristics. Beth still wasn't exactly sure what everything meant in terms of their connection when doing a rebirth, but she was aware that it meant they were rather compatible, whether it was just as teammates or as romantic partners.

The rebirths were now so smooth and easy it was almost unnoticeable, as they retained so many stats now that there wasn't any adjustment to suddenly being much weaker or slower. That, coupled with how their mana reservoirs and capacity to move mana in their bodies grew, meant that they felt even better after a rebirth than before, if only just slightly weaker. They immediately started using Beth's gate to level, though Val had still been using it a bit to keep trying to catch up even when they were on vacation. Now it was time to buckle down for a couple years, and they were going to focus solely on the levels, not doing any more Gold missions for the time, unless something particularly exceptional popped up. Something like the monster-slaying mission that they had handled at the start of their last waiting period for rebirth materials would be enough to get their attention right now, but anything else wasn't going to interrupt their leveling quest.

One of the things that Beth was working on in particular while they leveled was her new dominion skill. She would like to be working on the skill from the stone cube, but she hadn't been able to put all the runes together correctly to figure out what the skill was. It was kind of like hearing a tune that was missing two notes; she could understand what was going on quite well, but she was still trying to figure those two notes out. The problem was that it wasn't a skill crystal, but a set of runes that were meant to lay out how the skill operated. Much like Zane had mimicked skills for them by using nothing but runes, the runes were the pattern for how the skill operated, but they didn't include any guidance or way to learn the skill. Beth had to puzzle out how the skill was actually arranged and what it was supposed to do. It made her really appreciate just how awesome and amazing skill crystals were, considering that sixty seconds of holding one to her forehead taught her the skill and gave her a bunch of information about the skill.

The skill was also stymying her progress with the cube, as she really needed to crack the skill and figure it out before she could advance any further. She felt she was maybe becoming a bit obsessive when she realized that she had been staring at the stone cube for an hour without blinking and not hearing anything anybody else had said. She decided to put the cube away for a day, maybe two, and let her brain rest a little, even with her still having to think about the fighting they were doing. She might have been thinking about it too hard, which sounded weird, but sometimes sleeping on an idea did produce amazing results, just giving the brain a night or two to fully assimilate the information it already had floating around in it.

The group continued their grinding in the meantime, making quite a bit of progress as they leveled, not for the last time, but for an important time. Beth wasn't nearly as excited, or even nervous, as many of the others, having already met the requirements for the next rebirth, other than whatever the True Rebirth would ask. She was just a bit nervous for the others, especially Sera, as she didn't want her lover and future wife to fail, even just on her first attempt, but she had a lot of faith in her team. The people she had surrounded herself with were exceptional on many levels, and she could sit back and relax while knowing they were all more than capable of handling themselves. The building of a Mana Physique relied heavily on one's self and one's knowledge, understanding, and capability, and she felt her team were all very strong in their own personal development in all those areas.

Sadly, nothing with the cube just magically clicked, not that she was expecting an epiphany out of the blue, but it would have been nice to sit down and solve it in ten minutes. Or fifteen. Or three hours. It turned out, figuring out how to run the mana like demonstrated through the runes took more than a good sleep and a few good fights to percolate through her brain, but she was a lot closer. If she was missing two notes in the song before, now she was just missing one, and she could fill in that gap with just a bit more perseverance. It was just something about the way the mana had to flow through the body that she was missing, and if she could fill in that last piece of the puzzle, she could unlock the whole thing. Well, the whole skill, but very likely not the whole cube, as she had done little more than scratch the surface of what was within.

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The answer did come like a bolt from the blue when Sera asked her a question about how to use Spatial Step more efficiently. It was in giving a very quick explanation of the flow of mana when using the skill that Beth realized that that was the answer she had been missing, the final note of the song. She didn't need to perfectly replicate the rune pattern a hundred percent, but the thing she hadn't thought about was that different mana could move different, and she was dealing with spatial mana. Spatial mana could move vast distances in an instant and ignore some of the rules of speed and spin that applied to other mana types, and it was in understanding that critical point, or rather remembering it after instructing somebody in what was fundamentally the same thing, that she realized where her mistake had been. She had been trying to apply a bog standard approach to the movement of the mana that the runes simulated, but she needed to use the spatial mana like, well, spatial mana.

It was in realizing that that she solved the third layer of the cube and got to where she needed. The skill just clicked into place in her brain, her understanding having been developed from many hours of study, of the cube and spatial mana both, and from her intuitive knack for all things space-related. She cast the skill effortlessly when she locked in the correct flow of mana, creating the exact effect of the skill, causing the skill to lock in and appear in her status screen, which was a relief, all things considered. The skill was called Spatial Inversion, and it was both a bit of a weird one and a doozy at the same time. It let her invert an area of space, which sounded both crazy and scary, but what it really did was let her step out of the framework of regular space, moving through something very much like a subspace. It wasn't dimensional travel per se, though she would have to have a debate with Mortaine about that some time, and it wasn't teleportation. Instead, it was a way she could move while be largely unaffected by any other mana or type of skill, a way to get around unseen, undetected, and mostly impervious to others' machinations. As with all things, there were workarounds, including certain arrays, the person or being she was fighting have good spatial knowledge and understanding, or the person just being so overwhelmingly strong they could crack through the fabric of space and hit her anyway.

Cracking the code on that rune segment, as it were, also allowed her to crack through the third layer of the stone cube. That brought about a whole new level of complexity, as the next layer wasn't the fourth layer, but was a multi-layer matrix that had to be solved by merging all the layers in a proper sequence. Even that took her a couple days to figure out, Beth having to delve into multiple volumes of rune-lore and theory discussion to figure out what was going on. If there was one thing good she could say about the complexity, it was that it was forcing her to learn a lot of new things about runes and the way mana operated. These were things she would have to learn eventually for her crafting, if nothing else, but she was just as glad to dedicate time to it now, considering how much it was deepening her understanding and broadening her perspective. She was also learning a lot of new things about spatial mana and her affinity, things which would directly make her stronger in the near term as well as boost her potential overall.

The multi-layer matrix was a real challenge; just because she understood the basics of what it was didn't mean she was any closer to being able to solve it. That took a lot more research and a lot of trial and error, though she didn't exactly have tons of extra time right now to dump into that. She didn't want to fall behind the rest of the team in getting to the peak of rebirth nine, and she felt like she was going to have a longer wait than usual at that stopover, giving her plenty of time to keep playing with her extra shiny stone. She did hope to be a little further than the current predicament by that point, however, considering just how long it was going to take them to get to level three hundred eighty to be ready for their next rebirths. Beth was hoping the list of items wouldn't be as difficult and, by extension, expensive to acquire this time around, but it was a dim, flickering thing, that hope, a candle in a raging hurricane. They weren't at the point that some reached where they were getting close to bankrupting themselves for a single rebirth, though part of that was because of their fabulous luck in the rare items they had found and sold at auction, but Beth knew that day would eventually come.

Speaking of eventualities, she still had that token she had weaseled out of Mortaine burning a hole in her proverbial pocket, reminding her she needed to put some more work in on her smithing. She was still firmly in Journeyman, which wasn't terrible, especially considering how much time she dedicated to combat overall, but she really needed to hit Expert. Sera also had plenty of work to do to get there, and Blood was trailing behind a bit and would need a bit of motivation to get moving again. She also just didn't know when they were going to have time to dedicate such a big block to their professions. It was funny how she basically had all the time in the world right now, but she felt constantly rushed or out of time, though part of that was impatience. She wanted to get through the next rebirth smoothly and move on to some bigger and better things and at the same time she wanted to handle several outstanding puzzles or problems she had. Continuing to train her skills on top of that, plus dedicating enormous amounts of time to her crafting skill, really made her want to have an extra hundred hours in the day. She was blessed with a solution to that problem that let her do just that, but she couldn't use it to practice crafting because her team was sort of busy using it to furiously grind levels.

She had to make do in using some of her vanishingly little free time to work on the profession in the CRA forge, making use of their facilities for a pittance while the rest of the group was resting or working on other things. She was doubly glad she had tools and materials of her own, as borrowing materials was expensive and some of the tools in the forge weren't really up to her more exacting standards. She still managed to get some decent work done, though it was a far cry from what she could do were she to devote her gate power to the problem fully. Still, they would all hit max level sooner or later and she would get her skill back, even if it were for a short amount of time, relatively speaking. That process was ongoing and several months objective time had seen them making huge gains, but they still had quite a way to go. Val had closed the gap a little further, pushing very hard to get the levels needed that she could hope up to their level of rebirth and join them in becoming Enlightened. It helped that she was able to race after them without worrying at all about expense or rarity for anything she needed at all, including consumables and other minor items. Val's family was still backing her quite heavily, for a variety of reasons, and Val also knew much of those politics and exploited them.

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