In A Broken Candle, normal xp will only get you to level 6. To go any further, you need to be more than human. You need to be an immortal, a being that defies death, a being that spits in the eye of normal causality.

There are several ways to do this.

Ascent by murder

Learn the Ritual of Spiteful Ascencion and kill an existing immortal as part of it. If you’ve spent a season working closely with them, and learning their heart, you can be confident that it’s you, not them, who will be the one ascending. What you can’t guarantee is that you will ever quite be rid of them.

Ascent by devotion

Identify a god who is able and willing to accept saints, and do a penance of the god’s choosing. If you you precede this with a season doing the god’s mundane worship and propitiation, you can be confident they won’t just make you a god-beast in their image. What you can’t guarantee is that the things the god later makes you do are palatable, legal, or safe.

The God of the Church of the Lowlands is not accepting applications at this time. But there are other gods in the forests and the hills.

One further concern with this method is that the Church does not like living saints, and is often assiduous in its attempts to canonise them.

Ascent by loci

Identify a place of power of a suitable type, and take control of it. If you spend a season or so getting to know the place and its cycles and its history, you can be confident you won’t just be a genius loci, and thus will be able to leave. What you can’t guarantee is that someone won’t attack you through your locus while you’re away.

Ascent by contempt of death

Master, or gain the services of someone who has mastered, the great necromancies. Then die, and rise again. If you premptively bolster your spirit with the minds and bodies of three unlucky mortals, you can be reasonably confident you’ll get past the comma in the previous sentence. What you can’t avoid, however, is that after you ascension you will be fucking terrifying and will smell bad.

Ascent by elevation

Rumour has it that the Risen Men have a way to raise you up. It’s reliable, safe, and makes you more yourself than you have ever been before.