Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

The Ancestor was a good five minutes behind him, so Uhtred took the opportunity to find a decent enough crevice to place Nayu An for the moment.

From there, he quickly retrieved a stack of ten Essence Crystals from his spatial storage. As the owner of one of the four dungeons back on Earth that produced Inert Essence Crystals, he had come fully prepared for the Tower trial.

His personal dungeon was Earth-attuned, meaning its Inert Crystals produced Earth essence that was exclusively beneficial to cultivators with that affinity.

However, this was a non-issue. Trade was common between his Capitol of the Elite, Jolene Okafor’s Marina Archipelago, and even Golden Finger Chen’s territory.

He had enough varieties of Essence Crystals to suffice for a while. But even if he didn’t, he could just use any he pleased — his core was Formless, after all.

Along with a few other necessities, he had about fifty Essence Crystals in his spatial storage. He pulled out only ten because of the short time he had to top up his reserves before the Ancestor arrived.

Not that the ten Essence Crystals packed enough essence to fill up his Level 47 Nascent Realm core. But at least for his fire and water sub-cores specifically, the eight fire-attuned crystals and two water-attuned crystals would give him a slight leg up in those elements against the Ancestor.

.

.

Five minutes elapsed very quickly, and the Ancestor’s voice could be heard booming down through the small valley.

"Come out, you hiding rat!! I know you are lurking down there!!!"

Uhtred opened his eyes, exhaling a hot stream of air as he finished absorbing a final Essence Crystal. He had managed to consume three additional crystals during the five minutes it took for the Ancestor to track him down.

He glanced at Nayu An’s unconscious form behind him, then placed a hand on her neck just to make sure she was still breathing.

Once that was confirmed, he followed a path shaded by rocks and crevices that prevented the Ancestor from seeing him from above, until he appeared out of an opening a fair distance away from where he placed Nayu An.

The Ancestor’s bloodshot, unhinged eyes locked onto him the instant he stepped into the open.

Without a second of hesitation, the old man fired off a palm strike of compressed air... but Uhtred sidestepped it effortlessly.

"Come on, old man. You should know by now that basic palm strikes aren’t going to cut it against me," Uhtred mock-scoffed. "Don’t you have anything else left in your arsenal?"

The Ancestor’s battered, ragged form descended slowly from the sky.

He hadn’t been flying particularly high to begin with, but the heavy, rattling gasp that escaped his mouth upon landing made it clear that maintaining flight had taken a devastating toll on his depleted reserves.

"Look, old man. You and I both know we’re running on fumes, so let’s skip the theatrics."

Uhtred stared at the mad Ancestor pointedly.

"I don’t give a damn about your granddaughter’s life. All I want is what lies inside her. Once I extract that, I have no interest in either of you. I’ll be on my way and you both can go do fuck-all for all I care."

The Ancestor’s eyes turned terrifyingly wild. He stared at Uhtred as if any remaining thread of sanity had completely snapped.

"Let me do you one better then!" he rasped back, his voice thick with venom. "I also don’t care who you really are behind that vessel you inhabit! But if you value your soul, you will offer your head as atonement and accept a natural death! Otherwise..."

He chuckled darkly, leaving the rest unsaid.

Uhtred’s brow furrowed and he let out a slow sigh, shaking his head. He noted the old man’s precise choice of words:

Soul...

He had explicitly used that word. The fact that he brought up the soul meant he almost certainly possessed a method to target it directly.

While Uhtred was no longer ignorant regarding Esoteric magic, moments like this reminded him how dangerously out of his depth he remained concerning its full, horrifying scope.

I want to assume he’s bluffing, Uhtred thought. But in his unhinged state, he might actually have the means to use a soul attack.

Uhtred definitely had no counter to that. If the Ancestor truly had some sort of soul magic, then he was quite literally fucked.

The precise timing of the Ancestor’s threat didn’t escape Uhtred either. The fact that the old man was saying this now indicated that this was some sort of final-final trump card.

If Uhtred had to guess further, it was likely a mutual destruction spell meant to drag them both down, all fucks be damned.

Still, even after piecing all of this together, Uhtred remained outwardly unfazed.

"Haha! What an irony. An Ancestor of a righteous faction using such a vile, dark technique..." Uhtred chuckled, eyeing the old man coldly. "And where, pray tell, did an orthodox cultivator learn a spell that torments the soul?"

His words seemed to have struck a sore chord. The Ancestor’s expression darkened and he scowled.

He opened his mouth to retort, but caught himself at the last second. He narrowed his eyes, then broke into a harsh, raspy guffaw.

"You are a sharp one, I’ll give you that! A crude goading attempt, but effective because you know precisely which buttons to press..."

The mocking smile on his face vanished, replaced by a wicked calm.

"...But all you’re doing is trying to buy time to recover!!"

Without exchanging any more words, the Ancestor dashed towards Uhtred with a burst of speed and force that would have taken Uhtred by surprise... had he not expected such a wily move.

But then again, his focus wasn’t even on the Ancestor either.

In the split second the old man moved, the dreaded prompt of mandatory choices appeared in his vision.

.

.

Uhtred had deliberately chosen to ignore his chat so far since his return to the scenario world.

First, because there really wasn’t the time to read curses and scathing words from his multiversal viewers. He had flipped off the entire multiversal audience after all.

And second, because there had been changes going on in his chat, and he didn’t have the time to focus on each individual change. He simply decided to wait until it was all finalized before addressing it.

From what he could glean, though, several of his subscribers were beginning to leave his channel, but not out of spite or anger. Rather, it was more like a business transaction.

It had started with one or two, then escalated to dozens and hundreds of his ten thousand subscriber slots being traded away.

The vacated slots were instantly filled by new, far more formidable entities who weren’t previously subscribed to his channel.

It was then that Uhtred realized this was likely a transaction.

Without a doubt, his actions during the interview had drawn the eyes of ancient, high-level powerhouses who typically ignored lower floors. Now, out of curiosity or perhaps just to keep an eye on his progress, astronomical sums of tokens were changing hands behind the scenes to purchase subscriber slots on his channel.

In a sense, Uhtred was losing out on immense wealth, given that his channel’s subscription fee remained fixed at two hundred Multiversal Tokens.

Compared to that, whatever transactions were occurring between viewers were undoubtedly fetching much more absurd fortunes.

But still, that wasn’t what bothered him. Rather, it was the fact that these unknown entities now had a say in deciding his mandatory scenario choices.

And one had just come at a terrible time...

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