Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 1473  A Letter of Invitation!

”Even after possessing this artifact for thousands of years, your clan remains one of the weakest forces in this realm,” Joe said casually, shaking his head as though expressing mild disappointment.

His tone was light, almost conversational, yet the words themselves cut sharply through the air.

The effect was immediate.

The expressions of the seven family heads darkened at once. Their previously controlled composure stiffened as faint fluctuations of suppressed aura rippled outward. The elders standing behind them also felt their faces grow rigid.

To be belittled in such a manner, in their own sacred trial grounds, before their disciples and clan members, was nothing short of open disdain.

And yet the silence held. Not one of the family heads stepped forward, and not one of the elders allowed their anger to find a voice, because beneath the fury that Joeʼs words had stirred in all of them ran a current of cold and sober understanding that none of them could afford to ignore.

The man standing before them was not simply rude or poorly mannered. He was an elder of the Violet Star Palace, and even the most indignant among the assembled figures knew with absolute certainty that underestimating what that meant would be a mistake with consequences none of them were prepared to face.

The weight of that institution stood behind Joe like a wall, invisible but immovable, and every person present could feel it pressing against the space between them and him. So they stood in their anger and held their tongues, and the silence around the Combat Legion Tower stretched on without anyone moving to break it.

”Heh,” Joeʼs sneer came first, a short and contemptuous sound that escaped him with the effortless ease of someone who had grown so accustomed to looking down at the world around them that derision had become second nature.

Then, without any ceremony or preamble, a rectangular card materialized in his hand as though it had been plucked from the air itself.

”Take this,” he said, and before Mathew had time to respond with anything more than instinct, Joe had already sent the card cutting through the air toward him with a casual flick of his wrist that suggested he attached no particular importance to what he was handing over, even as the very act of producing it implied otherwise.

Mathewʼs hand closed around the card and he brought it up to examine it, his eyes moving across its surface with the careful attention of a man who understood that anything delivered by an elder of the Violet Star Palace was worth studying before drawing conclusions.

The other family heads watched him from where they stood, their earlier anger not yet fully settled, and for a moment the gathering held the particular tension of people waiting for information they had not yet been given access to.

They exchanged quiet glances among themselves, wondering what this rectangular object could possibly represent and why an elder of the Violet Star Palace would come directly to their trial planet to deliver it to them.

As they were wondering, they noticed Mathewʼs face changed, and it changed in a way that none of them had expected to witness from a man of his composure and experience.

The expression of careful and measured curiosity that had settled over his features while he examined the card did not transition gradually into something else but shifted with a sudden completeness that drew the eyes of every person present.

Where there had been the focused attentiveness of a family head assessing an unknown object, there was now something raw and unguarded, a pure and uncontained excitement that broke through every layer of the dignified restraint that decades of leadership had built around him.

It was the face of a man who had just understood something that changed the dimensions of what he believed was possible.

”This...” The word left him as barely more than a breath, and he looked from the card to Joe and then back to the card again, his gaze moving between the two as though he needed to confirm that the man who had delivered this thing was real and that what he was holding in his hand was equally so.

Even as the head of one of the seven great families and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Dragon Clan, a man whose position demanded a constant and unshakeable projection of authority, he could not find the steadiness to collect himself in this moment.

The card in his hand represented something that struck too deeply at the ambitions and the needs of his clan for him to pretend otherwise, and the composure he had maintained so flawlessly through Joeʼs earlier insults crumbled entirely before what he now held.

”Here, see this,” he said, and he passed the card to the nearest of the other family heads with a urgency in the gesture that communicated everything about its significance before any of them had the chance to look at it for themselves.

The card moved from one set of hands to the next, and with each new person who examined it, the same transformation played out again. Shock settled over each face in succession with the undeniable consistency of people encountering something that exceeded the boundaries of what they had thought today would bring.

The opportunity that the card represented was not simply significant in the way that occasional strokes of fortune could be significant to a force navigating the ordinary competitions and setbacks of life in the Divine Realm.

It was something of a scale that dwarfed anything the Black Dragon Clan had encountered in tens of thousands of years, a span of time so vast that it swallowed generations and epochs whole, and yet the thing now passing between the hands of the seven family heads made everything that had come before it in all that time feel ordinary by comparison.

”Donʼt look at me,” Joe said, raising both hands in a gesture that deflected the weight of their collective astonishment back toward him, as though he wanted no part of the credit for whatever emotions the card had stirred in them.