Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Chapter 107: Silently Powerful Sponsor! [20 GT Bonus Chapter]

The young master raged, but the dam had already burst. Now that the first official bid was registered inside the System interface, the competitive instincts of the other sponsors took over completely.

They could not stand to let another entity secure a Unique grade Pathfinder core cleanly. Surprisingly, the young master who had just threatened to hunt down Stormwarden was the first to bid right after:

> Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master: One hundred and one thousand merits! The core belongs to the Nine Nether lineage!

> Vengeful Grandmaster of Nyxos: One hundred and ten thousand merits! Damn you all! If any of you attempt to push the valuation past my mark, you will face the absolute wrath of the Nyxos star sector!

The chat immediately erupted into a chaotic mess of scathing curses, the sponsors completely ignoring the grandmaster’s threats.

> Myriad Sword Ancestor of the Seventy-seventh Heaven: Who the hell does this fellow think he’s threatening? Nyxos? That pathetic sector hasn’t produced a Grandmaster in three cycles! One hundred and twenty-five thousand merits!

The Vengeful Grandmaster, who had just threatened everyone could only vent his frustration through rapid, angry text blocks, calling the Sword Ancestor a brainless, wasteful spender who was throwing away centuries of grinding for a primitive trinket.

But the momentum was entirely out of his control now. The numbers were ticking up with terrifying speed.

> Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master: One hundred and fifty thousand merits! Try matching that, you untalented ancient fossils!

Before the young master could even finish celebrating his lead, a massive, screen-spanning text calmly dropped directly into the center of the panel.

> Anuran All-Mother of Fertility: Two hundred thousand merits.

The sheer size of the jump silenced the entire stream in an instant. The aggressive, fast-paced text streams from the old foggies died out completely. They totally even forgot to curse at the All-Mother. Instead, they were staring at the number in absolute, stunned disbelief.

To wager a six-figure merit on an unrefined mortal from a fledgling integration world was pure, unadulterated madness.

One hundred thousand was already pushing the absolute limits of a rational investment, but two hundred thousand was completely ridiculous. The risk made no sense.

The sponsors silently pulled out of the running, leaving only the All-Mother and the young master at the table.

Uhtred stood completely still on the carapace, his eyes wide as he stared at the final figure of two hundred thousand blinking on his panel. Even with his deliberate calculations to fleece them, he had never anticipated the bid reaching this level of insanity.

Two hundred thousand merit points...

He looked at the name Anuran All-Mother of Fertility with a newfound level of deep, calculated wariness.

Just how massive was her total merits if she could casually toss out two hundred thousand on a complete gamble? This wasn’t something as cheap as multiversal tokens for goodness sake!

He schooled his expression quickly, keeping his face completely expressionless to ensure the stream didn’t catch his surprise. Being wary of her was a problem for the future. Right now, he needed to finalize the bet.

He was fully prepared to lock the deal in at her current mark...

But before he could tap the interface to close the window, another glowing text materialized, shattering the silence of the chat.

> FriendlyDaoistStormwarden: This friendly daoist will bid three hundred thousand merits.

The number had barely lingered on the screen for a microsecond before a massive, blood-red system error message violently exploded across the entire interface, accompanied by a harsh, ringing tone that echoed directly inside Uhtred’s head.

[Error! Transaction parameter exceeds the maximum allowable limits for a newly integrated world!]

[System Intervention Triggered: To maintain global development balance, individual merit intake for a mortal-tier participant is capped at 200,000 per single contract event]

[Bidding Closed. Winner Designated: Anuran All-Mother of Fertility]

Just like that, the bet was settled by the System. For a brief moment, Uhtred felt a strange sensation kind of lock around his core like a phantom before the feeling disappeared.

The message was clear, this was now a System-enforced bet. The moment he died, his core was going to be teleported away before anything happened to it, straight to the Anuran All-Mother of Fertility.

But at the same time, it meant the All-Mother’s two hundred thousand merits were under the same enforcement. The moment Uhtred successfully escaped the serpent alive, that massive fortune would be automatically transferred directly to him.

However, Uhtred didn’t care about the looming threat of losing his core, he didn’t even really pay much attention to what the System had said. He had absolute trust in his own capabilities, and he hadn’t entered this beast just to die.

Compared to the threat of losing his core, what truly held his focus was the sheer shock of what FriendlyDaoistStormwarden had just attempted.

The guy had casually dropped a bid of three hundred thousand merits! A number so massive that the System itself had to manually step in and shut the bid down because receiving that much wealth would completely break the power progression parameters of Planet Earth.

If the Anuran All-Mother was a powerful cosmic entity, then who the hell was this low-key Daoist Stormwarden sitting quietly in his subscriber list?

The stream feed immediately came back alive, the remaining sponsors frantically spamming the chat to demand answers about the Stormwarden’s true identity, trying to decode the background of an entity who could give that much merits away so casually.

But FriendlyDaoistStormwarden simply went completely dark, refusing to type another word.

Uhtred also did not waste another second looking at their text arguments. He swept his hand across the air, closing the entire streaming interface and cutting the blue panels out of his vision completely.

He adjusted his position back into a cross-legged stance on the center of the black carapace, the white light of his orb reflecting off the bubbling, toxic lake of acid around him. He looked at the pulsing flesh ceiling, his senses focusing back onto the five heavy vibrations of cosmic essence moving through the serpent’s body.

The bid was already set. Now it was time to do the work and actually not die...