Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Uhtred closed his eyes and sank his awareness deep into the tissue surrounding him. He began to sense for the internal flow of cosmic essence, trying to understand exactly how the separate cores inside this giant monster cycled to create the insulation effect that protected it from the outside world.

He continued in this manner for nearly a whole hour straight. He remained locked in deep focus, balancing himself carefully on the floating carapace while the liquid sloshed gently around him.

Through the streaming function, the multiversal sponsors watched his channel in complete silence, waiting to see if the human forerunner would find a way out or dissolve into nothing.

After a whole hour of intense observation, Uhtred’s expression turned flat. Despite his best efforts, despite his high perception attribute and his innate talent for deciphering essence flows, he was hitting a wall.

His core was a formless, primordial grade core, it was incredibly versatile, but he still could not pinpoint the exact process that allowed the giant serpent to insulate itself so completely.

This was no longer a game or a simple puzzle. His life was literally at stake here. Every minute he spent sitting inside this dark stomach, the noxious gases were slowly wearing down his stamina, and the acid pool was whittling away at the shell he was sitting on.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the bubbling stomach acid.

I guess I’ll just have to bite the bullet and look for essence cores in the end...

He figured that he needed direct contact with the source to truly understand what was happening.

There was a limit to how much he could sense through the air, especially when cosmic essence was practically nonexistent within the toxic atmosphere of the serpent’s stomach.

He needed a direct connection with its flesh. However, while making contact was easy enough since he simply had to move close enough to the stomach walls and place his bare hands on them, there was still the major problem of his energy supply.

Initiating a deep sensory connection with a living, higher-level entity meant he would have to expend a portion of his own cosmic essence to force his awareness through its natural body defenses.

His reserves were already meager, and he couldn’t afford to burn what little he had left. He needed to top up his core before attempting anything else.

Without any further hesitation, Uhtred slid off the edge of the black shell and dove straight into the burning stomach acid. He broke through the surface and began searching through the dark, slimy depths for the remnants of what the beast had eaten.

Uhtred swam through the thick, stinging liquid passing by several half-dissolved bodies of ordinary humans and even chunks belonging to ancient variants.

Severed limbs, shattered armor plating, and broken weapons drifted through the muck, causing him to clench his jaw hard as he waded past them.

The biting, corrosive force of the acid pool was beginning to hurt even more now. Even though he was actively channeling his cosmic essence to enhance his body’s physical durability from the inside, the pain was constant and unrelenting. It felt like thousands of tiny needles were burrowing into his skin at once.

To make matters worse, the chunks of bodies he came across were completely useless. They were simply legs, severed shoulders, and miscellaneous pieces of prehistoric beasts that he couldn’t even identify.

None of them were close to the chest portions where an essence core would congeal.

With every passing second he spent submerged, his situation continued to look even more dire. He pushed deeper into the dark pool, moving toward the lower curves of the stomach lining.

Finally, as if the universe was aligned in his favor, his hand brushed against something hard and round. He pulled it close to the light of his orb, and it was exactly what he was looking for... A floating essence core that had already begun to be digested by the stomach of the beast.

The color was dull, lacking the usual glow an essence core should naturally have, as the energy within had already begun draining into the surrounding flesh before he found it.

As he looked closer, he spotted more of them. Several of these cores were floating right next to the tissue walls of the beast’s stomach, lined up as though a direct physical connection was required to enhance their digestibility.

Uhtred swam along the wall, sweeping as many as he could reach into his palm. He packed every single core he could find into his grip, totaling around seven in all.

They were all incredibly dull looking, their internal energies already partially siphoned by the serpent’s digestive tracts, but Uhtred didn’t care about their quality right now. They would suffice for the meantime.

He didn’t even bother to waste any more time looking for more. His body was stinging severely from the prolonged immersion, and he needed to get out.

He swam back to the black carapace and hefted his body over the edge. With a hard grunt, he dropped the gathered essence cores onto the dry surface first before climbing completely onto the shell himself.

He sat down heavily, his body dripping with the wet, corrosive juices. His jaws were clenched tight against the burning sensations on his skin, but he didn’t waste a single second lamenting the pain.

Uhtred immediately crossed his legs and stabilized his mental state. He picked up the first core and began cultivating, gathering the essence through his veins, drinking every single bit of energy within the seven cores greedily to fill his meager reserves.

As the energy entered his body, he realized the replenishment was barely making a dent. The influx only served to boost his reserves by a tiny fraction.

Uhtred was currently a Level 23 powerhouse. At this level, any core lower than a level similar to his was going to be practically useless to his cultivation.

These cores, for example, surely belonged to much lower-leveled beasts, meaning he required significantly more of them to achieve a reasonable cultivation effect.

In theory, Uhtred reckoned that if he possessed a high-tier cultivation manual instead of the basic, generic one the System had handed out to everyone at the start, things would be different. Even the manual he had recently purchased from the multiversal store was only a slight upgrade, and it was still terrible in terms of raw efficiency.

If he had a true inheritance legacy manual, he would have siphoned a massive amount of energy from these fading cores without wasting a drop.

Efficiency was the absolute key when it came to manuals. Uhtred’s core was a primordial grade core, making it fully compatible with all elemental affinities and attunements. Despite this inherent advantage, and despite how ravenous his core was when it came to drinking cosmic essence, he was still bound by the limits of the cultivation technique he used.

The technique provided the steps and his core simply amplified the suction.

If a normal unique grade talent using a standard cultivation manual could extract about twenty percent of the essence within a beast core, Uhtred’s primordial grade core boosted that extraction rate with its greedy suction by up to thirty percent at the very least.

Essentially, high-quality cultivation manuals were vital to an ascender’s growth, which fully explained why they were so incredibly expensive and scarce in the multiversal store.

For Uhtred’s current crisis, it meant seventy percent of the energy inside these seven cores was simply dissolving into nothing before he could absorb it. It was only enough to give his core some more breathing room, but no more than that.

Once the seven cores completely dissipated into empty dust, Uhtred opened his eyes. He lifted his star-metal battleaxe and began to use the flat side of the heavy blade as a makeshift paddle, plunging it into the acid to move the floating carapace across the lake.

He guided the shell all the way to the edge until it bumped against the thick stomach walls of the serpent.

He leaned forward and placed his bare palm flat on the slick flesh wall. He did it carefully, keeping his movements light so as not to trigger the serpent into another external turmoil that would throw him back into the corrosive stomach acid.

The moment his palm touched the stomach wall, Uhtred paused. He did nothing for several seconds, simply staying in that position so as not to trigger the beasts. Then, he began to spread his perception outward, driving his replenished cosmic essence directly into the muscle fibers to connect with the internal circulation of the serpent.

He continued this deep sensory connection for several minutes.

As the time ticked away, a hard frown began to color Uhtred’s face. It wasn’t a look of frustration or panic, but rather a deep, contemplative frown. He was slowly unraveling what made the beast tick.

By the time he finished his analysis, more than an hour later, his eyes snapped wide open in shocked disbelief.

He had finally understood the trick. He finally understood why this beast could trap the essence inside its massive body without leaking any of it to the outside world... Or rather, his initial assessment hadn’t even been entirely correct.

The beast actually did leak cosmic essence, but the amount was so incredibly minuscule and negligible that it was completely imperceptible to his perception.

Most importantly of all, the vital discovery Uhtred uncovered was that the serpent did not actually possess five separate cores.

The remaining four congregations of cosmic essence he had sensed earlier from the outside were not independent cores at all, rather, they were all extensions of one single, massive central core!

Four separate sub-cores!