Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

The multiversal streaming channel remained completely dead for several long moments.

The sponsors watched in shocked silence, still reeling from the incredible thing Uhtred had just achieved within the belly of the serpent.

Eventually, a few text strands began to ripple across the interface, though many of the viewers remained entirely quiet, struggling to process the reality of what they had just witnessed.

Uhtred had literally created a sub-core formation inside his essence core in the span of a few hours.

To these ancient, cosmic entities, the concept was completely ludicrous. A sub-core formation was a milestone that was traditionally only achievable when a cultivator was sitting right at the absolute peak of the Mortal realm, preparing to cross the threshold into the Nascent realm.

Yet, Uhtred had bypassed that requirement. He had forced the change while sitting at Level 23. He had manifested one of the strict prerequisites for the next realm before his level was even close to the required stage!

Not only that, but after the erratic, violent emanations of his transforming core began to make the Dune Strider serpent uneasy to the point where it vomited him back into the open, he had instantly put up a brutal physical fight against the titan despite his heavily depleted state.

He hadn’t needed weeks of meditation or weeks of practice or weeks of adapting to the new core formation... The exact moment he had come out to the open air, he instinctively adapted to the benefit of the sub-core formation.

He had only just observed the beast’s internal mechanics, reverse engineered the circulation, and learned how to dual cast his elemental affinities on the fly!

He had stood his ground against a Level 25 Nascent realm beast, actively inflicting enough damage to force the massive titan to retreat into the desert.

Granted, the serpent was likely a newly evolved beast that hadn’t settled deep into the Nascent realm yet, but it was a Nascent realm beast nonetheless. Even with the sub-core breakthrough, Uhtred was still fundamentally a Mortal realm cultivator.

The qualitative gap between those two tiers of existence was not something an ascender could simply bridge through raw willpower, even for geniuses who routinely fought entities above their own level.

FriendlyDaoistStormwarden and the Anuran All-Mother of Fertility were the first two sponsors to recover their composure.

[FriendlyDaoistStormwarden is highly impressed by your absolute ruthlessness against your enemies and your complete indifference to wealth, spending a fortune without batting an eye simply to wound your opposition]

[FriendlyDaoistStormwarden has gifted you 5,000 Merits]

> FriendlyDaoistStormwarden: Young friend. You possess not just the raw talent, but also the unhesitant bearing of a true high-soaring cultivator! This Friendly Daoist is incredibly eager to witness your climb up the path of ascension!

The system notifications flashed across Uhtred’s left eye, tracking FriendlyDoaistStormwarden’s donation and his commentary regarding his immediate move to place bounties on the heads of the ancient variants.

A second later, the All-Mother of Fertility chipped into the feed, dropping a donation too.

[Anuran All-Mother of Fertility has gifted you 2,000 Merits]

[Anuran All-Mother of Fertility is impressed by your firm will and decisiveness]

Uhtred read the messages as they scrolled past, his expression remaining perfectly cold.

He didn’t buy any of their fawning praise. He knew the All-Mother wasn’t throwing these points out of genuine intrigue or goodwill. It was a calculated move.

She, along with every single sponsor watching his channel, had just seen a level of raw, anomalous talent that completely defied their understanding of cosmic evolution.

Disguising their shock as simple amusement at his bold spending was just a way to save face. Not a single one of them wanted to explicitly acknowledge the reality of what he had done by forging sub-cores at Level 23.

They simply left the topic alone, including the All-Mother, who was currently behaving with perfect cordiality despite the fact that she had just been fleeced of two hundred thousand merits from their bet.

Uhtred snorted internally. These multiversal sponsors were all the same. He didn’t trust a single word they said, with the possible exception of the Stormwarden, though even with this fellow, he maintained a healthy layer of suspicion.

It wasn’t all the sponsors though. At the very least, some of the more obnoxious of them still possessed the presence of mind to keep their mouths shut.

The Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master, who usually couldn’t go three seconds without posting a derogatory rant about ”primitive humans,” had gone completely dark. He hadn’t sent a single message since the serpent fled.

The young master had finally realized that Uhtred wasn’t a standard, unique-grade talent. His estimates about him were entirely wrong, going beyond his wildest calculations.

Wherever the arrogant young master currently was out in the multiverse, he was likely frantically alerting his family about the anomaly on Earth.

The same went for the rest of the old foggies who were usually very vocal. They had all gone completely quiet, probably deeply regretting how they used to talk to Uhtred.

However, Uhtred didn’t really care about any of that. He casually waved his hand through the air, closing the streaming channel interface.

He was not done with his bounty placements yet...

Thanks to the two thousand merits from the All-Mother and the five thousand from FriendlyDaoistStormwarden, his remaining balance had climbed up from seventy-four thousand merits to eighty-one thousand.

”System,” Uhtred said out loud. ”I want to issue an announcement to every single participant within the trial grounds of Australia. How many merits would that cost?”

[A continent-wide public broadcast costs 1,000 Merits. Do you wish to proceed?]

Uhtred raised a brow. The number looked incredibly small to his eyes. However, before he could begin to be complacent, he caught himself and reoriented his mind.

He knew the only reason it looked small to him was because of his current bloated wealth. To any regular human or even any ancient variant, a thousand merits was an astronomically large amount to have.

He knew exactly how much blood and sweat it took him to accumulate that amount.

Even before he had fleeced the cosmic sponsors through the stream bet, his total merits had been nine thousand, and that was after essentially solo clearing a regional dungeon, and holding the undisputed number one rank among humans on the entire planet.

For a normal ascender, a thousand merits was a goal they hadn’t even come close to touching in the two weeks since the integration began.

”Deduct the fee,” Uhtred commanded flatly. ”And also add my name to the announcement. Make sure everyone knows who exactly placed the bounty on their heads.”

[1,000 Merit Points deducted. Current Balance: 80,000 Merits]

[Continent-wide Announcement Authorized. Dispatching transmission...]

In an instant, across every square meter of the vast Australian continent, whether they were hiding in the dry northern crevices, wading through the salt flats, or sprinting across the red dunes, being chased down by beasts, all 3.5 million participants, modern human and ancient variant alike, saw their personal system interfaces flash with an urgent System notice...

And like a raging inferno, an explosion of shocked, incredulous disbelief erupted across every single part of the continent.