Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Several hours later...

Uhtred stood at the forefront of the human population along the border. Zara stood next to him, and off to his left, behind him, Antoine also stood discussing something in low tones with the large Level 10 man who had pulled Uhtred on the earth cart on their journey here.

Only a few seconds remained till the countdown was over. Everyone was primed and ready, waiting for the shimmering barrier to disappear.

Several things had happened up until this point, some of which had surprised Uhtred and some of which hadn’t.

For starters, one of the people who really surprised Uhtred was Diya. After he had entered into the camp with Zara and Antoine, Uhtred had eventually met Diya a few hours later. However, it wasn’t the reunion he had imagined.

Diya no longer looked like the same girl he recognized, which was especially surprising because it had only been just about a week since he last saw her.

Instead of the cheerful, simple girl he remembered, he saw a weathered, hollow-eyed girl. She had looked straight at him with a strange disconnect in her eyes. As though she had witnessed many horrors.

Behind her, several fairly strong Level 8 and 9 ascenders had been lined up like personal bodyguards. Whatever she had been through, she had ended up becoming someone a lot of people looked up to and even seemed very willing to even die for.

Those men and women behind her looked at her like she was some sort of savior, and it wasn’t hard to imagine it. Diya had contributed more than him in the last trial.

She had single-handedly wreaked the most damage to the ancient variants as a collective than even him, despite all his feats.

From the 900,000+ participants within the trial grounds, modern human and ancient variants included, that number had dropped down to around 490,000 people.

One had to remember that even that previous 900,000 figure had once been 1.2 million.

From being someone who couldn’t even watch a Level 7 Homo erectus scout being tortured back on the main continent, to someone who essentially committed mass genocide on an entire population, it was no surprise Diya looked the way she did.

Thankfully, though, Dennis was present with her. The scholar stood by her side like a sort of advisor, and Uhtred could only imagine how much worse she would have been if Dennis wasn’t present.

He hadn’t even imagined the two were together the whole time, but he was thankful they were.

Uhtred had really thought Diya was fundamentally and thoroughly changed to the point where even he might not be able to bring her back to her previous self.

However, once every member of his crew was left alone, after the men hovering around Diya left her to talk with her crew, it was only then that the mask on her face finally slipped and Uhtred saw a trace of the Diya he was familiar with.

She had immediately begun healing both him and Zara. In the process, Uhtred had tried to make some small talk. Diya had been more vocal than before in that moment, however, she hadn’t revealed much about anything, really.

She only talked about subjects that were inane and casual, some random things that had happened that she and Dennis had witnessed. She chose not to talk about the contagion spell she created, or the deaths by her hands, or anything along those lines.

By the end of the healing session, the only significant thing Uhtred had learned was that Diya had taken some sort of leadership position over a large group of people.

She told him to trust in her as she was building a faction of loyalists. People with peculiar skills, who were also trustworthy enough to help in the development of Uhtred’s territory after the trials were over.

Uhtred himself hadn’t even thought that far ahead, as he wasn’t one to stress about details like those, but both Diya and Dennis had explicitly emphasized how important many of these seemingly low-level ascenders were to creating a thriving territory.

Uhtred’s mind returned to the present and he released a sigh where he stood, watching the final seconds tick by.

Diya and Dennis had returned to the group they were building, and Uhtred had allowed them without any grievances. He could most definitely tell that there was more to what Diya and Dennis had revealed, but he wasn’t going to pressure them.

The main thing was that they should survive the next trial. That was the only thing he cared about.

Just as Uhtred began to internally lampoon and question himself as to when he had begun to care so deeply about these people who he had only known for a few weeks, the countdown suddenly ended.

[Notice!]

[The 12-hour buffer countdown has officially concluded]

[Commencing the second trial: Age of Abundance]

The second the text flashed across Uhtred’s vision, the massive, invisible shimmering barrier completely vanished into thin air.

Instantly, a dense wave of pure cosmic essence, thicker than anything he had ever experienced, slammed into his body.

The energy flooded his pores and violently sharpened his senses, rejuvenating him like a thirsty man suddenly doused with water.

Loud gasps and murmurs of shock rippled through the thousands of human ascenders. Even Uhtred himself could not help but gasp slightly.

”What the hell...? This is even denser than the ambient essence on the last floor of my dungeon!”

The cosmic essence in the air was so dense it even seemed feasible to cultivate directly from it. Usually, beast cores were the most efficient for cultivating because they contained pure attuned essence compatible with one’s affinity.

So long as you had a decent cultivation technique, you would gain tens of times more cultivating with a beast core than trying to individually filter the cosmic essence in the air to pick out your specific attunement.

It was no wonder everyone was utterly shocked at how dense the essence in the air was. It was nearly comparable to a very low-level beast core already!

Before Uhtred or any of the other thousands of ascenders could relish the feeling, the System continued with its notices:

[Welcome, ascenders, to the Age of Abundance trial]

[The previous Age of Hunger trial tested your survivability as a species. You were placed in a barren environment stripped of cosmic essence, and your cores were forced to leak continuously. This was a direct test to determine which strain of man was more suited to the path of ascension]

[The main objective of the trial was to damage your opposition’s collective standing while testing your ability to share improvements]

[Developing and distributing techniques to combat essence leakage, while at the same time actively trimming the numbers of your opposition, was the method to winning the previous trial]

[And at the end of the Age of Hunger trial, the ancient variants claimed victory. However, this second trial poses a different test]

[Unlike the previous trial, where the core objective was withheld so as to test your survival instincts, this trial’s objectives will be fully detailed]

[As you can already feel, within these trial grounds, cosmic essence is densely abundant. If you open your maps, you will find various Grotto Heavens littered across the zone]