Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

From every surface beneath the feet of the shadowy figures, hands erupted, vast and pale and formed entirely from ice, their fingers long and tapered and ending in claws that caught the dim light of the chamber with a faint, cold gleam.

They came up in clusters, surging from the floor with a speed that gave the shadowy figures no interval in which to react, and they seized each one with a grip that was not merely strong but viciously thorough, the icy claws closing around limbs and torsos and pulling downward with a force that allowed no resistance.

The shadowy figures struggled, their dark forms writhing against the restraint, but the cold was already doing its work independently of the grip, climbing through whatever spiritual substance composed them and converting it, layer by layer, into something rigid and still.

Within moments each figure had ceased to move entirely, locked inside a shell of ice that encased them completely, their expressions and postures frozen mid-struggle into statues that stood in scattered formation across the chamber floor.

The ice hands tightened. There was a sound, brief and sharp and total, like the simultaneous fracture of several dense objects, and then each frozen statue shattered outward from its own center, exploding into countless fragments of ice that scattered across the floor and dissolved before they finished sliding.

The chamber was empty, and the cold began to recede back into Max as he released the technique, the temperature climbing slowly toward something habitable again.

”Hmm,” Max said, looking at the space where his opponents had been standing several seconds ago. ”This is just the low-level use of Ice God Hand and it is already this deadly.” He stood with that thought for a moment, genuinely curious about what the answer would be.

He wondered what would happen if he were to release the full version of the technique, not the restrained and partial expression he had just demonstrated, but the complete, uncompressed release of what the Ice God Hand was actually capable of at its upper threshold.

This floor of the combat tower did not seem like the appropriate venue in which to find out, but the question settled into the back of his mind and stayed there.

He filed the observation away and let his surroundings shift again as the tower registered his victory and prepared the next floor.

The technique did not become less effective as he climbed. If anything, the gap between what the Ice God Hand could produce and what the tower’s constructs could withstand seemed to matter less with each floor he cleared, because the power contained even in the low-level application of the technique operated at a register that the earlier floors simply had no framework for countering.

The twenty-sixth floor sent its shadowy figures rushing toward him the moment they finished materializing, their forms at the fourth level of the Rebirth Realm and their movements carrying a speed that would have been genuinely threatening to a cultivator relying on conventional responses alone.

Max did not rely on conventional responses. The ice hands surged from the ground before the figures crossed half the distance between them, and what followed was the same sequence of seizure, freezing, and shattering that had ended the floor below, completed inside a span of time that felt almost discourteous in how little room it left for the constructs to demonstrate what they had been designed to do.

The twenty-seventh floor introduced a new configuration, placing Max in a chamber where the shadowy figures had arranged themselves at the perimeter rather than the center, maintaining distance and attacking from range using compressed projectiles of spiritual energy that crossed the room with genuine velocity.

It was a sensible adaptation, keeping the constructs away from the ground where the ice hands could reach them most efficiently. Max acknowledged the adjustment with mild interest and responded by simply expanding the radius of his technique, letting the Ice God Hand extend its reach across a far wider surface area, and the hands that emerged this time came up at the perimeter of the chamber rather than its center, directly beneath the figures that had positioned themselves there to avoid exactly that outcome. The floor ended as quickly as the one before it.

By the twenty-eighth floor the constructs had reached the fifth level of the Rebirth Realm, and the pressure of their collective aura when they materialized was substantial enough that several of the observers watching the screens outside the tower straightened instinctively, reacting to the weight of the displayed energy even through the remove of a broadcast.

The shadowy figures on this floor moved with a fluency and a ferocity that reflected their elevated cultivation, their attacks carrying a force that could have caused serious problems for any cultivator whose only resource was the strength their own level provided.

Max released the Ice God Hand again, and the figures were encased and destroyed within the same ruthlessly short window that had characterized every previous floor, the gap between their strength and the cold that consumed them too wide to be bridged by anything the tower had given them to work with.

The twenty-ninth floor came and went with the same result, the figures slightly stronger again, slightly faster, slightly more deliberate in their approach, and the Ice God Hand reaching up from the ground and ending them with the same patient, absolute efficiency it had demonstrated from the first moment Max had chosen to use it.

He was not struggling. He was not adjusting. He was applying a technique that existed at a level of sophistication the combat tower’s earlier floors had not been built to account for, and the floors were falling beneath it one after another without offering him anything that required him to think particularly hard.

Max stepped through the threshold of the thirtieth floor and felt the air change around him in a way that was more pronounced than any transition he had crossed so far, the ambient pressure of the chamber settling against him with a density that suggested the tower had finally decided that the preliminary portion of its challenge was behind them both.

”Hehe, this will be interesting now,” Joe said, and the smile that accompanied those words carried a different quality than the ones he had worn during the earlier floors, less the detached amusement of someone watching a foregone conclusion play out and more the genuine anticipation of someone who believed the situation was finally about to correct itself into something that aligned with his expectations.