Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 1479  A Condition

”I accept your bet,” Joe said, after a silence long enough to suggest that the deliberation behind it had been genuine. He had turned the proposition over from every angle and arrived at the same conclusion each time, which was that Max, despite whatever qualities had so thoroughly convinced the family heads of the Black Dragon Clan, was not going to cross the eightieth floor on a cultivation base that sat at the third level of the Rebirth Realm.

His confidence in that assessment had not moved by a single degree since Mathew had first proposed the number, and he felt no need to pretend otherwise. ”But I also have a condition,” he added, his voice carrying the measured weight of someone who had decided exactly what he wanted before opening his mouth.

Mathew kept his expression open and his posture relaxed. ”What condition?” he asked, his smile not retreating even slightly. Whatever Joe was about to ask, he was prepared to hear it, because the foundation of his composure was not politeness but certainty.

He knew, with the kind of knowledge that sat deep and still rather than restless and anxious, that he was not going to lose this bet. Max was going to cross the eightieth floor, and so whatever condition Joe attached to his acceptance was ultimately a condition that would never be collected.

Joe looked at him steadily. ”If I win this bet, I want Max to join the Violet Star Palace.” He let that sit for a moment before continuing, his reasoning following close behind the demand. ”I reckon that only our force, among the countless third-rate forces in the Divine Realm, has the resources and the structure to train him properly and shape him into the kind of genius that the sword of the Sword Sovereign clearly intends him to become. If you can agree to this condition, then I will accept your bet. Otherwise, forget it entirely.”

The smile on Mathewʼs face did not disappear, but something behind it shifted. He had walked into this conversation prepared for conditions, but not that one. His eyes narrowed by a fraction as the weight of what Joe had just asked settled over him, and somewhere beneath the composed surface of his expression, a thought moved through with considerable force.

ʼThis greedy bastard.ʼ He thought cursing inwardly.

Max was not simply the most talented disciple the Black Dragon Clan had managed to cultivate in recent memory. He was, at this particular moment in time, the most renowned young genius anywhere in the entire Divine Realm, a cultivator whose name had spread far beyond the boundaries of the clan that had raised him, whose possession of the Sword Sovereignʼs blade had made him a figure that forces across the realm were already watching with careful, hungry attention.

The Black Dragon Clan had been fortunate enough to find him, to recognize what he was before the wider world had fully caught up to the reality of it, and now Joe was asking them to hand that fortune directly to the Violet Star Palace.

Mathew turned and exchanged glances with the other family heads, and in the brief silence that passed between them the shape of an agreement formed without anyone needing to speak it aloud. They understood one another well enough for that.

”Alright,” Mathew said, turning back to Joe. ”This is a deal.”

But the word alright carried something in it that was less like concession and more like the quiet confidence of a man who had agreed to terms he was entirely certain he would never be held to. From the first moment Mathew had proposed the bet, through every exchange that had followed, not one of the family heads had experienced even a passing doubt that Max would cross the eightieth floor.

The condition Joe had just attached to his side of the wager was, in their collective estimation, a condition that existed only on paper.

They were not gambling on Max. They were investing in him, and the currency they had chosen to invest was a consequence they had no intention of ever paying, because they had never once genuinely entertained the possibility that they would have to.

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On the screens floating above the gathered crowd, Max had long since left the twentieth floor behind. The twenty-first floor had greeted him with a formation of shadowy figures whose cultivations sat firmly at the second level of the Rebirth Realm, their auras noticeably more cohesive and their movements considerably sharper than anything the earlier floors had produced.

They did not rush him blindly but instead moved with a patience that suggested the tower had begun introducing something resembling tactical awareness into its constructs, spreading across the chamber and attempting to cut off the angles from which he might respond to any one of them.

Max gave the formation a single moment of attention, read the geometry of it, and then moved forward rather than waiting for them to close the distance on their own terms, his sword rising and falling in a sequence of three controlled strikes that dismantled the arrangement before it could apply any real pressure.

The twenty-second floor compressed the space significantly, placing him in a narrower chamber where the shadowy figures could funnel toward him from a single direction, eliminating his ability to reposition freely and forcing him to manage the pressure of multiple opponents arriving in close succession rather than spread across open ground.

”Time to try one of the inheritance techniques,” Max muttered to himself, his voice carrying the quiet, almost clinical tone of someone deciding to run an experiment rather than someone bracing for a fight.

The decision was made, and the execution followed without ceremony. He drew on the fifth level of his ice concept, letting it rise from somewhere deep within his cultivation base and radiate outward through his body, and the moment it touched the air of the chamber the temperature around him dropped with a sudden, absolute completeness, as though the floor of the combat tower had been relocated somewhere far beyond the reach of warmth.

The change was not gradual. It was immediate and total, and the shadowy figures nearest to him recoiled by an instinct they should not have possessed, their forms flickering at the edges as the cold pressed against whatever constituted their existence.

Then the ground moved.