Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

For several seconds, Uhtred analyzed each name and title with cold precision.

He was excited, but he didn’t let the surging excitement cloud his judgment. This was a critical choice. From the way the System had phrased it, an opportunity to select an Insight Legacy wasn’t something handed out under normal circumstances.

It was a direct stop-gap benefit, granted solely because there were no attunements in the multiversal registry that matched his Formless Core.

The System had even been forced to step down its definitions multiple times just to find a category that was remotely comparable. So he needed to make this decision count.

He started by analyzing the titles attached to the names: Alyn the Unbound. Paragon of Sin, Undav. And Sovereign of Chaos, Drakgon.

Unbound, Paragon, and Sovereign... I’m guessing these are not just titles... Realms, perhaps?

Uhtred already knew there was the Mortal Realm and, beyond that, the Nascent Realm. However, after the Nascent Realm, he had no clue what was beyond. The System had never provided a breakdown of the higher stages.

The only clues he had gathered came from how certain multiversal entities structured their usernamesin his chat. He remembered Ascendant Favoured One, the very first viewer who had entered his channel back before it officially unlocked at Level 10.

While Ascendant Favoured One had been somewhat arrogant, he had still been much more grounded and reasonable, especially compared to the current members of the chat.

He didn’t seem like the type to toss around a grand title like "Ascendant" without a legitimate reason behind it.

Uhtred hadn’t given it much thought back then, but seeing these legacy entries now, the dots began to connect.

"Ascendant" was almost certainly a cultivation realm. He had also seen viewers refer to themselves as "Master" and "Grandmaster" in his chat. Looking at that naming scheme, the logic there became straightforward. Master surely came before Grandmaster, and Ascendant had to sit somewhere above Grandmaster.

As for Unbound, Paragon, and Sovereign? They were undoubtedly far above the rest, most definitely above even the Ascendant realm.

Of course, Uhtred was very sure there were gaps in the realms which he didn’t know yet, but at least for now he had a clear tiered progression of the ones available:

Mortal, Nascent, Master, Grandmaster, Ascendant, Unbound, Paragon, Sovereign.

That realization made his decision significantly easier. Sovereign of Chaos, Drakgon immediately shot to the very top of his list, followed by Paragon of Sin, Undav, and Alyn the Unbound.

Next, his focus shifted to the number and nature of the affinities each figure wielded. But even by that metric, the Sovereign still remained the best choice.

Compared to Alyn the Unbound and Paragon of Sin, Undav, who both wielded thousands of elemental and esoteric magics, the Sovereign of Chaos stood on an entirely different level.

He literally controlled all elements. That was the exact phrasing the System had used... control over every single element in existence, paired with two Fundamental magics.

He held no control over any Esoteric magic, which meant Uhtred wouldn’t gain any direct insights into Esoteric blood magic from the memory.

However, that wasn’t a problem at all. Of the three, the Sovereign was still by far the closest to what Uhtred considered "limitless." He controlled every elemental magic without exception. Uhtred knew he would glean far more from a being who was completely unbound by elemental limits than from the other two.

And if those reasons weren’t enough, the title of the memories themselves carried another level of detail.

For the first two entities, the locations of their battles were clearly listed. But for the Sovereign of Chaos, the name of the battle had been completely redacted by the System.

For the System to intervene and redact information from a prompt meant the battle had to be so historically monumental, and Drakgon so terrifyingly mighty, that a Mortal Realm ascender wasn’t even permitted to read the name of the battlefield.

He wasn’t supposed to know the location, and that alone made him immensely curious. There was no way he was picking anything else.

Uhtred locked in his choice.

[Selection Confirmed: Sovereign of Chaos, Drakgon]

[Loading Insight Legacy: Battle for [REDACTED]...]

Before Uhtred could brace himself, a sudden, weightless sensation took over. He felt like he was falling through endless layers of dense clouds.

Then, the motion abruptly stopped.

Uhtred opened his eyes. He was floating, suspended in open space. There was no ground beneath his feet, no sky above his head, just the vast, unending expanse of the cosmos laid bare before him.

Except it wasn’t empty.

Everywhere he looked, the void was filled with unimaginable cosmic scale. Nebulae stretched across distances he couldn’t even begin to calculate, forming clouds of cosmic dust so dense, colorful, and vivid they looked almost solid.

Points of blinding light flickered behind them, littering the dark void in a breathtaking display.

They all looked like stars at first glance, but looking closer, Uhtred realized with a shock that many of them weren’t stars at all.

They were literal black holes.

Their event horizons glowed with intense, warped light. He could visually see space deforming around their edges as matter was violently dragged into the dark voids at their centers.

The sheer destructive power of those cosmic maws was terrifying, exerting a gravitational pull so immense that even light couldn’t escape.

Yet, impossibly, they coexisted with the surrounding nebulae without tearing the entire region apart.

Beside them hovered massive stellar bodies, stars larger than Earth’s sun by more than a million times.

They radiated blinding white-blue light and massive waves of cosmic essence and radiation that would have vaporized planet Earth a million times over if it were anywhere near them.

Uhtred had watched space documentaries back on Earth. He enjoyed stargazing at night and could probably even consider himself a casual space enthusiast. But none of that prepared him for the raw, terrifying reality of standing in the open cosmos, even if it was only through someone else’s memory.

The scale of everything around him was so absurdly massive that his mind struggled to process it. His eyes kept searching for a reference point to anchor himself. He was starting to feel small, extremely small. Scales like these made one begin to feel a sense of oppression that went beyond what could be put into words.

In the end, he forced himself to pull his gaze away from the background and focus on what lay directly in front of him. He wasn’t here to gawk at massive stellar bodies or feel oppressed by their mind-numbing size or the vastness of space. He was here to witness a memory.

Below him, an impossibly vast landmass stretched across for what he estimated to be hundreds of thousands of miles in every direction. It was completely flat, looking as if someone had taken dozens of worlds, shattered them, and compressed them into a single hovering surface.

He couldn’t fathom how something that massive remained structurally intact without an atmosphere, or why gravity wasn’t pulling it inward to collapse into a sphere. The entities who created or gathered on this plane clearly possessed the power to defy universal physics at will.

And those entities were everywhere...