Chapter 148: What’s Your Attunement?
In this wave of mass improvements, Uhtred and Zara also didn’t want to fall behind the curve. They pushed into a high-density Grotto Heaven and forcefully took it over.
This time, they even came across an ancient variant squad consisting of eight Homo Erectus and Neanderthals, all hovering between Level 20 and Level 18.
That didn’t change anything, though. The fight had been swift and straightforward. Uhtred and Zara had dealt with them easily before moving on to take on the beast that guarded the Grotto Heaven.
However, securing a standard Grotto Heaven wasn’t enough for Uhtred.
Deep down, his primary objective remained reaching the Grotto Heavens at the inner border. They were dangerous, but at the same time, they were the only places within the entire trial grounds where cosmic essence was so dense, Uhtred could only imagine.
Aside from the cultivation benefits of controlling such a location, there was also the fact that the system weighted those locations significantly more. If Uhtred held any of them by the end of the trial, it would significantly boost human standing compared to the ancient variants.
He needed to reach one of those spots, but he also knew that pushing any further past their current location would force them into direct conflict with Nascent Realm beasts, a threshold neither he nor Zara was ready to cross just yet.
Of course, Uhtred had faced a Nascent Realm beast already, but he couldn’t really say he had truly faced a Nascent Realm beast. He had barely come off of it with his life, and his body had been in tatters by the end of it.
There was no way he was going to repeat such a thing, willingly putting himself in a situation where he would face not just one, but several Nascent Realm beasts when he was still within the Mortal Realm.
Recognizing their current limits, Uhtred decided against pushing deeper for the moment. Instead, he chose to remain at their current Grotto Heaven and focus purely on cultivation. The essence density here was high enough, and with the refined techniques they possessed, they could cultivate at maximum efficiency.
They lost themselves in cultivation, going at it continuously, and their levels began to climb at a visible pace.
Zara fully consolidated her foundation at Level 20 before breaking straight into Level 21.
Uhtred, who was sitting at the peak of Level 23, maintained a steady, intense cultivation cycle. However, because his core structure already had multiple sub-cores, consolidating his foundation was significantly harder than it was for a standard ascender.
Unlike before, when Uhtred could just use any beast core he had in hand to cultivate, now he had to individually nourish and balance each of his separate sub-cores with their specific attunements.
This required far more time, effort, and essence to achieve a single level of breakthrough, yet, Uhtred wasn’t bothered by the added difficulty in the slightest. In fact, he welcomed it. He was confident that building such a deep, multi-layered foundation would likely be of help when the time came for him to officially cross into the Nacent Realm.
By the evening of the third day, Uhtred successfully broke through the barrier and reached Level 24.
That was all well and good. In fact, it was blisteringly fast considering his sub-core formation. However, Zara’s progress during the same time frame was nothing short of astonishing.
By that same evening, Zara had smashed through the boundary of Level 21 and entered Level 22.
Uhtred was genuinely shocked when he felt her sudden level breakthrough. One had to remember that advancing in the upper levels of the Mortal Realm was totally different from the lower levels.
Moving from level 20 to 21 to 22 was a long, arduous process. It probably took even more effort than moving from Level 1 to Level 10 combined.
Of course, using this logic, it also meant that Uhtred, who had moved from Level 23 to Level 24, accomplished something similar, since he had crossed a level that was even higher than that in difficulty.
But the fact that the achievements could even be compared was exactly what alarmed him.
He knew just how absurd his core was for him to cultivate this fast. For Zara to match his progression speed directly implied that her talent grade was well beyond the Unique grade. Even Legendary didn’t seem fitting either.
Uhtred had harbored heavy doubts about her official classification for a long time. The strange, force-like nature of her abilities and her absurd combat output was very non-standard. Looking at her rapid breakthrough now, he was even more certain that she had secrets just like him.
However, what made him truly unsettled this time was that, right when Zara had broken through to Level 22, he had felt a strange phenomenon.
He opened his eyes, turning his head to observe her as she stabilized her breathing a short distance away.
She was cultivating purely by absorbing the ambient essence in the air. Uhtred, on the other hand, had been alternating between high-tier cores from the beasts they had killed, and the ambient spiral technique.
While he had been focused on his own cultivation, he had felt a bizarre, violent distortion in the surrounding essence flow that had physically severed his concentration, forcing him to break his state to look at her.
She had been utilizing the spiral technique he taught her, but the way essence moved around her body didn’t feel like his technique at all. The pull her core exerted on the surrounding environment was so aggressive that it had literally stripped the ambient essence right out of his immediate vicinity.
He usually preferred to let her keep her private secrets, just as she allowed him to keep his. But this time, the sheer anomaly of the event forced him to address it.
He waited patiently until her breathing evened out and her eyes slowly opened.
"Come to think of it, Zara..." Uhtred spoke up, his voice calm and even as he looked at her. "...I’ve never actually understood what your attunement is."