Chapter 195: First Floor
Silence.
The chat was entirely dead, with not a single viewer watching at all.
"...From the moment I officially selected you ten as the representatives of Planet Earth, the Tower assumed exclusive control over all broadcasting rights," Roy continued. "Your individual streams will only come back online once you are inside the Tower."
The cat man leaned forward, his eyes sweeping over them with a sharp, calculating glint.
"You are already being graded. If I give you the details of what the first floor will be, your starting marketability will drastically reduce once you enter the Tower. No one wants to watch people who already know what to expect!"
Roy cracked a toothy grin. "So put on your game faces. Ready yourselves. Five seconds left."
"Tch!" Hassan hissed through his teeth. But despite his frustration at the rushed explanation, he immediately adjusted his stance, readying himself.
King Alexei let out a deep, booming grunt, a savage, eager grin spreading across his face.
Black Sun Mateo’s face reverted to its natural unconcerned, silent mask.
Perfection, standing silently in his immaculate white coat, adjusted his posture, his featureless white mask reflecting the dim lights of the room without giving away a single thought.
Isolde Castiglione, who had just arrived, checked through her System spatial storage. Even appearing as a late, impromptu arrival, she had the core essentials needed for survival in her storage.
At the back of the hall, Uhtred was also well prepared. He glanced to his left and right. Zara met his gaze with her usual icy, unbothered calm. Diya offered a firm, stoic nod.
They were all going in blind, but they were ready for whatever the Tower would throw at them.
Under Handler Roy’s excited laughter, the final second counted down, and immediately, a blinding column of light descended from the gargantuan Tower above the planet, taking all ten ascenders along with it.
.
.
.
Inside the Illustrious Tower of Wonders...
Noise... Noise like he had never heard before. That was what flooded Uhtred’s senses first.
It sounded like the drone of a hundred million voices screaming, roaring, clicking, and chanting simultaneously, speaking in countless alien tongues.
Everything flooded his ears for a brief second before his translation device kicked into gear, and even then he still couldn’t decipher any singular word from any of the many voices droning.
The sound was so loud that Uhtred instinctively felt the urge to clamp his hands over his ears.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, he felt his palm press firmly against the side of his head. The sound muffled slightly. The simple feedback of touch grounded him, confirming that his physical body was intact and fully under his control.
His vision was the next sense that followed, and then he saw it himself. A crowd like he had never seen before, dense and uncountable, a black mass of alien bodies stretching in every direction as far as his eyes could see.
There were humanoid figures of varying builds and skin tones: massive multi-limbed insectoid races with shimmering chitin, floating masses of liquid sludge aliens, cybernetic organisms encased in heavy exoskeletons, bizarre biological entities that defied standard logic.
It was a sight to behold...
He had never seen anything like this. Not even during the Sovereign of Chaos’ grand cosmic battle that he witnessed during his Mortal-Nascent Realm evolution.
It wasn’t a one-to-one comparison, but this dwarfed that in terms of scale. It was even more daunting and mind-boggling because this was not a memory fragment. This was real. This was physical. This was a living, breathing mass of billions of sentient beings packed shoulder-to-shoulder into a single, unfathomably vast space
So these are the races of our universe...
Uhtred could barely hear his own thoughts over the deafening noise. He looked around, taking in as much as he could. His [Inspect] skill was fully active, checking out the levels of every creature and alien he could see.
For many, he could see their exact levels. That meant they were lower-leveled than him, or at most, within five levels above his own.
With his wealth of Multiversal Tokens, he could have upgraded the biological modifications to his eyes, but he chose not to. Realistically, any creature more than five levels above him could sense being inspected even with the upgrade, so spending the tokens felt pointless .
[Level 41]...
[Level 39]...
[Level 48]...
[Level 50]...
As he looked around, gauging the average level of his alien competition, he suddenly noticed a figure whose level he actually couldn’t see.
[Level ???]
Right there, within thirty feet of his position, stood an insectoid ascender with a dark violet carapace and four scythe-like arms, its level completely concealed. That meant the alien was at least Level 53 or even higher!
And it wasn’t just that alien alone. A few paces beyond the insectoid, a floating, gaseous alien also emanated an aura that completely bypassed Uhtred’s inspection threshold as well.
A slow, dangerous smirk spread across his face.
This was it... the danger, the wonder, the excitement of the cosmos.
Before the System integrated Earth, humanity had spent centuries staring into the night sky through telescopes, searching for the faintest whisper of alien life. They had built probes, theorized about radio signals, and debated whether they were alone in the vast emptiness of space.
Now, here they were, thrown into a pressure cooker alongside billions of sentient alien races, all integrated, all fighting for survival, and all competing under the same brutal System...
To prove himself mighty even among this powerful and diverse crowd wouldn’t just mean he was the strongest on Earth... it would prove his dominance across the entire universe.
Uhtred remembered Handler Roy’s words: there were definitely going to be teams that would reach Floor 9... teams consisting of extremely logic-defying talents...
Even without Roy’s warning, Uhtred had caught a glimpse of this standard himself back when he formed his sub-core formation before reaching the Nascent Realm.
Back then, the System gave him a title that was not limited to Earth alone, but applied across the entire universe:
Universal Deviant: 82nd in local universe to form a sub-core before reaching the boundary of the Mortal-Nascent realm.
He had been the 82nd to achieve that feat. And now, seeing the sheer volume of high-level powerhouses packed into this endlessly large floor, he knew there were countless other monsters who hadn’t gotten that title, but definitely possessed crazy talents.
Plenty of interesting prey... Uhtred thought, his blood pumping with a cold, electric anticipation.
Suddenly, a realization snapped him out of his internal analysis.
Wasn’t he supposed to have materialized alongside the rest of the Earth squad?