After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 78: First Divine Bond, Leaderboard Rank

The Cloud Whirl Alliance hub sat at the heart of the Overlord-class shelter, a vast domed chamber ringed with floating terminals, each one humming with quiet, patient light. Attendants of a dozen different species moved between them, and the whole space smelled faintly of ozone and old parchment, the particular scent of a place that processed centuries of paperwork without ever quite catching up.

Aidan walked into it the morning after the feast with a headache he refused to admit to.

[Jovan: That’s what century-aged wine does to a body that isn’t used to drinking it in one gulp.]

’Worth it.’

He pressed his Digicard against the nearest terminal, and the sync took longer than he expected, the display cycling through numbers so fast they blurred before finally settling into something solid.

[Digicard synchronized.]

[Contribution Points updated: 1,361,740.]

The attendant behind the terminal, a bored-looking man who had clearly processed ten thousand routine syncs that week alone, glanced at the screen out of habit and immediately stopped looking bored at all.

"That’s..." He checked it twice, then leaned in for a third look, as if the number might correct itself under enough scrutiny. "Sir, that’s an outbreak-tier total. A big one. Did you fight in Sector Twelve?"

"A bit," Aidan said.

The man opened his mouth, closed it again, and decided against asking further questions, which Aidan appreciated more than he let on.

...

The combat examination took place two floors up, in a chamber built for exactly that purpose, its walls lined with formation glyphs that hummed with restrained power, dormant weapons racked along one side like a museum that occasionally bit back.

A stern, silver-robed proctor walked him through the process while he stretched his shoulders, her voice flat with the practiced boredom of someone who had explained this same speech thousands of times before.

"Offense, defense, technique variety, and decision-making under pressure," she recited, gesturing at a raised circular arena at the chamber’s center. "All measured across a series of escalating simulated opponents, calibrated to your registered rank, and weighed against every other Legendary-rank Hunter currently registered in this sector of the Alliance." She tapped a floating panel. "Most candidates take the full allotted hour. Begin when ready."

"Noted." Aidan rolled his neck, and stepped into the ring.

The first construct rose out of the floor almost immediately, a simulated brawler built to test raw defense, and Aidan let it hit him twice just to feel out its pattern before answering with his sword. The second construct came in faster, testing his footwork against a blur of simulated strikes, and he mixed his blade with threads of wind and lightning, reading its telegraphs the same easy way he’d once read a nervous tournament boy’s opening stance.

He tried three separate variations of Blazing Point Fang against three different simulated defenses in a row, cataloguing which version cut cleanest through which kind of guard, treating the whole exam less like a test and more like free range time on a very expensive training dummy.

The proctor’s stylus moved faster and faster across her floating ledger.

By the final construct, a towering simulated horror built to test decision-making under genuine pressure, Aidan finished it with a controlled taste of Wrathspiral Lance, just enough to punch through its core without wasting the full weight of the technique, and the simulation dissolved into harmless light around him.

[Combat examination complete.]

[Provisional Leaderboard Placement: Legendary-rank, Sector 9. Rank 1.]

Aidan checked the chamber’s chronometer on his way out of the ring. Eleven minutes, against a full hour allotted.

The proctor stared at the number floating above her ledger for a long, silent moment before finding her voice again.

"Rank one," she said slowly, like the words tasted unfamiliar in her mouth. "First place. Out of just over eleven thousand registered combatants in this sector."

"Nice." Aidan rolled his neck, already thinking two steps ahead. "Anywhere I can spend those contribution points now?"

...

The market occupied the hub’s lower level, a sprawling exchange of glass cases and floating displays stretching further than Aidan could see from the entrance, and the moment his synced total scrolled past the entrance scanner, a very different quality of attendant materialized at his elbow.

"Divine-rank inventory is through here, sir," she said, practically glowing with the particular delight of someone who rarely got to work a commission this large. "Might I ask what you’re building toward?"

"Versatility," Aidan said. "Show me what fills gaps instead of what looks shiny."

She walked him past row after row of gleaming Divine-rank gear, armor that hummed with borrowed storms and gauntlets that crackled with captured lightning, and Aidan turned most of it down within seconds, aspects that overlapped too closely with what he already carried.

A spear offering pure Metal and Blade got a polite shake of his head. A ring promising deeper Electromagnetism went the same way. He paused longer over a cloak woven from something that whispered pure Wind, genuinely tempted, before deciding it doubled a talent he’d already spent years sharpening on his own.

Then they reached the back case, tucked into a dim corner past the more popular displays, and something in his chest sat up and paid attention.

A scythe rested inside it, its haft carved from something black and faintly frost-rimed, cold radiating off the glass hard enough to fog the case from the inside. The blade itself was a deep, swirling violet-grey that seemed to drink the light around it rather than reflect it, edges wreathed in a faint mist that never quite dissipated, and the whole case sat unnervingly quiet, as if it were muffling its own presence.

[Duskrend Scythe. Divine-rank.]

"This one’s been sitting here a while," the attendant admitted, a little sheepish. "Most buyers find the aspects too unconventional to build around. It doesn’t sell itself the way a lightning gauntlet does. Hard to use, hard to master. Requires matching talent that allows them to wield its powers fullest due to the Conceptualized Aspect, so that’s one more limitation."

’Perfect. I collect unconventional.’

He reached out and felt the weapon’s nature the moment his fingers brushed the haft, four distinct currents running through it at once, cold and dark and heavy and utterly silent, layered together in a way that shouldn’t have held together as one weapon at all.

"Frost. Shadow." Aidan turned the haft slowly, feeling each current in turn. "Gravity, pulling down toward the blade’s arc. And something underneath all of it that isn’t a sound so much as the absence of one."

The attendant nodded eagerly. "Silence, technically, though most catalogues just call it the mute current. Four aspects layered into one haft, and two of them actively resent sharing space with the other two. Most Hunters who’ve tried it report the whole weapon fighting itself before it ever fights an enemy."

’Fighting itself, huh.’ Aidan’s grin sharpened. ’I’ve spent a while learning how to make things that don’t want to cooperate, cooperate anyway.’

He bought it on the spot, the price scrolling past in a number large enough to make the attendant’s smile widen considerably, and walked out onto the open market floor to trigger the bond right there.

He already had fifth slot unlocked since met the requirement of total power of power bonds reaching 100k.

[Triggering Power Bond on Duskrend Scythe...]

The scythe dissolved into a stream of violet-black light, folding down into something new entirely, and settled into place as his fifth bond.

[Power Bond created.]

[Power Bond: Duskrend Scythe]

-Power: 58,940

-Bond Level: F

-Attributes:

—> +120% Reach.

—> +90% Debuff Duration.

-Aspects:

—> Frost (100%)

—> Shadow (100%)

—> Gravity (100%)

—> Silence (100%)

-Conceptualised Aspect:

—> Shadowfrost (100%)

Aidan turned the aspects over in his mind, testing the shape of each one the way he always did with something new.

Frost alone was simple enough, a cold that slowed and brittled whatever it touched. Shadow alone was equally straightforward, a darkness that clung and concealed and quietly ate away at whatever light tried to push through it. Gravity gave the scythe’s every swing a heavier, hungrier pull, and Silence swallowed the sound of the strike itself, a blade that could open a wound before its victim even registered it had moved.

Four solid, useful aspects on their own. None of them, individually, was anything he hadn’t seen a dozen versions of already.

Shadowfrost was different, and it was the reason the case had sat gathering dust in the corner of the market.

It wasn’t Frost and Shadow layered side by side. It was what happened when the two stopped fighting each other for control and folded into something new instead, a bite that didn’t just numb flesh but numbed the will underneath it, a cold, creeping dark that clung to a wound and refused to let it close cleanly no matter what the target tried.

[Jovan: Most who buy that scythe never manage the Conceptualised Aspect at all. It stays dormant, two currents sulking in the same house, refusing to share a room.]

’Then it’s a good thing I’m annoyingly good at making things share a room.’

[Jovac: That talent of yours is indeed quite broken. SS-rank on paper, but its true rank far higher. People have to build affinity with powers, or have the talents for them, but you directly bonds with the powers.]

[Tom, from somewhere back in the dimension: Ooh, can it freeze my complaints solid?]

’Only if you volunteer, buddy.’

Aidan hefted the scythe once, testing its reach against empty air, watching mist curl off the blade in slow, hungry tendrils before he let it dissolve back into latent light.

Five bonds now. Lightning and metal and burst and electromagnetism in one hand, flame and pierce in another, blood and nether kept quiet and close, and now frost and shadow and gravity and silence, with a strange, patient cold sitting conceptually above all four.

’Rank one on the leaderboard, a fresh bond nobody else knows how to use properly, and I haven’t even had lunch yet.’ He grinned, heading for the exit with the scythe humming faint and eager in his inventory. ’Not a bad morning at all.’