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

Chapter 80: Back to Dimension, Quest Rewards, In Three Days

The Legendary-rank dimension greeted Aidan with the smell of scorched grass and the distant thunder of someone training far too enthusiastically.

He followed the noise over the ridge above the riverbank camp and found the source before he’d finished cresting it. Two auras burned below, and neither one of them was SSS-rank anymore.

’Well, well.’ He grinned, folding his arms. ’The girls have been busy.’

Beatrix and Solenne stood across from each other on a blackened stretch of valley floor, both wrapped in the unmistakable density of fresh Epic-rank power, the mountain of resources he’d left behind clearly put to thorough use.

"You’re back!" Beatrix spotted him first, face lighting up. "Watch this. We were just about to spar."

"By all means." Aidan dropped onto a boulder with the happy air of a man arriving exactly in time for the show. "Pretend I’m not here."

They didn’t need telling twice.

Beatrix opened hard and direct, the honed instincts of a guild captain driving clean, disciplined combinations, water-blue light wrapping her fists as she pressed forward with textbook aggression.

Solenne simply wasn’t where any of it landed.

Hollow Step slid her sideways out of the world and back again, and when she reappeared, fire and shadow moved with her like they’d been born in her bloodstream. Steller Heart Blaze wrapped her frame in a corona of deep crimson flame, and threads of her Infernal Shadow Ranger talent bent every shadow in the valley into extra angles of attack.

Beatrix blocked the first three phantom strikes on instinct alone. The fourth came out of her own shadow and swept her feet, and a lance of controlled starfire stopped a precise inch from her throat before she’d finished landing.

"Dead," Solenne said, not unkindly.

"Again," Beatrix growled.

They went four more rounds, and the four rounds went the same way. Same stats, same fresh Epic-rank foundation, and it didn’t matter in the slightest. Solenne’s mastered spirit art and SSS-rank talent turned every exchange into a rigged game, fire where Beatrix expected nothing and shadow where she expected fire.

By the fifth loss, Beatrix sat down in the scorched grass, sweaty and scowling, pride visibly bruised.

Aidan laughed.

"Don’t worry. I got something for you, Beatrix. Similar to what I gave her." He hopped off the boulder, ambling over. "Now you are practically my people, so if you want to survive with me, you’ll have to become stronger than that."

"You got more Spirit Art and talent runes?" Beatrix was taken aback.

"Let’s find out together."

He pulled the Golden Treasure Chest out of his inventory first, its surface gleaming in bands of Epic, Legendary, and Divine gold, and cracked it open on the valley floor.

[Congratulations, you have acquired a Spirit Art: Cerulean War Requiem (Legendary)]

[Spirit Art: Cerulean War Requiem]

—> Upon cultivating and mastering this Spirit Art, the user can attain its Spirit Form. Upon activation, the user is granted a 120% boost in Defense and a 100% boost in Attack, and every strike taken or blocked adds one stack of Requiem. Each stack raises the user’s Attack and Speed further.

—> War Requiem Release: Consume all stacks to unleash a single tide-crash strike whose power scales with stacks consumed.

’A brawler’s art. It gets stronger the longer the fight drags and the more punishment you weather.’ Aidan glanced at Beatrix, who fought exactly like that, straight ahead and stubborn. ’Made for her, honestly.’

"This one’s yours." He tossed her the stone. "It rewards people too pigheaded to stay down. Should feel like home."

Beatrix caught it with both hands, staring at the knowledge bleeding faintly off its surface, and for a moment she looked like she might argue about the price of such gifts. Then she remembered who she was talking to, and swallowed it whole instead.

"There’s more." Aidan produced the Divine-rank Mystery Box next, matte black with a single seam of white light, and split it open.

Three orbs floated up out of it, drifting in a lazy orbit above his palm. One burned deep gold, one shimmered pearl-white, and the third sat dull, heavy red, like old blood that had learned patience.

[You have acquired: Three Surprise Reward Orbs.]

"Ooh." Aidan crushed the gold one first.

[Congratulations, you have acquired a Divine-rank Spirit Technique: Halcyon iridescent Verdict.]

’Divine-rank technique.’ He turned the knowledge over once and tucked it away unlearned. ’That one needs thinking about. No rushing it.’

The pearl-white orb dissolved into drifting light that condensed into folded cloth, an armor dress of layered silver-blue weave that shimmered like moonlight on deep water, elegant enough for a banquet and dense enough to turn a Legendary-rank blade.

[Legendary-rank Armor acquired: Tidemoon Regalia.]

"Also yours." He handed the folded regalia to Beatrix, whose composure was visibly beginning to fray at the edges. "It matches the art. And if I get my hands on another named talent rune, that’s yours too. Then you two will be even."

"I..." Beatrix looked down at the spirit art in one hand and the armor in the other, then up at him, and gave up on words entirely.

The third orb, the dull red one, Aidan cracked open last.

The light that came out of it didn’t shine. It seeped, pooling downward like something too heavy to float, and condensed into a long, thin blade the color of dried wounds, its edge faintly serrated with what looked disturbingly like teeth.

[You have acquired a Cursed Weapon: Maryn’s Hunger (Unranked).]

[Maryn’s Hunger]

—> A blade that devours. Every swing drinks a portion of the wielder’s blood and vitality as payment, and converts what it drinks into cutting power without any known upper limit.

—> The blade’s hunger deepens with use. The curse can be suppressed and refined by a worthy bearer. Origin: Unknown.]

The whole camp went quiet around it.

[Jovan: That is Origin Tomb work. The same craft as my Cursed Vessel, but a weaker version. Handle it with caution, or don’t handle it at all.]

’A cursed legacy blade with no ceiling on its power, that eats its own wielder as the price.’ Aidan studied the faintly breathing edge, and felt the thing study him right back. ’Now that’s an interesting problem for another day.’

He stored it carefully, alone, in its own corner of his inventory.

"Alright, listen up." He clapped once, gathering the whole camp’s attention, Solenne and Beatrix and the drifting summons all turning his way. "In three days, the three of us are entering the selection tournament for the Origin Tomb."

He had that quest to complete. And he was also interested in the Origin Tomb.

[Side Quest: Enter an Origin Tomb]

[Reward: 1000 × Transcendent Points, Mystery Weapon Box.]

"The nearest one takes place on a mega planet 3.7 light years out," Aidan went on. "My new friends from the Enforcer Department are heading there anyway to register their own entries, so we’ll be traveling with a Divine-rank escort. Try to look respectable."

"Three days," Solenne repeated, already calculating. "You want us at peak Epic-rank before then."

"I want you at peak Epic-rank before then," Aidan agreed. "Better odds in the brackets. The resources are there, the dimension’s yours, and Beatrix has a brand-new art to learn on top of it. No pressure."

"That’s enormous pressure," Beatrix said.

"Yes." Aidan smiled pleasantly. "Welcome to being my people."

...

While the two women threw themselves back into training with the particular fury of people given an impossible deadline, Aidan walked out past the ridge to a quiet stretch of valley and sat down alone.

One more piece of business before the day ended.

’Alright.’ He closed his eyes and reached for the oldest talent he owned. ’Exotic Summoner. It’s been dry for days. Let’s see if today’s the day.’

The talent answered, and the world behind his eyes dissolved.

When his inner sight cleared, he was looking at somewhere else entirely, and his breath caught before he could stop it.

A mountain rose before him, magnificent and impossibly vast, its peak wreathed in slow rivers of cloud. And atop that peak, cradled in stone like an offering to the sky, sat a pond that did not belong to any world he knew, its water so clear it seemed less like liquid and more like a held piece of sky.

A single fish swam in it.

Exotic blue flames blazed over its body with every lazy turn, burning impossibly beneath the water without a single ripple of steam, and its glistening scales caught the light and threw it upward in sheets, painting auroras across the heavens above the mountain.

And beneath those beautiful, cascading lights, the world was ending.

Every wave of aurora that rolled off the fish’s scales rained catastrophe onto the lands below, storms and quakes and fissures of light, a paradise of a vista built on top of a world that had already been destroyed by the simple, passive existence of the thing swimming in that pond.

Aidan stared at the single burning fish, and the fish, slowly, turned in the water to stare back.