Free Web NovelChapter 87: Rapid Development
Uhtred’s POV. Back in his territory...
The reinforced stone plaza within his territory was dead silent, save for the heavy breathing of the three figures sprawled across the ground.
Diya, Minh Quan, and Dennis lay in various groaning positions across the wide, hard floor. Beneath them, the glowing lines of an array was etched into the very ground itself, pulsing with a soft silver light.
A week ago, this exact spot had been completely bare, nothing more than a rough patch of dirt surrounded by wild trees. Now, the entire layout of the territory had completely transformed.
Anyone who had seen this territory a week ago would be completely surprised by what lay before them right now.
Uhtred stood over the three figures on the ground, his face completely expressionless.
He casually glanced down at his left arm, where a shallow cut was visibly closing over at a rapid pace, the flesh knitting itself together under the influence of his dense vitality.
Right around the edges of the healing wound, there were weird, tiny deforming extensions in the muscle fiber. It looked as if some sort of unnatural, parasitic cellular growth had been about to spurt directly out of his skin before his internal energy starved it out.
Uhtred could feel his core working to purge the residual essence, relying on the immense physical resistance of his new Level 22 body.
Even so, considering the massive level gap between his powerhouse status and Diya’s current Level 9 status, the fact that she had managed to inflict any sort of damage at all was very impressive.
"I’m impressed, Diya," Uhtred called out, his voice echoing flatly across the stone plaza as he looked down at her groaning form. "You have finally begun to actually understand how powerful your class is."
Uhtred analyzed the lingering cellular disruption in his arm. He could easily imagine just how deadly this attack would have been to an ordinary ascender. If Diya used this against someone around her own level, or even a few levels above her, they would take serious, catastrophic damage.
It was literally a weaponized cancer growth, forcing the target’s own cells to violently mutate and expand.
The girl was manipulating organic cells under the guise of her healing affinity. Her deep medical insights into the human body were actively being weaponized... but this was exactly the kind of progression Uhtred wanted to see from his crew.
He didn’t care about standard boundaries or conventional logic anymore.
Ever since he had returned from that deep scouting mission into the ancient variants’ outpost and faced the reality of that Level 24 Neanderthal general, Krijn, Uhtred had essentially turned into a relentless devil during their training sessions.
Diya, Minh Quan, and Dennis had noticed the shift in his demeanor ever since he returned from that outpost that day. He hadn’t hidden anything from them. He had gathered them right there on the grass and explained his findings in cold, brutal detail.
He told them about the scale of the Neanderthal and Homo erectus stronghold in Zone 1. He described their massive, brutalist stone architecture, their highly organized caste structure, and their advanced integration with system utilities.
He laid out the grim truth that the ancient variants had been active on the planet long before humanity emerged from the integration space.
They had a massive head start, their average enforcers were already sitting between Level 7 and Level 10. And this was just an outpost in Zone 1. There were several more outposts within Zone 1 alone, not to mention the fact that their true strongholds were in the further zones, Zone 2 and Zone 3.
Humanity was severely behind. The entire global quest was heavily skewed against their survival.
To bridge that gap, Uhtred had stopped withholding information. He saw absolutely no use in keeping secrets if it was to the detriment of not just his crew alone, but humanity as a whole.
The only things he kept to himself were information that was personal to him. For everything else... the multiversal store, the global power chart, the wealth ranking, and even the tips and warnings he had received from his interactions with Ascendant Favored One at the beginning — information about sponsors — he revealed it all.
He wanted them to possess a comprehensive, high-tier understanding of the System before they even reached the level required to unlock the features naturally.
From there, he had aggressively begun equipping them with better tools purchased directly from the multiversal store. He bought translation devices, armor-like clothes, gears, and broad cultivation manuals tailored generally toward their specific classes.
He hadn’t had the capital to buy highly specialized legacy manuals, as even he didn’t possess one yet.
In the multiversal store, specific, high-tier cultivation techniques were some of the most expensive commodities available. Most advanced civilizations actively gatekept their true inheritance techniques, refusing to list them on the public market.
Still, everything Uhtred had purchased over the past week to rapidly build up his crew and fortify his territory had cost a massive, staggering sum of multiversal tokens... capital he simply hadn’t possessed when he first stepped out of the ancient variant outpost.
To fund his operations, Uhtred had been forced to completely reorient his mindset. His conversation with Krijn on that stone mound had thoroughly shattered his old perspectives.
There were massive System avenues he had been completely sleeping on simply because he hadn’t wanted to deal with the nuisance.
Chief among them was the Multiversal Streaming Channel.
Why the hell was I limiting myself when there are thousands of rich, bored cosmic entities drooling to watch this integration? he had realized. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
Uhtred stopped viewing the channel as an invasion of privacy and began thinking like a ruthless businessman. These multiversal sponsors surely held hefty amounts of wealth, and he was the undisputed number one ranked human on the entire planet.
Thanks to his earlier conversations with Ascendant Favored One at the beginning of the integration, Uhtred knew that while the sponsors were blocked from passing tactical information across separate streams, they could freely hop between channels.
They were undoubtedly watching the new Level 10 human ascenders pop up across the globe, which meant they could easily deduce by simple comparison that Uhtred was the absolute apex powerhouse of this integration world.
He was a hot commodity. And he wasn’t about to let those arrogant entities look at him for free anymore.
100 Multiversal Tokens.
That was the fee he set for getting access to his channel.
He hadn’t even been sure if the System would allow such a steep paywall for a mortal-tier stream, but the System had processed the new restriction instantly without a single hitch.
At first, Uhtred wondered if he was being too bold. He wasn’t a performer, and he wasn’t willing to become one. He wasn’t someone who would go out of his way to please some multiversal entities just to gain money.
His content was nothing more than raw footage of him mapping the terrain, slaughtering high-level beasts, and simply cultivating his core.
But the moment he reopened the channel and saw the massive backlog of insults, arrogant demands, and explicit threats from entities like that Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master and the rest of the old foggies he had snubbed back then, Uhtred had simply cleared the logs, booted every single viewer out of his channel, and locked it behind the 100-token restriction.
He couldn’t see their reactions, but he knew they must have been absolutely livid.
Wealthy "young masters" and "venerable elders" across the multiverse were likely fuming, steam practically pouring from their ears at the audacity of a primitive mortal demanding a triple-digit token fee just to watch him walk through the woods.
Yet, to his immense surprise, the strategy worked. freeweɓnøvel.com
The wealthy entities paid the fee. Even the damned Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master and the very same old foggies who had been spamming his notifications with scathing rants were among the first to drop the cash just to keep tabs on his progression.
A whole hundred multiversal tokens. That money was enough to buy a 1,000 square meter territory area from the System on any integration world. It was not a small amount of money. This was hard cash, not even net-worth or some aggregated value of what one possessed.
Uhtred had grinned when he saw that over thirty people had actually paid the fee within the first forty-eight hours. That was an instant influx of 3,000 multiversal tokens. Right now, that subscriber count had climbed to nearly thirty-five!
Damn! I should have charged them two hundred, Uhtred thought, a brief flash of dark humor crossing his mind.
Maybe even five hundred... Or a thousand!
Of course, he knew 1,000 tokens was surely pushing way beyond what the System would even accommodate, but the fact that thirty-five of these multiversal entities didn’t even blink at a hundred tokens proved that to them, 100 Multiversal Tokens was likely no more than cheap change.
He had actually tried to manually raise the subscription price later in the week, but the System had declined his attempt.
A notification popped up indicating that until he reached Level 25, where he could expand the number of subscribers he could have on his channel — which was currently capped at 100, the entry fee remained locked.
It was with this new source of income that he had been able to fund everything he had spent his money on over the past week.
In total, Uhtred had spent more than 1,700 Multiversal Tokens, both on his crew members and to buy facilities and tools for his half-acre territory.
He took the eye-opening experience he’d gained from what he’d seen in the ancient variants’ territory and bought new structures of his own...
