Read Novel Full Chapter 1478 A Bet!
Chapter 1478 A Bet!
Mathew was the one who answered, and he did so with the kind of light, unhurried smile that belonged to someone who had long since made peace with the fact that his convictions would not always be popular.
"If it were any other disciple, we would not be so certain," he said, his voice carrying the easy confidence of a man speaking from accumulated evidence rather than blind sentiment, "but we have complete belief in Max. He should cross the eightieth floor mark without much difficulty."
The words had barely settled before the other family heads began to nod, one after another, their agreement quiet but absolute. Even Garry, who didn't like Max one bit, dipped his head in affirmation.
They were not performing enthusiasm for one another's benefit. Each of them had arrived at this belief through their own observations, and those observations had built a picture of Max that no longer fit inside the ordinary frameworks they used to assess the disciples of their clan.
They had watched him defeat geniuses who were cultivating at the late stage of the Rebirth Realm, opponents whose cultivation advantages should have been prohibitive against someone at his level back when he was still at the Divine Rank.
They had watched him do it not through luck or some narrow circumstance that could be dismissed as a fluke, but through his sheer strength.
Now that he had stepped into the third level of the Rebirth Realm, the family heads found it entirely reasonable to expect him to cross the eightieth floor of the combat tower with relative ease. As for how far beyond that he might climb, none of them were willing to speculate, and their reluctance was not born from ignorance but from hard-won wisdom.
They had already learned what happened when they tried to put a ceiling on Max. At the Path to Eternal Flames trial, they had made their assumptions, quiet ones, internal ones, each of them privately deciding on some layer where Max would finally meet a wall he could not knock down, and every single one of those assumptions had been dismantled before they could even finish forming.
He had passed through barriers they had thought impassable, had done so without the kind of dramatic struggle that at least would have made the predictions feel less foolish, and had left them standing on the other side of their expectations with nothing to say.
That experience had changed how they thought about him in a way that could not be undone. Max was not someone who could be measured by the tools they used to measure everyone else.
He did not behave like talent on a scale they recognized, did not peak and plateau in the patterns that experience had taught them to anticipate, and so they had collectively, silently, stopped trying to predict where he would stop and started simply watching to see where he chose to go.
"The eightieth floor?"
The shock in Joe's voice was genuine, and for a moment he simply stared at the family heads as though waiting for one of them to laugh and admit they had been exaggerating for effect. None of them did. He turned the claim over in his mind and found that no matter how he approached it, it refused to become reasonable.
If Max had been at the ninth or tenth level of the Rebirth Realm, Joe could have entertained the possibility without much resistance. A cultivator at that height standing before the eightieth floor of the combat tower was at least an argument worth hearing, a challenge that sat within the outer edges of what talent and technique could theoretically accomplish.
But Max was at the third level. The third level of the Rebirth Realm was not a foundation from which one launched an assault on the eightieth floor of anything.
In Joe's considered judgment, a cultivator at that stage of development would find crossing the margin between the thirtieth and fortieth floors to be a genuine and punishing struggle, the kind that left disciples walking out of the tower with a clearer understanding of their own limitations.
The notion of that same cultivator reaching the eightieth floor was not ambitious. It was, as far as Joe was concerned, simply disconnected from reality.
"Elder Joe," Mathew Grimes said, his smile returning with an ease that suggested he found the elder's disbelief more amusing than offensive, "it seems you don't believe Max will cross the eightieth floor mark."
"I don't care what any of you say," Joe replied, nodding his head with the firm, unhurried certainty of a man who had spent enough years watching cultivators ascend and fail in towers like this one to trust his own read of the situation above sentiment and clan loyalty. "In my assessment, Max is not crossing the eightieth floor."
Mathew Grimes let the declaration land, and then he smiled the particular kind of smile that belonged to someone who had been waiting for exactly that response. It was unhurried and a little sly, the smile of a man who had already decided what came next before the conversation arrived there. "Then how about we make a bet?" he said.
Joe's eyes narrowed by a fraction. "What sort of bet?"
"It is simple," Mathew said, his tone carrying the light, conversational quality of someone proposing something entirely reasonable. "If Max manages to cross the eightieth floor mark, then each year from this point forward our two forces will hold an exchange meeting between our respective disciples. The meeting will be held annually regardless of its outcome, a standing arrangement between the Black Dragon Clan and the Violet Star Palace. And if Max does not cross the eightieth floor mark, then you may ask anything of the Black Dragon Clan, and we will do our utmost to fulfill whatever you demand of us."
Joe did not accept immediately. He held the offer in his mind and turned it over carefully, examining it from the angles that mattered.
His first question was the one he kept returning to, which was where exactly the family heads of the Black Dragon Clan had found the confidence to stake anything on Max crossing the eightieth floor with a cultivation that sat at only the third level of the Rebirth Realm.
There was something they knew, or believed they knew, something they had seen in Max that translated in their minds into a certainty he could not share, and he found himself genuinely unable to trace the logic that had led them to a number as high as eighty.
But the other side of the bet, the consequence of losing it, gave him considerably less trouble. Agreeing to an annual exchange between the disciples of their two forces was not a sacrifice by any meaningful measure.
It was, in truth, an arrangement that cost the Violet Star Palace almost nothing and carried with it a set of implications he could understand entirely.
The Black Dragon Clan occupied a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of third-rate forces in the Divine Realm, one of its weakest members, while the Violet Star Palace sat comfortably among the strongest of that same tier.
The gulf between them was real and widely acknowledged. For the disciples of the Black Dragon Clan, the opportunity to compete regularly against cultivators from the Violet Star Palace would be enormously valuable.
It would expose them to a higher standard of technique and strength, force them to confront the distance between where they stood and where the upper range of their tier had reached, and broaden in a practical and irreplaceable way their understanding of what cultivation at a genuinely competitive level looked like.
Joe could see the reasoning clearly. The Black Dragon Clan was not proposing an exchange out of arrogance. They were proposing it because they understood that their disciples needed exactly that kind of friction to grow, and they were willing to attach Max's performance in the combat tower to it because they believed, with a completeness that continued to unsettle him, that Max was going to give them what they needed.
Just as he was contemplating the bet, Max crossed the 20th floor and entered the 21st floor. The rate at which Max was ascending floors in the combat tower baffled most of the disciples.