Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 1481  Soul Fragments

Joe turned his attention away from the floating screens for a moment and looked at the seven family heads standing nearby, making sure he had their attention before he continued. "As we all know, from the first floor through the twenty-ninth floor, a cultivator ascending the combat tower faces nothing but shadowy figures," he said, his tone shifting into something that carried the weight of a man drawing on real and considered knowledge of the tower's architecture.

"Those constructs are exactly what they appear to be, conjured shadows without genuine substance behind them, designed to test a climber's reflexes and the raw application of their strength, but possessing no actual depth of experience or understanding. They can be overwhelmed by a sufficiently powerful technique precisely because there is nothing behind them except the cultivation level the tower has assigned to them."

He paused, letting that distinction settle before he moved past it. "But from the thirtieth floor onward, that changes entirely. From the thirtieth floor, a climber no longer faces shadows. They begin to face the soul fragments of real individuals, cultivators who once ascended this very tower during their own lifetimes and who, at some point in their journey, made the deliberate choice to leave a fragment of their soul behind within its walls, to be preserved and used as a fighting warrior for every climber who came after them. These were real people. They had real combat experience, real techniques, real instincts that were forged across years of cultivation and battle, and those qualities do not disappear simply because what remains of them now exists as a fragment rather than a complete soul."

He looked across the gathered family heads with an expression that suggested he considered what he was about to say to be the crux of everything. "It was precisely because of this that I found it difficult to believe Max would be able to overcome these soul fragments," he said.

He folded his arms and let his gaze drift back toward the screens, where Max stood alone at the threshold of the thirtieth floor with the changed air of the chamber pressing against him from all directions.

"Let us see," Joe said quietly, with the patient composure of someone who had been waiting for this particular moment since before the ascent began, "whether that sword and this kid are enough to handle something that can actually think back."

The seven family heads watched the screens with an attention that was different in quality from the ease with which they had observed the earlier floors. Their confidence in Max had not diminished by any measure, but confidence and curiosity were not the same thing, and the thirtieth floor represented a threshold that none of them could observe with complete indifference.

They had seen Max dismantle shadowy constructs with a technique that turned the ground itself into a weapon, and they had felt the satisfaction of watching every assumption Joe had offered about the earlier floors prove too conservative.

But the soul fragments were a different category of opponent entirely, and even the family heads, who had collectively decided that Max defied ordinary measurement, found themselves leaning into the broadcast with an alertness that the previous twenty-nine floors had not demanded from them.

They wanted to see how he handled something that had once been real, something that carried within it the residue of actual experience and actual battles fought by an actual person who had stood in that tower and climbed it through nothing but the strength of their own cultivation and will. Whatever Max did next, they intended to watch every detail of it.

---

Max stood at the center of the thirtieth floor and waited, his breathing steady and his grip on his sword loose enough to allow for immediate movement in any direction.

Then his opponent materialized, and Max went still.

It was not a shadow. It was not a construct of darkness assembled from borrowed energy and given the rough outline of a form to make it functional. What stood before him on the thirtieth floor resembled a human being with a completeness and a specificity that the shadowy figures below had never approached, a figure with defined features and a discernible build, wearing the remnants of what appeared to have once been a cultivator's robes, their edges worn and their details faded by whatever passage of time separated this fragment from the person it had once belonged to.

The figure stood with the posture of someone accustomed to standing in difficult places without flinching, their weight distributed with the unconscious precision of long experience, and the aura that radiated from them carried a quality that was unmistakably different from the raw, uncomplicated energy the tower's constructs had projected.

"So no more of those shadowy figures," Max muttered, his eyes moving across his opponent with the careful, cataloguing attention he gave to anything he had not encountered before.

"Indeed," said his opponent. "No more of those useless things."

The words arrived in a voice that was unhurried and fully formed, carrying the timbre and the weight of something that had once belonged to a living throat, and Max went very still in a way that had nothing to do with combat readiness and everything to do with the fact that his mind had just registered something it had not expected and had not prepared a response for.

He stared at the figure in front of him for a moment that stretched slightly longer than he intended.

"You can talk?" he asked, and there was something in the question that was entirely genuine, stripped of the measured composure he typically maintained, the pure and unfiltered curiosity of someone encountering a thing they had not known was possible.

"Of course I can talk," his opponent replied, with the flat simplicity of someone answering a question they found slightly unnecessary.

"How is this possible?" Max asked, his eyes narrowing as he tried to fit what he was observing into a framework that could accommodate it.

The shadowy figures below had been silent, purposeful in the way that tools were purposeful, incapable of anything beyond the execution of the function they had been built to perform. They had not observed him, had not responded to him, had not registered his presence as anything other than a target to be eliminated.

The figure standing before him now was doing something fundamentally different. It was engaging with him, listening to what he said and constructing a response that addressed the specific content of his words, and that distinction opened a distance between what Max had expected from the thirtieth floor and what was actually standing in front of him that he found himself genuinely needing a moment to cross.

His opponent smiled. "I am a soul fragment," it said. "What you see before you is not a construct. It is not assembled from the energy of this tower or shaped from the ambient spiritual force of the chamber around you. I am a remnant of a real individual, a piece of a soul left behind deliberately within these walls by the person I once was a part of, preserved here to serve as a warrior for every climber who reaches this floor."

It paused, and when it continued its voice carried the calm, matter-of-fact quality of someone recounting a history they had long since made their peace with. "My name is Darian Voksh. I am real living being. Even though this is just my so.ul fragment here, the fact that I am here and talking to you means my body is out there somewhere in the vast Divine Realm"

Max listened and then he became curious of one thing. "You gave a piece of your soul to this tower voluntarily, why?"