My attributes are increasing infinitely

Chapter 484: Unfathomable potential

The black light did not hold.

It trembled once, twice, a third time, and then something fundamental shifted.

Those watching from the upper floors felt it before they saw it. A pressure that had no physical source pressed against their senses, against the very fabric of the spatial treasure that housed them. The castle, which had stood unchanged for centuries, responded with a low, resonant hum that vibrated through stone and bone alike.

On the sixth floor, the female member who had spoken earlier, a woman with silver hair and eyes that held the weight of decades, stumbled backward. Her hand remained pressed against her mouth, but her eyes had widened beyond composure.

"The color," she whispered. "It’s"

She could not finish.

The black light folded inward.

And from its center emerged something that had not been seen in Elysium for longer than living memory could account for.

Dark Gold.

The light rose from the disk like a pillar, steady and absolute. It was not bright in the way other colors had been. It was dense. Heavy. As if the light itself possessed mass and pressed against the air around it.

Dominic’s legs gave way.

He did not choose to kneel. His body simply refused to hold him upright. His hands struck the stone floor, and his head lowered, and for a long moment, he could not breathe.

Heroes, he thought, the word surfacing from somewhere deep in his mind. The ultimate existences.

He had heard of them. Everyone had. They were not legends. Legends could be doubted. Heroes were something else entirely. They were the foundation upon which Elysium had been built. The names that even the most powerful clans spoke in tones that bordered on reverence.

There had been seven.

Seven heroes who had carved order from chaos, who had established the laws that governed potential itself, who had

The pillar of Dark Gold expanded.

And then it moved.

Not outward. Not upward.

Through.

The light pierced the floors above. One. Two. Three. It passed through the castle’s spatial layers as if they did not exist, reaching toward the seventh floor, the eighth, the highest chambers where the clan’s elders had not stirred in years.

On the seventh floor, an old man with skin like cracked earth opened his eyes for the first time in a decade.

He did not speak. He simply rose from his meditation position and began to move downward.

On the eighth floor, a door that had not been opened in a century began to glow from within.

---

In the training grounds, those who had been rushing toward the hall stopped where they stood.

The dog-headed man had crossed half the distance when the Dark Gold light erupted. His stride halted so abruptly that his claws scraped furrows into the stone beneath him.

His ears flattened.

His tail, which had been held high with curiosity, tucked low.

Every instinct he possessed, every survival reflex honed through years of combat and advancement, screamed at him to retreat.

But he could not move.

None of them could.

The light held them in place, not through force, but through presence. It was like standing before something that had no obligation to acknowledge your existence but could end it without effort regardless.

"What is that," someone said behind him. The voice was cracked. Uncertain.

The dog-headed man did not answer.

He had no answer to give.

---

Inside the hall, the Dark Gold pillar had begun to shift.

It was subtle at first. A faint oscillation at the edges, as if the color was trying to resolve itself into something else. The pressure in the room doubled, then tripled, then climbed beyond any metric Dominic could measure.

He remained on his knees, his forehead nearly touching the stone.

Ethan stood at the center of it all.

His hand was still on the disk.

His expression remained unchanged.

But something was happening beneath his skin. The members who had gathered at the hall’s entrance, those who had arrived just as the Dark Gold manifested, could see it clearly. Faint lines of light traced paths across his arm, his neck, the side of his face. They were not the color of the pillar. They were something else entirely.

A color that had no name.

The disk began to crack.

It started at the point where Ethan’s palm made contact. A single hairline fracture, no wider than a thread, splitting the pale surface.

Then another.

And another.

The cracks spread outward in a pattern that was not random. They followed the faint lines that had always been etched into the disk’s surface, the veins that had been there since the castle’s construction. But now those veins were widening, splitting, separating.

The Dark Gold pillar flickered.

And in that flicker, something new emerged.

A color that existed at the edge of perception. A shade that the eye could not quite capture, that the mind could not quite categorize. It was not black. It was not white. It was not any color that had been named in any record, any text, any memory passed down through generations.

It was the color of something that had not yet been defined.

The disk shattered.

Not explosively. There was no blast, no outward force, no sound that matched the scale of destruction. The disk simply ceased to be a cohesive object. It fractured along every line, every vein, every hidden fault, and collapsed into a fine dust that scattered across the platform.

The pillar vanished.

The pressure vanished.

And silence fell.

---

It was not the silence of a room that had grown quiet.

It was the silence of something broken.

Dominic remained on his knees, his mind refusing to process what he had just witnessed. The testing disk was not merely a tool. It was a foundation artifact, one of the clan’s oldest possessions, something that had survived wars and disasters and the passage of centuries.

And it had shattered.

Because of a potential that could not be contained.

He lifted his head slowly, his movements mechanical.

Ethan stood on the platform, his hand still extended, now resting on nothing. The faint lines beneath his skin had faded, leaving no trace of what had just occurred. His expression was calm. Almost detached.

His eyes, however, had changed.

There was something in them that had not been there before. Not awareness exactly. Something deeper. A weight that had not been present when they entered the hall.

The hall’s entrance filled with bodies.

Members who had been on the training grounds, members who had descended from the floors above, members whose ranks Dominic could not even guess at. They stood in the doorway, on the threshold, unwilling to cross into the space where the disk had been.

No one spoke.

No one moved.

Then the crowd parted.

Three figures stepped through.

The first was the old man from the seventh floor, his skin like cracked earth, his eyes pale as ash. He moved with the slow deliberation of someone who had forgotten that speed was an option.

The second was a woman whose age was impossible to determine. Her hair was white, but her face held no lines. Her eyes were dark and deep, and they did not blink.

The third was a figure wrapped entirely in shadows that did not move with the air. No face was visible. No form could be discerned. It simply stood, and the space around it bent slightly, as if unwilling to hold it.

The old man reached the edge of the platform.

He looked at the dust that had been the disk.

He looked at Ethan.

And for the first time in fifty years, the elder of the seventh floor spoke.

"History," he said, his voice like stone grinding against stone, "has changed."

The words hung in the air.

No one disputed them.

No one could.

The woman with white hair moved closer, her dark eyes fixed on Ethan with an intensity that seemed to peel away layers. Her lips pressed together.

"The disk did not fail," she said quietly. "It was not designed to contain what it encountered."

The shadow figure did not speak. It did not move. But the space around it bent further, and those closest to it took an involuntary step back.

Dominic finally found his voice.

"Elder," he said, his throat dry, "his potential"

"Has no rank," the old man interrupted. His pale eyes had not left Ethan’s face. "The disk reached Ultimate. Then it reached beyond Ultimate. And when it tried to define what came next, it could not."

He turned to look at the dust scattered across the platform.

"That disk has tested potential for eons. It has recorded every rank that exists. Every color that can manifest." His voice grew quieter. "It encountered a color it did not recognize. A potential it could not categorize."

He looked back at Ethan.

"And so it broke."

The silence that followed was different from the ones before. It was the silence of understanding settling into place. Of implications being weighed.

The woman with white hair spoke again, her voice carrying a weight that made Dominic’s chest tighten.

"There are records," she said slowly, "of something like this. From before the heroes. From the time when Elysium was still a bigger mystery."

She paused.

"They speak of potentials that existed outside the established hierarchy. Colors that were never meant to be tested because they were never meant to exist within a structure at all."