The two figures that materialized before Max in the second floor didn't directly attacked as sothing was happening to them.
"Hmm? They are rging together?" Max was surprised. He hadn't expected the shadowy figures could rge into one.
They coalesced into sothing resembling a humanoid shape, tendrils of black mist curling off their edges, and the mont they fully took form they lunged at Max simultaneously, moving with a coordinated aggression.
Max did not step back, did not shift into a defensive stance, and did not even bother to channel more than a sliver of his cultivation. He simply swung his sword in a single, clean arc, and the blade moved with a sharpness that seed to cut through the very concept of resistance.
The two shadowy figures were not rely defeated. They were obliterated, blasted apart by the force of that one motion, their dark forms unraveling and disintegrating into wisps of shadow that faded before they could even reach the floor.
"It seems the starting few floors are easy," Max muttered, his voice carrying the flat, almost uninterested tone of soone completing a task well beneath their attention.
His surroundings rippled and shifted as the tower registered his victory, the walls dissolving and reconstituting themselves into the next floor, and this ti three shadowy figures erged from the edges of the room.
They were all at the first level of the Rebirth Realm, their auras thin but present, a faint pressure radiating from each of them as they spread out to flank him. It was a reasonable strategy against an ordinary opponent, but Max was not ordinary, and the spacing between them ant nothing to a sword strike that carried the weight of his strength.
He brought his blade through them in a single sweeping slash, the edge carving through their conjured bodies as though they were made of smoke, and they collapsed inward and vanished before they could register what had happened to them.
Floor after floor fell in the sa fashion. By the fourth floor, four shadowy figures attempted to overwhelm him through sheer volu, rushing him from multiple angles at once, but Max moved through them with an economy of motion that was almost unsettling to watch, dispatching all of them inside of two strikes.
The fifth floor brought opponents with slightly more cohesion to their forms, their movents faster and more deliberate, but they were still comfortably within the first level of the Rebirth Realm and they crumbled beneath the sa overwhelming gap in power.
The sixth and seventh floors introduced shadowy figures that could generate crude weapons from their own bodies, spears and blades of condensed shadow that they thrust at Max with genuine killing intent, yet he broke through them without adjusting his approach, his sword shattering their improvised arms along with the bodies holding them.
The eighth floor placed him in a chamber where the shadows themselves seed to move and shift to disorient him, the lighting deliberately unreliable, figures appearing and disappearing at the edges of his vision in an attempt to scatter his focus.
Max simply extended his perception outward with his Dinsional Sovereign Body, felt the weight of each presence through the subtle fluctuations in energy they could not entirely suppress, and cut them down before they could capitalize on the visual confusion.
The ninth and tenth floors each ca with stronger opponents whose cultivation had climbed to the second level of the Rebirth Realm but the result was sa. With a slash of his sword, all the shadowy figures were cut down.
Max then easily entered the 11th floor.
---
Outside the tower, a crowd had gathered, their eyes drawn upward to the enormous screens floating above them that broadcast Max's every movent in vivid detail.
The footage captured each floor with perfect clarity, showing his singular strikes and the instantaneous dissolution of every opponent the tower sent against him, and the crowd murmured among themselves as they watched a third-level Rebirth Realm disciple move through the combat tower's lower floors as though he were taking a leisurely walk through empty corridors.
Joe stood among the observers with his arms folded and a smile pulling at one corner of his mouth, not the smile of soone impressed, but the smile of soone who already knew how this story ended and was content to watch it play out.
He watched Max sweep through another floor on the screen with that sa infuriating ease before he finally spoke.
"The first few floors are easy in the combat tower," Joe said, his tone unhurried, almost conversational, "but once he makes it halfway in, beyond the fiftieth floor mark, that is where the real difficulty starts."
He paused, letting the observation settle before continuing. "I reckon with his third-level Rebirth Realm strength he should have a very hard ti getting past the thirtieth floor, but if he sohow manages that then I am sure he would run into a wall around the fiftieth to sixtieth floor range. That is where average disciples give up."
He tilted his head slightly, as though granting a small concession before pulling it back. "And even though this kid is not exactly average, considering he sohow managed to take the sword of the Sword Sovereign, his cultivation is simply too weak to ascend the combat tower to any aningful height."
As those words left his mouth, Joe turned his gaze toward the family heads of the Black Dragon Clan, expecting to find at least so degree of agreent in their expressions.
What he found instead was sothing that gave him brief pause. Not one of them looked convinced. They stood watching the floating screens with calm, composed faces, and there was no uncertainty in their eyes, no hesitation that suggested they were privately weighing the possibility that Joe might be right.
They simply did not believe him, and they were not bothering to hide it.
The mild surprise that flickered across Joe's face lasted only a mont before it curdled into a frown. "What?" he said, looking between them. "You all believe Max would cross the sixtieth floor and enter the seventieth?"
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