NABC Chapter 450: Rewards for Clearing the First Floor—2
Chapter 450: Rewards for Clearing the First Floor—2
For a couple of seconds, the light enveloped him completely—warm and pervasive, reaching into places that light shouldn’t logically be able to reach. When it faded, his body felt completely restored. Better than restored—genuinely refreshed in a way that made the exhaustion of the past several hours feel like a distant memory.
Every wound closed. Every burst vessel is repaired. The subtle accumulated strain on his bones and muscle fibers from the extended battle is gone.
Not that I wouldn’t have healed eventually anyway, he noted with private amusement, but still.
He checked himself carefully from top to bottom, looking for any other change beyond the physical restoration.
Something was subtly different. He could feel it—a barely perceptible shift in some quality he couldn’t quite name or locate precisely. But whatever it was, it wasn’t accompanied by any system notification or obvious stat change.
I’ll figure it out eventually.
When the white light fully dissipated, two items were left floating in the air before him.
The first was a heart.
Black, pulsating with a steady rhythm that shouldn’t have been possible for a detached organ, covered in thin silver patterns that traced paths across its surface like living circuitry. The patterns shifted slowly as he watched, never quite repeating the same configuration. Floating around it were runic symbols he didn’t recognize from any written system he’d encountered—they drifted in loose orbit, catching light that didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular.
Looking at it deeply, dangerously easy.
He found himself staring.
The silver patterns pulled at his attention in a way that made thought feel slow and unnecessary, like standing at the edge of something vast and being gently convinced that falling would be fine.
He lost five full minutes to it before something—instinct, maybe, or some deeply buried survival habit—caused him to physically look away.
That was nothing. He blinked several times, deliberately refocusing on the far wall of the arena. Genuinely dangerous just to look at. I need to be careful.
The second item was smaller. A single sphere roughly the size of a closed fist, deep blue in base color with multicolored runic lines circling its surface in complex, shifting patterns. More visually elaborate than the heart, in the conventional sense—it looked like someone had compressed an entire night sky into a portable form.
And his elemental affinities reacted to it immediately.
All of them. Simultaneously.
Like a chorus of recognition, every element he carried responded with an intensity that was almost physical—pulling toward the sphere with a sensation he’d never experienced from any other object or material.
It feels like... like it comes from the same place I do. Or maybe the same place all elements do.
He didn’t stare at it for five minutes this time, choosing wisdom over curiosity.
Leon attempted to place both items into his spatial ring.
Neither would go in. The ring simply rejected them as if the items weren’t there.
He tried his soul-connected storage space next—the internal inventory that had been with him since his first day in this world.
Same result. Complete rejection from both.
He stood there for a moment, considering the problem.
Outside the tower, I’m in my own dimensional realm. Complete privacy, complete safety. No one is going to take anything.
Practical solution: wind element.
He extended fine threads of air around both items, lifting them gently into stable suspension beside him. They drifted along as he walked, the heart continuing its slow pulsation and the sphere continuing its endless multicolored orbital display.
Two portals had materialized at the far end of the arena while he’d been examining the rewards.
One was clearly labeled Exit in clean, simple text.
The other had no label at all. But the faint aura coming from it—just slightly different in quality from the exit portal—made the answer obvious.
Second floor.
Leon glanced at the unmarked portal for a moment as he walked.
Next time. I want to be able to bring Seraphine. Hopefully, the second floor allows party formation.
He turned his attention back to the exit portal and stepped forward.
His foot connected with something solid and completely invisible. The impact wasn’t harsh—more like walking into a glass wall that had no intention of breaking—and he stopped, mildly surprised.
Then the system messages began arriving again.
[The Primordial Void Heart cannot be removed from the tower]
[This item may only be utilized by a challenger who carries recognition from the Floor One Authority Fragment]
[Without the tower’s stabilization during the merging process and the recognition of the Floor One Authority, utilizing this item carries an estimated 99% probability of death]
[This item is bound to the recognized challenger only]
Leon stared at the notifications for several seconds.
Then he said something out loud that would have made Seraphine lecture him extensively about language.
The sound echoed across the empty arena with considerable feeling.
He’d been genuinely, deeply excited about this particular reward—not primarily for himself, but for the solution it represented to a problem that had been sitting quietly in the back of his mind for some time. The idea of Seraphine—or someone else close to him—carrying a constitution treasure of this caliber, the way it would change their capability and resilience in the increasingly dangerous situations he knew were coming...
And it’s bound here. Can’t leave. 99% death chance without the tower’s involvement.
He exhaled slowly and stared at the notification for another moment.
Alright. Fine. No choice.
He had the first-floor recognition. The tower would provide stabilization. Those were the two stated requirements, and he satisfied both.
His curiosity shifted from frustrated to genuinely interested as he considered the practical question.
I already have a heart. An extraordinary one that’s the source of most of my strongest abilities. So what exactly happens when you merge a second heart into someone who already has one?
Do they combine somehow into something unified? Do I end up with two functional hearts operating in parallel? Is there a dominant outcome?
He didn’t know. The description offered nothing about pre-existing heart situations.
But one thing he felt absolute certainty about: whatever the outcome, he would be significantly stronger after the merge than before it. The trajectory of everything he’d ever merged with or absorbed pointed in the same direction—upward, always upward.
The anticipation of that was enough to settle the frustration about Seraphine.
She’ll get something else. I’ll find another solution for her.
Another message appeared from the tower, appearing below the previous notifications with that same clean, unhurried pace.