Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 872: One Kilogram for a Head

Above the polar region, ribbons of aurora drifted across a sky thick with stars, their pale light washing the world in an eerie glow. From a distance, everything looked still, frozen into silence. But at the very crown of the world, where the wind howled without restraint, two figures dragged themselves over the final ridge and stood upright against the gale.

Ethan and Blackie.

The climb had been brutal. Even for them.

Ethan stepped forward to the very edge of the summit and looked down. A dense layer of clouds stretched beneath his boots like a silver sea. Above him, the sky felt impossibly close, vast and intimate all at once. For a strange moment, he felt detached from Earth entirely, as if he had climbed beyond the world itself and now stood suspended between earth and void. The constellations glittered so vividly it seemed he could reach up and brush them with his fingertips.

"Boss," Blackie called out over the wind, "we going down now?"

Ethan tore his gaze from the sky and surveyed the summit properly. The peak formed a circular depression, almost like a crater. From up here, it did not look particularly large. Contained. Finite.

’This is the Forbidden Vale? It’s this small?’

Doubt crept in. After everything the Cloudfang elder had described, this felt underwhelming.

"Yeah," Ethan said at last. "We’re going down."

He moved toward the inner slope.

"More climbing?" Blackie grimaced, peering over the edge.

Ethan did not bother answering. He had already begun descending. With a resigned mutter, Blackie followed.

They dropped at speed, boots and claws biting into rock and ice as they made their way down the inner wall. The wind shifted as they descended, thickening, swirling. Then they passed through the cloud layer.

The world beneath them opened.

Ethan stopped so abruptly that Blackie nearly collided with him. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Below lay an expanse of vivid, impossible green.

Towering trees, broad-leafed and ancient, stretched in every direction. Dense canopies rippled like an emerald ocean. The air shimmered faintly with moisture and life. This was the highest point in the entire polar circle, surrounded by endless snowfields and frozen mountains. Yet within this hidden basin, it was as though another climate, another ecosystem, had been carved out of reality and sealed away.

From above, it had looked like a modest circular valley.

From here, it was vast.

Its borders dissolved into haze and distance, far beyond what the summit view had suggested. The scale felt wrong, subtly distorted, as though space itself refused to behave normally.

Ethan narrowed his eyes and extended his Soul Sense.

Nothing.

It was not merely blocked. It was suppressed, flattened against an invisible barrier that pressed back with quiet authority.

A sharp buzz vibrated against his wrist.

[Beep... Detecting multiple life forms entering monitored perimeter.]

Shatterstar’s interface flickered to life, but the signal was unstable. Static crawled across the display. The screen shimmered faintly as if resisting the effort to function. Red dots began appearing one after another, clustering along the outer regions of the polar circle.

More than a hundred.

Even Shatterstar’s powerful transmitters were being disrupted by whatever field saturated this place.

Ethan’s gaze shifted downward again. The valley floor was still three or four kilometers below. If he descended all the way, he suspected he would lose contact entirely.

His jaw tightened.

’Why now?’

Why were so many people entering the polar region at once? And how did they know to come here?

He did not allow himself to dwell on it. Turning back now would mean climbing all the way back to the summit, and whatever was calling to him from below was not growing weaker.

He continued downward.

---

Across the polar expanse, at multiple entry points, more than a dozen teams advanced through the snowfields. They were the life forms Shatterstar had flagged. Beyond them, even more were converging from different directions, their movements coordinated by a single piece of information.

These individuals wore light clothing, some barely more than layered shirts and tactical gear. In temperatures that could freeze an ordinary person solid in minutes, they should have been statues of ice.

Instead, they walked through the storm.

Frost gathered in their hair and along their brows, but their movements remained steady. Energy Users. Mutants. High-tier ability wielders drawn from every corner of the globe.

They were here for one reason.

Ethan Caelum.

Half a day earlier, a post had surfaced on the dark web. At first glance it resembled any other bounty listing. Target name. Coordinates. Confirmation of identity.

But the reward was different.

Those who operated on the dark web were mercenaries, assassins, power brokers. They dealt in currency, leverage, blood. This bounty offered none of that.

It offered purified energy crystals.

Perfectly refined. Fully absorbable. Potent beyond comparison.

Since the global energy eruptions, the value of pure energy had become universally understood. Practitioners at higher tiers required vast quantities to advance, and the energy provided through Ethereal had begun to plateau for them. Over the past year, many had noticed a pattern. Ethereal granted explosive growth to newcomers, but for those already in the Prenatal or Nurturing stages, the returns diminished sharply, as though the system itself resisted feeding them further.

Then the strange groups had appeared.

Following them came the energy orbs.

The energy contained within those orbs was pristine, compatible with nearly anyone, and dramatically accelerated cultivation. The problem was access. Every orb site was heavily guarded by those same mysterious factions. Outsiders were repelled long before they could reach the core, forced to absorb only the thin residue leaking into the surroundings.

So when the bounty appeared, offering one full kilogram of purified energy crystals, the reaction was immediate.

The dark web had verified the goods. That was their rule. Clients prepaid the reward into escrow. Upon confirmation of the target’s death, the payout would be released. Neither party would ever meet.

One kilogram.

No one had seen crystals in such quantity before. But the dark web’s reputation was absolute. If they allowed the post, the goods existed.

The listing also included precise coordinates.

The polar region.

The apex of the world.

If Ethan had seen it, he would have felt a chill colder than the surrounding ice. His location had been pinpointed with terrifying accuracy.

Who could have provided that information?

Was there someone close to him feeding details into the shadows?

Because it was an open bounty, the reward would go to whoever completed the kill first.

The result was inevitable.

A feeding frenzy.

Many of those arriving in the first wave already bore frost-whitened hair and stiffened beards, the cold seeping into them despite their resistance.

"Fuck, it’s freezing," a white-haired man muttered within a twelve-person squad, rubbing his arms as ice clung to his sleeves. "I swear I’m turning into a popsicle."

"Quit whining, Charles," snapped the blond man leading the group. His own breath fogged thickly, teeth clicking despite his attempt at composure. "We’re all cold. Look at the guys ahead of us. They’re barely wearing anything. It’s a contest now. First one to put on a coat loses."

"Y-yeah," a blonde woman added through chattering teeth, her entire body trembling. "Charles, stop complaining."

"Bullshit," Charles shot back, narrowing his eyes at her. "You’re wearing an extra layer."

"Shut up, Charles, or I’ll gouge your eyes out," she snapped, cheeks flushed from more than just cold.

"Enough," the blond leader cut in, voice firm. "Conserve energy. Conserve heat. We’re Dark List Team Nine. We don’t get shown up."

Similar scenes unfolded across the polar expanse. The first wave consisted primarily of top-ranked Dark List teams. Among them, pride was currency. Endurance was reputation. The cold became another arena to assert dominance. Adding layers now would be an admission of weakness.

Behind them trailed the second wave.

Lower-ranked teams. Independent operators. Opportunists.

They had no interest in posturing.

Bundled in insulated gear, faces half-hidden behind masks and goggles, they moved steadily across the snow.

"Are those idiots in front insane?" one man muttered within a heavily layered squad, watching the nearly bare-backed vanguard cut through the wind.

High-level practitioners did not suffer diminished vision in the cold. His words carried.

His teammate elbowed him sharply.

"Shut up," he hissed. "You want that heard? Those are top fifteen Dark List teams. They’d skin you alive before breakfast and call it cardio."