SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 590: The Missing Road

Leon spent the next day proving that power was not the problem.

He began by reconstructing the missing coordinate structure around the fragment he had recovered. Much of it could be inferred from the surviving sections, but an interworld coordinate did not tolerate approximation. One uncertain segment turned the entire route away from its destination.

His first reconstruction pointed into the dark between worlds and ended there.

He dismantled it and began again.

The second approach reversed the surviving descent path instead of replacing it. The passage had been built to carry travellers in one direction. Its anchors were not merely pointed toward Velaria; every layer of their structure depended upon that direction. When Leon inverted the flow, the old foundations pulled against themselves.

He stopped before the strain destroyed the scar.

For the third attempt, he treated the remnant only as a guide and built a new channel around it. That road reached beyond Velaria’s laws. Then it drifted. Constructed entirely from one side, it possessed nothing at the distant end to hold it in place.

”A bridge without a second shore,” Seraphine said.

Leon watched the channel slide away from the coordinate and collapse. ”A bridge thrown toward where I know the shore should be.”

”That sounds worse.”

”It is.”

His fourth attempt anchored the foreign coordinate from Velaria’s side. It held for four seconds before slipping free. He could perceive the other world, but perception was not contact. He was trying to fix something in place without being able to touch it.

The fifth attempt sent controlled amounts of energy through the surviving connection. A thin current passed. A stronger one followed. When he increased it to the level needed to support an actual passage, the incomplete coordinate structure buckled under the load.

Leon caught the collapse and rebuilt the damaged sections.

None of the failures injured him. His mana recovered during the intervals between tests, replenishing at its established pace until expenditure never became a lasting limitation. His channels remained stable. His perception did not falter.

That made the answer harder to avoid.

He was strong enough to understand the problem. He possessed the spatial control to test possible solutions without destroying himself or the ancient scar. But strength could not replace a structure that no longer existed.

And every weakness became worse when he included the dimensional world.

He intended to carry a bound rank-three world across the passage. The settlements, the Ascension Tower, Xyra, the Pyrans, the sleeping dragon, and everything else connected to it would add pressure far beyond that of five people crossing. His best channel would have torn apart the moment he tried to push that weight through it.

Xyra examined the results through their connection. She identified the failure in each attempt, but she did not produce a sixth solution from knowledge she did not possess.

”You have enough raw energy,” she said in his mind ”You have recovered a valid destination, and your understanding is sufficient to guide a crossing of once-built bridge. What you lack is a structure capable of rebuilding and anchoring the road itself.”

Leon sat in the center of the ruined chamber, the foreign coordinate held carefully at the edge of his perception.

A structure that could rebuild a road.

Not greater spatial power. Not another attempt to force incomplete anchors to perform a task for which they had never been designed.

A tool.

Then he remembered the sealed cache in his storage.

He had carried it out of the Ascension Tower after Floor Three and left it unopened. At the time, there had been wounded people waiting outside the Tower and a Class Reawakening Dungeon still active. Later came the reunion, the dead, and the responsibilities inside his world. Another treasure had never been the most urgent thing in front of him.

Now it might be.

Leon withdrew the cache.

[Ascension Tower — Sealed Reward Cache (Floor Three)]

It was the reward he had received after earning an SSS evaluation on the floor. SSS described the evaluation, not the rank of whatever waited inside.

He broke the seal.

The cache unfolded into light. When the radiance faded, a dark metallic object rested in his palm, shaped like the central stone of an arch and covered in lines that shifted whenever he tried to focus upon them.

[Worldway Keystone — Mythical]

Leon read its function once.

Then again.

The Keystone could not discover another world. It could not invent a destination coordinate or create a road where no connection had ever existed. It required a genuine surviving link and a valid coordinate.

He had already found both.

Once supplied with them, the Keystone could reconstruct missing sections of an interworld route, reverse a one-way passage, stabilize it during a crossing, and record its endpoints so the same road could later be reopened at an enormous energy cost.

Without the scar and the coordinate Leon had recovered, it would have been useless for reaching this particular world.

With them, it was the missing structure.

Ira stared at the Keystone. ”You were carrying that the entire time?”

”I did not know what was inside.”

”Still. I feel like this should teach us something about opening rewards sooner.”

”It teaches us that the reward would have done nothing before I found a destination.”

”That lesson is less entertaining.”

Leon placed the Keystone against the spatial scar.

It recognized the surviving connection immediately. The lines across its surface ignited, reached into the wound, and then stopped.

It did not build the route for him.

It waited for direction.

Leon guided it through the old structure section by section. He supplied his understanding of the original descent path. The Keystone restored missing foundations beneath each reversed segment, turning a route that had only run downward into one capable of holding in both directions.

Xyra monitored the dimensional world and warned him whenever the growing connection placed pressure upon its boundary. Seraphine, Ira, Vyra, Loriel, and Luna remained in the chamber, watching the dead scar become a road again.

The work took most of the night.

Near the end, the Mark of the Uncounted flared.

A foreign claim reached toward the forming passage from the direction of the abyssal crack. It was thin and searching, feeling along the damaged framework for a place to attach itself.

Leon saw it because of the Mark. Cutting it was his own act.

He severed the claim before it touched the new route, then closed the opening it had used through the surrounding framework. Only when no trace remained did he continue.

Beyond the distant abyssal crack, the enormous red eye opened.

It did not attack. It simply watched, its attention fixed upon Leon with patient recognition.

No evidence told him when the being had first attached itself to the damaged framework or what it wanted from the Upper Ones’ road. He refused to turn ignorance into a conclusion.

The eye remained open.

Leon returned his focus to the Keystone.

An hour later, the passage stabilized.

Energy from the higher-ranked world flowed into Velaria in a thin, steady current. The air around the restored road seemed to gain weight. Seraphine’s posture tightened. Loriel reached out before catching herself. Ira released a quiet, appreciative curse.

Leon felt the distant world holding at the other end.

Real and reachable right in front of him.

The route remained open only long enough for him to complete the test. Then, under his direction, the Keystone folded it closed. The chamber returned to stillness, leaving the restored structure dormant around the original scar.

[Worldway route established.]

[Endpoints recorded.]

[Passage dormant.]

The abyssal eye had no open road to follow.

Leon looked at the silent Keystone and knew the search was over.

It was time to leave Velaria.