SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 599: The Gates of Moonfall

Yanning found six legitimate reasons to speak with Leon during the three-day journey.

She explained the local currency and the districts where outsiders were most often cheated. She checked whether his supplies were adequate, warned him about the city gate, and described the temporary registration available to wandering cultivators without sect or clan records.

Each useful conversation contained a question.

”Your inheritance,” she asked on the second afternoon. ”Did it belong to a sect or a private cultivator?”

”I don’t know.”

”You spent years inside and never learned whose it was?”

”I know what was in the rooms. I don’t know whose name was on the door.”

She accepted that answer, then approached the same subject four hours later from a different angle. Leon developed a real respect for her technique. She never repeated a question in the same shape. Instead, she built each inquiry out of the business at hand and set the hook somewhere new.

He gave her narrow truths and nothing wide. He did not mention Velaria, the dimensional world inside him, his class, or how little he understood about this world.

Yanning was also checking on him for reasons that had less to do with information. He was the least injured person in the caravan by an enormous margin, yet she asked about his side twice on the second day. On the third morning, she happened to be near the fire when he woke despite having no task there.

Leon filed it under commerce. Building a relationship with someone powerful and unknown was sensible, and she was doing it well.

Qingyue noticed everything he missed.

She walked several paces from the opposite side of the road, occasionally consulting the crescent jade that continued pointing south. Her attention moved between Yanning and Leon often enough to make her conclusions obvious, though she kept them to herself.

She spoke to Leon privately only twice.

The first time, she said, ”You told her the water flows north.”

”It does.”

”You have said many true things since I found you.” Qingyue glanced toward him. ”Not one of them tells anyone who you are. You are very careful for a man too isolated to know what a Moonless is.”

”Careful people survive isolation.”

”Convenient.”

The second conversation came on the final evening, after the fires burned low.

”Why?” Qingyue asked.

Leon looked up from the road map Yanning had lent him. ”Why what?”

”Why interfere? You owed them nothing. You could have crossed the far side of the hill, and nobody in this world would ever have known.”

He considered the question because she deserved an honest answer rather than a noble one.

”They had already decided to kill the children. I could stop it. Walking away wouldn’t have been caution. It would have been me deciding those children were worth less than my privacy.”

Qingyue studied him across the fire.

”That is a Jade Moon answer,” she said, making it impossible to tell whether she meant it as praise.

She went to sleep soon afterward.

Other facts reached Leon in fragments from the guards, servants, and Yanning’s explanations.

The seven lesser robbers had been Void Immortals. Their leader had been an Early Earth Immortal. Leon aligned the local terms with what the System had shown him. Void Immortal and Ethereal Initiate described the same stage. Earth Immortal corresponded to Ethereal Lord.

The new terminology did not change his estimate of Qingyue. The Level 114 leopard had withdrawn upon seeing her insignia, and Leon had already assumed she was at least comparable to it and possibly much stronger. Now he merely possessed the local names for the beginning of that road.

He also learned that unregistered wandering cultivators were common enough to have their own designation and mistrusted enough that nobody used it kindly.

Moonfall Frontier City appeared late on the third afternoon.

It stood against a spur of gray mountain with the Desolation behind it. Leon stopped for a moment because the city was old. Its walls ran for kilometers, filled with formations that turned through the stone in slow, layered patterns. They had been built by people who expected centuries of attacks and had planned accordingly.

Beasts on the approach road hauled loads no animal in Velaria could have shifted. A caravan queue stretched half a kilometer from the eastern gate. Above the northern quarter, an enormous flat platform drifted at rooftop height with lanterns hanging beneath it.

”The city’s ore lift,” Yanning said, following his gaze. ”It crosses this road near dusk. Don’t stand beneath it.”

The Shen name moved their four wagons past the queue. A gate officer in dark armor came out at a jog, took one look at the four wagons where eleven had departed, and began asking questions in the clipped tone of a man who had heard too many versions of the same disaster.

Shen Baoyuan answered plainly. He named Leon and described what had happened on the road without embellishment.

The officer studied Leon. ”No identity token. No clan record. No registration.”

”No.”

”Where are you from?”

”An inheritance space south of here. It collapsed.”

”Of course it did. That is what they all say, and occasionally one of them is even telling the truth.”

Qingyue stepped forward and turned her collar enough for the silver crescent of Jade Moon Palace to catch the light. She said she had encountered Leon in the Desolation, that his account was implausible but not impossible, and that it deserved investigation rather than immediate punishment. She would bring him through the gate herself instead of leaving him outside it.

The officer’s posture changed at the sight of her insignia. He bowed—not deeply, but more than he had bowed to Shen Baoyuan—and the remaining process took less than a quarter of an hour.

Registration required Leon’s name, a drop of blood, and a controlled pulse of qi pressed into a thin jade tablet. It recorded a stable signature and confirmed that the person standing at the gate matched the person receiving the token. It did not reach deeply enough to find his second heart, the world within him, or anyone sleeping inside it.

”Name.”

”Leon.”

”Family name.”

”No family.”

The officer wrote it down without comment, which told Leon that the answer was not rare here.

The temporary jade he received was small, thin, and slightly warm. A registration mark covered one face, while a fading formation on the other showed that it would eventually need to be renewed.

Leon held it a moment longer than necessary.

Days ago, he had left a world he had rebuilt from a wasteland while carrying a civilization inside his chest. He had arrived here as a man who did not officially exist. Now he possessed just enough identity to buy, sell, learn, and sleep beneath a roof. It was temporary and built upon a story that was mostly false, but it was a beginning.

”Don’t lose it,” the officer said. ”Renew it before the mark fades.”

Moonfall’s gates rose twelve meters high and showed repairs from at least four different centuries. Leon followed the Shen wagons through them into smoke, noise, and streets crowded with more people than he had seen in one place since the City of Light.

Yanning fell into step beside him beneath the gate arch.

”Our compound is in the third ward. We have a guest wing, and my father will be insulted if you choose an inn. If you prefer one anyway, I can find you a place where the doors actually lock.” Her voice remained professional, but the warmth beneath it had become difficult for anyone except Leon to miss. ”Either way, come to me before buying anything expensive. I would prefer your first Moonfall merchant not cheat you badly enough to embarrass the rest of us.”

”Understood.”

Satisfied, she went ahead to direct the wagons.

Qingyue had stopped a few paces inside the gate. She looked south over the wall, the flat crescent of jade open on her palm and still turned toward whatever had drawn her into the Desolation.

Then she closed her hand around it and looked at Leon instead.

”You’ll be here for a while,” she said.

It was neither a question nor an offer.

”For a while.”

”Good.”

Qingyue turned and walked deeper into the city.

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