SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 613: One Night Until Judgment

The vessel was smaller than Leon expected—twelve paces from bow to stern, with a low cabin and an open rear deck. Its pale wooden hull had been grown as one piece rather than joined. Qingyue touched the jade plate in the forward rail, the deck came alive, and Moonfall fell away.

Yanning stood in the courtyard below with one hand raised. Shen Baoyuan had gone inside, since a family being watched does not stand about staring at the sky.

Leon promised nobody he would return soon. The Shens had time, information, stronger walls, and their own competence. A promise made from a sect he had not entered would have meant little.

As the vessel climbed, Moonfall became a shape. Leon saw the wall on its long crooked circuit, mining roads stretching west, and the ore lift over the northern quarter. Beyond them, the Desolation opened into black basins, metal-veined ridges, a vast petrified forest, and a distant grey column where a spiritual storm turned above the south.

He had spent a week learning that city from streets and ledgers. From up here it took eleven seconds to cross.

And that’s one frontier city, on the edge of one region.

”You’re quiet,” Qingyue said.

”Recalibrating.”

”Good. Most people wait until after they’ve said something foolish.”

The journey took the day, and she talked through a fair part of it, which surprised him until he understood she was preparing him.

”Understand what the Palace is before you walk into it,” she said. ”We’re a sect. Powerful families live inside our territories, but none inherit standing at Jade Moon. Most accepted candidates begin as outer disciples and rise through cultivation, instruction, and service.”

”How far up does that go?”

”Outer disciples, inner, core. Then personal disciples, taken by a specific elder and that elder’s responsibility.” She adjusted something on the jade plate without looking at it. ”Above them elders, above them Supreme Elders, and above all of it the Palace Mistress. That’s as much structure as is useful to you today.”

”And your recommendation gets me where?”

”To the reception compound and an examination. That’s all.” She glanced over. ”Some elders will watch because I brought you personally. Others will assume I found something strange in the Three-Moon Desolation and became sentimental. Tomorrow’s results decide which group was right.”

She adjusted the vessel’s course. ”I am a Late Earth Immortal. That gives my recommendation weight, but it does not let me rewrite the Palace’s recruitment rules.”

Earth Immortal was the local name for an Ethereal Lord, the System’s levels 111 through 130. Qingyue spoke as though Leon had grown up knowing that. He let her continue without revealing that he translated every local realm into a different classification inside his head.

”And unknown origin?”

”Isn’t a disqualification. We take orphans, wanderers, and survivors of collapsed places every year.” Her tone flattened. ”But if the examination finds a corrupted foundation, a false age, or hostile techniques, they will hold you and determine what you are.”

”What’s tomorrow?”

”Three tests, in order.” She counted them off. ”Bone age — confirms roughly how old you are, and catches crude body possession, age concealment, and reconstructed bodies. Then a cultivation-realm reading, level and stability, built to catch false suppression or a forced advancement. Then the spiritual-root monument.”

Leon kept his face still. ”Which does what?”

”It reads your elemental structure—how many affinities you possess, how they interact, and what that suggests about your potential.” She looked over the rail. ”The bone-age test should be routine. The cultivation reading will probably confirm that you’re at least an Archon. I watched you fight the Moonless and the robbers, then examined what you did at the Shen estate. The monument is the part I cannot predict.”

That’s the one.

He considered the problem while she talked about the coast. The monument read spiritual roots, meridians, and structures the natives here developed from birth, and he had none of them. It might find affinities without a root, power without local circulation, and a foundation unlike anything it had previously examined.

It might reject him. It might call him abnormal. It might read a great deal more than he wanted read.

He had decided to walk into it regardless, since a year of guessing in frontier markets was the worse outcome. But he built the answer he would need and put it where he could reach it fast.

The realm had its own inheritance. Its methods weren’t the methods out here, and my teachers never explained the mechanism to me — I learned to use it, not to describe it.

It was narrow enough to survive ordinary questioning.

”You’re taking a risk with this,” he said, after a while.

”Some.”

”Why?”

Qingyue considered it long enough that he thought she might not answer.

”I would rather answer awkward questions for bringing back one unusual candidate than spend the next century wondering whether I abandoned real talent because its origin was inconvenient.” She shrugged. ”If they turn you away, I’ll be laughed at for a season. I can survive that.”

The land changed in the last two hours.

The highlands broke into ridges before giving way to jade-colored water, dark green in the deeps and nearly translucent over the shallows. Islands floated above it. Terraces hung from cliff faces in stacked half-moons, while enormous formation rings on the water drew in the light of a silver moon before sunset.

Somewhere past all of it, in the haze, stood peaks that were not peaks.

The vessel banked south and came down toward a walled compound on a headland — handsome, well kept, and obviously outer.

The reception officials treated Qingyue with immediate respect and Leon with careful neutrality.

Two disciples in pale gray bowed to her the moment she stepped down. An official came out of the hall, bowed lower, and turned to Leon with a face that offered nothing.

”Registration.”

Leon handed over the green tablet. The man read it twice and held it to the light to check the seal.

”Shen Yuanhe’s personal bond. Peak Void Immortal, Moonfall.” He looked over the top of it. ”A significant guarantee for a man with no lineage line.”

”He had his reasons.”

”He usually does.” The official set it down and turned. ”Senior Sister?”

She pressed her seal into the wax beside the city’s mark. ”My recommendation. He examines tomorrow.”

The official entered it in a ledger and read the terms back. Leon received one night in an eastern courtyard and one examination at the first mark after dawn. He had no access to the inner grounds, archives, training terraces, or practice waters. If the examiners found him unsuitable, he would leave that day.

”The courtyard is better than the candidates’ hall,” the official added, closing the ledger. ”Because Senior Sister Qingyue brought you personally. Nobody here has formed a judgment about you yet.”

”Understood.”

Qingyue walked him as far as the courtyard gate and no further.

”First mark after dawn. The hall with the double doors on the north side. Don’t be early or late.” She turned to go, then stopped. ”My name brought you through the gate. It does nothing in that hall tomorrow.”

”I’d rather it worked that way.”

”Yes,” she said. ”I thought you might.”

The courtyard was small and old and very good: a single-story residence, a walled garden with a stone basin, one gate, and a privacy array laid into the wall in three concentric rings.

Leon activated it and spent forty minutes examining each layer. The residence transmitted no sound or images. The middle ring blocked intrusion, while the outer wards reported attacks, unauthorized departures, and large releases of hostile energy.

Watching for a fight or a runner. Nobody’s listening.

Fair enough. He would have built the same thing.

He left every layer untouched and added a self-contained spatial isolation inside the residence. From outside, the courtyard’s privacy formation continued operating exactly as issued.

He checked it three times, then sat down on the floor in the middle of the room and let the last two weeks arrive all at once.

He carried a lawful identity, Shen Yuanhe’s guarantee, a merchant token, and the knowledge that two prisoners remained safely sealed in Moonfall. Eleven days east, the Qiao clan still believed it had won. In the morning, three tests would decide whether the path ahead remained open.

The courtyard was silent. The garden basin dripped. Out over the water a formation ring hummed to itself as it drank the moonlight.

Leon confirmed the seal one last time, then turned toward the open space in the center of the room.

For the first time since entering the higher world, he finally had a safe place to bring them out.