SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 621: The Truth He Could Afford

The inner doors closed behind them and the noise of the examination compound stopped as though it had been switched off.

Ji Liansu did not hurry. She walked ahead of Leon along a corridor of pale stone that opened, after perhaps two hundred paces, onto a terrace on the seaward face of the peak — and then into a chamber that surprised him by being ordinary.

He had expected jade and gold. What he found was a plain room with a low table, four cushions, and a shallow channel of water running across the floor from one wall to the other, six inches wide, carrying a slow current out through a gap in the stone and down the cliff face. The only decoration was the water. Everything else had been left alone.

She sat, indicated the cushion across from her, and touched two fingers to the table.

The formations closed. Leon felt them go up in layers, and then felt something else settle over the room — a quieter, older working that had nothing to do with keeping people out.

”Nothing said in this room is recorded,” Ji Liansu said. ”I will not repeat any of it unless the Palace’s survival requires me to. My name is Ji Liansu. You may use it here. Outside, you will not.”

”Understood.”

”Good.” She folded her hands. ”Then I will ask the question I did not ask in the hall, in front of thirty people who would have written down your answer.”

Leon waited.

”The monument named nine,” she said. ”I have read the record twice and I have looked at you once, which was sufficient. Your foundation contains more than that classification accounts for.” Her eyes did not move from his face. ”Why did it stop?”

There it is.

He had known this was coming since the moment she said I would rather understand it than announce it in front of the assembled elders. He had spent the walk here deciding what he could afford, and he had arrived at an answer he did not entirely like and could not improve.

The woman across the table was a Peak Heaven Immortal. He had no idea what that meant in practical terms and no intention of finding out. In a direct confrontation, he had no realistic way to resist her for even a second. But she had stood in a hall full of elders bidding for him and said with his cooperation, and nobody has troubled to ask him what he needs. She had offered him room to choose when nobody present could have forced her to.

A complete lie now would be discovered eventually. And when it was, everything after it would be poisoned.

”It stopped because it ran out of channels,” Leon said.

Ji Liansu’s expression did not change.

”Nine sockets cut into the stone,” he went on. ”I could feel it working. It was honest — it took what I had and pushed each piece into the nearest place it understood. When the ninth filled, it had nowhere left to ask a question, so it stopped asking.” He met her eyes. ”That was the monument’s limit. Not mine.”

”What else is in you?”

”That’s the part I’m not going to answer.”

”No,” she agreed. ”I did not expect you to. What else?”

He took a slow breath.

”I didn’t grow up in a sealed inheritance realm. There wasn’t one.” He said it evenly. ”I came here from a lower-ranked world. It had a ceiling. I found a way past it and brought myself across, and everything I am was built there along a path that has nothing to do with roots or meridians or anything else in your library.”

The water ran along its channel. Ji Liansu sat with her hands folded and said nothing for what felt like a considerable time.

”How long have you been in this world?” she asked.

”Less than two weeks.”

Something moved behind her eyes then, and it was not doubt.

”That explains a great deal that has been bothering me since I read your record,” she said. ”You did not know what a Moonless was. You bought a children’s primer on meridians and understood half of it, which Elder Wen recorded because he thought it was a lie. Your circulation follows no route in any text I could name, and I could name several thousand.” She tilted her head slightly. ”And your age. Twenty-two, with that foundation—I had already decided the answer had to be a sealed realm with an extraordinary inheritance and a great deal of time distortion. A foreign path in a thin world is simpler and fits better.”

”You believe me.”

”I believe the version of you sitting in front of me makes more sense with this explanation than without it.” She reached down and let two fingers rest in the running water. ”A lower world. Energy-poor, I assume, by our standards. And you reached Peak Ascendant there, at twenty-two, and built a foundation my examiner could not map.”

”It wasn’t easy.”

”It was a gem buried where the surrounding earth could not feed it,” Ji Liansu said. ”That is not an insult to your home. A stone of that quality does not become less valuable for having formed in poor ground. It simply means nobody there ever saw what it could be, including, I suspect, you.”

Leon had no answer for that, which she seemed to take as one.

”Your public history remains a collapsed inheritance realm,” she said, withdrawing her hand and drying it on a cloth. ”I will forbid further investigation into your origins, personally, and the Supreme Elders will accept that because they have to. I will not tell them what you have told me. Your former life and whatever you left in it are your own business.”

”Why?”

”Because you told me without being made to.” She set the cloth aside. ”That is worth more to me than the information. I have taken disciples before who had to be opened like a locked chest. It is exhausting, and everything you learn that way is suspect.”

Then her manner changed. It was not a large change — her posture stayed the same, her hands stayed folded — but the temperature of the room did something, and Leon found himself paying a great deal more attention than he had been.

”There is one thing I require,” Ji Liansu said. ”It is the only thing, and it is not negotiable. You are part of Jade Moon Palace now. I do not ask for devotion, and I do not care whether you ever come to feel anything for this place at all. Serve it honestly, learn from it, take what it can give you, and go as far as you can go. That is all I want.”

”And if I betray it?”

”Then I will not forgive you,” she said, in exactly the same tone she had used to discuss the water. ”There will be no second conversation and no appeal. I say this once now so that you never have to wonder about it later.”

Leon believed her completely.

That was the strange part. She had not raised her voice, released a scrap of pressure, or looked at him any differently. She was a slight woman sitting on a cushion in a plain room with a veil over the lower half of her face, and he understood with total clarity that if he ever gave her cause, she would end him between one breath and the next and think about something else afterward.

”I have no intention of betraying the Palace,” he said. ”I came here for knowledge and for strength. Everything I want is on the other side of learning what this world already knows. Selling that out would be stupid before it was anything else.”

Ji Liansu considered him.

”An honest reason,” she said. ”Honest reasons hold better than noble ones. Very well.”

She rose, and Leon rose with her.

”Now,” she said. ”Before you can improve, you need to understand what you are currently doing wrong.”