SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 623: Granduncle Goes to the Library

Qingyue was waiting on the terrace, and she had clearly been practicing.

”Granduncle,” she said. ”The Palace Mistress has asked me to show you your residence and explain the rules.”

Two disciples in pale grey were sweeping the terrace eleven paces away. Both of them stopped sweeping.

”That’s a new title,” Leon said.

”It is the correct one.” Her expression was flawless. ”My master addressed you as Junior Uncle. That places you one generation above me. Anything else would be improper.”

”Anything else.”

”Anything else, Granduncle.”

He let the silence run for exactly as long as it took the two sweeping disciples to look at each other.

”Lead on,” he said, and Qingyue turned so quickly that her sleeve snapped.

They took the mountain path down the seaward side. She did not speak again until the terrace was well out of sight and there was nobody within four hundred paces in any direction.

”If you enjoy that,” she said, ”I will push you off this path.”

”I’m enjoying it a normal amount.”

”You are enjoying it a great deal more than a normal amount, Leon.”

”I’m twenty-two.”

”I am aware of how old you are. Half the Palace has spent the morning inventing ages for you, and none of them are entitled to the correct one.” She kept walking. ”I have served Jade Moon longer than you have been alive several times over. I have never once been outranked by a man who does not know what a Moonless is.”

”I know what one is now.”

”You know it because I cut it off your shadow.”

The residence sat on Ji Liansu’s own peak, a quarter of the way up the eastern face and screened from the main terraces by a shoulder of rock: a walled compound with a main hall, two side buildings, a training yard, and a garden with an old plum tree in it. Small, by the standards of what he had seen this morning. Extremely well placed.

Leon felt the formations from thirty paces out and stopped counting layers at seven.

”Defensive, privacy, communication, and a cultivation array under the main hall floor,” Qingyue said. ”The last one is worth more than the building. It concentrates ambient energy and holds it steady, which matters when you are doing anything delicate.” She led him through the gate. ”Now listen carefully, because I am only explaining this once and you will need it.”

She was brisk and thorough and better at this than he expected.

The token first — a flat disc of pale green jade with a single character on it, which he was to carry at all times and never lend. It opened the general library, the outer and middle terraces, four of the six training grounds, the medicine court’s public wing, and the requisition hall. It did not open the peaks of individual Supreme Elders, the inner training waters, or anything belonging to a named core inheritance.

The allowance came next: a monthly figure in spirit stones that made Leon do the arithmetic twice against Moonfall prices, plus a standing entitlement to request materials for research through the requisition hall, subject to review by nobody at all except Ji Liansu.

”Understand what you have been given,” Qingyue said. ”The stones are generous. They are not the point. There are core disciples on this mountain who have waited eighty years for permission to request restricted materials without a sponsor, and you may do it tomorrow, because your master is the Palace Mistress and nobody will ask her twice.” She looked at him sideways. ”Several people are going to be extremely jealous. Bear it politely.”

”Noted.”

”Conduct. You do not fight other disciples on Palace ground. You do not enter another elder’s peak without invitation. You do not discuss the examination record — that order came from the Palace Mistress and it is not decorative. If an elder makes you an offer of instruction, you may accept or decline freely; you belong to your master’s line and no one else can claim you.”

”And attendants?”

Qingyue’s step did not change. ”Direct disciples may sponsor personal attendants. Registration goes through the outer administration hall under your token, and the Palace expects you to be responsible for anyone you bring in. Most senior disciples keep one or two. Some keep a dozen and are considered ridiculous.”

Four, Leon thought, and filed the whole thing away without a flicker. ”Good to know.”

She stayed another hour, showing him where things were and how the requisition forms worked, and left before midday with a final, immaculate, ”Granduncle” delivered at the gate in front of the two service disciples who had carried up his allowance.

He spent the next two hours going over the residence with Space.

He found the seven formation layers he had expected and an eighth he had not, which turned out to be a slow-burning array under the garden that fed the plum tree. He traced every thread out of the compound: two ran to the peak’s central array and carried structural status, one carried the communication link, and one — the interesting one — ran to a monitoring station and would report a large hostile energy release or a breach of the outer wall.

Nothing listened. Nothing watched. He checked three times and then checked the boundary stones themselves, because a formation was only as honest as its anchors.

Clean.

He did not open the connection. Understanding the formations was the first half of the problem; the second half was knowing whether anyone ever came up here to inspect them, and he had been in this residence for four hours.

Not yet.

Then he went to the library.

It was not a building. It was a system of buildings, cut into the mountain across five levels and joined by covered stairs, and the general collections alone took him forty minutes to walk without stopping to read anything.

Cultivation methods from basic body preparation upward, shelf after shelf. An entire hall of techniques collected from factions Jade Moon had absorbed or defeated, catalogued by origin, some of them the last surviving copy of a family’s whole legacy. Studies of unusual spiritual roots — three rooms of those. Elemental treatises. A long low chamber of incomplete and abandoned experimental paths, the shelves visibly less worn than everywhere else.

Two sealed doors, each with a name on it, each closed to his token exactly as Ji Liansu had said.

He took down a text meant for eleven-year-olds and started there.

It was called Opening the Twelve, and it explained the ordinary meridian sequence in the patient, repetitive way of a book written for children with no capacity for damage. Leon read it in under an hour and understood perhaps two-thirds.

Then the System did something new.

[New category established: Cultivation Techniques]

Opening the Twelve — Foundational

Compatibility: Unassessed

Comprehension: 14%

Circulation: Not attempted

Leon looked at that for a long moment.

Fourteen percent.

He had memorized the entire text. He could recite it. And the System, which had always handed him skills at maximum proficiency the moment he touched them, had looked at what was actually inside his head and given him fourteen percent.

So this doesn’t work like the rest of it. Which was, he decided, exactly right. Knowing the words was not knowing the road, and no number of them would ever move energy through a channel that did not exist yet.

He put the primer back and walked to the elemental halls, and stood at the end of a row that ran forty paces into the mountain.

Nine elements had been revealed. He intended to read every path in this building.