SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 624: A Thousand Roads That Cannot Meet

By the second day the library staff had stopped asking whether he needed anything and started simply leaving it.

Food arrived twice a day on a lacquered tray, and by the third day the trays had improved considerably. On the fourth, one of them came with a small covered dish of candied plum that nobody had mentioned and that was very good.

He noticed the delivery duty had become competitive around the same time.

The first few volunteers had been junior disciples who set the tray down, bowed to the floor, and fled. Now they arrived in twos and threes, and lingered by the shelf ends, and conducted extremely quiet conversations at a distance of about fifteen paces before leaving.

Leon caught fragments over the days, because he was not deaf and they were not as quiet as they believed.

—the bells, all nine, my senior sister was on the west terrace and she saw the pillar—

—younger than half the outer court, they say—

—nobody knows his age, the record’s sealed—

—came out of a collapsed realm somewhere in the Marches, no clan, nothing—

—he’s been in here five days. Does he sleep?

Nobody approached him. It stayed at admiration and curiosity and a certain amount of scheduling, and once a young disciple bowed so deeply on delivering the tray that she knocked her own forehead on the shelf, went crimson, and had to be walked out by a friend.

Leon thanked them politely, ate what he was given, and read.

He read every element the Palace had. He read the nine the monument had revealed and the ones it had not, mixing the latter among the rest so that no single subject stood out on any day’s shelf.

Beyond the elements, he read the connective material, which turned out to matter more: neutral circulation methods that carried no elemental character at all, body-and-spirit harmonization studies, weapon-oriented paths that shaped energy toward a blade or a spear rather than a phenomenon, healing systems built on entirely different assumptions, and three shelves of failed multi-affinity experiments that had been kept because somebody sensible had understood their value.

By the fifth day he had memorized several dozen complete techniques, and the System had a great deal to say about them.

Nine-Turn Cinnabar Furnace — Complete, Fire

Compatibility: High

Comprehension: 61%

Circulation: Not attempted

Still Lake Reflection — Complete, Water

Compatibility: High

Comprehension: 58%

Circulation: Not attempted

Deep Root Bearing Method — Complete, Earth

Compatibility: Moderate

Comprehension: 44%

Circulation: Not attempted

The numbers moved when he actually understood something and refused to move when he merely remembered it, which he found bracing.

Late on the fifth day, the real problem came into focus.

Every complete cultivation method did the same five jobs. It drew ambient energy in. It filtered that energy through the spiritual root. It circulated the result along a specific set of channels in a specific order. It conditioned the body and the foundation through repetition. And it delivered a refined product shaped for the kind of technique the method existed to serve.

The trouble was the third job.

Every one of them thinks its route is the only route.

The Cinnabar Furnace ran hot. It did not merely carry fire — it widened and heated the channels it used, deliberately, over years, because a channel that had been conditioned by fire carried fire better. It said so on the fourth page, proudly.

The ice methods wanted the opposite. Narrow channels. Cold and dense. One of them contained an explicit warning against practicing any yang-natured method alongside it, and listed the symptoms of trying.

The earth paths built weight and stability into the circulation, slow and enormously durable, and they were fundamentally incapable of the rapid state changes that wind and lightning methods took for granted. He found a wind manual that required a full-body transition four times per breath. He found an earth manual that considered a full transition per hour to be hasty.

And Space was worse than all of them. Every spatial method he could find demanded specific anchor points held in a specific relationship — and other methods ran their circulation straight through those positions without knowing or caring.

He sat with the whole map of it for most of an afternoon.

I can’t stack them. Nine complete techniques laid side by side would not become a ninefold method. They would become nine sets of contradictory instructions fighting over the same body, and the foundation underneath would be asked to satisfy conditions that cancelled each other out. The Cinnabar Furnace and the ice path alone would ruin him inside two years.

So the complete structures are the wrong thing to take.

What he actually needed was underneath them — the principle each method had discovered, separated from the exclusive architecture built around it.

That was a much harder problem, and it was at least the correct one.

On the sixth day he found the previous bearer.

The records sat in the third root-study chamber under a catalogue heading that translated roughly as irregular constitutions, historical, and they were not an inheritance. Leon had half-hoped for one and was almost relieved to be wrong.

What survived was a personal collection: four fragmentary journals, a bundle of separate elemental studies in the same hand, and a set of loose correspondence. The name on them was Yan Zhuo. The oldest record was more than three thousand years old.

He read every page through the seventh day.

The journals were a record of failure. Yan Zhuo had tried the obvious thing first, which was to master nine established methods in sequence, and had spent decades discovering what Leon had approached from the outside. He had then tried a rotation—running each element’s method in a strict cycle so no two ever conditioned the channels at once—and abandoned it after nearly a century, because a body could not be reconditioned nine ways forever and the rotation had begun to leave permanent damage.

What he settled on eventually was specific to himself. His body had an unusual quality the journals described obliquely and never fully explained, and half his solutions leaned on it. Leon read those sections twice and got nothing he could use.

But the principles were there, scattered through three thousand years of dust. How to test a route without committing to it. Which conditions were genuinely incompatible and which merely looked that way. A long, careful argument about why elemental purity was overrated and coordination was underrated, written by a man who had clearly lost that argument with somebody important.

And a line near the end of the fourth journal that Leon read four times:

I have spent two centuries learning nine languages and I still cannot say one sentence in all of them at once.

Yan Zhuo had reached Heaven Immortal in the end, but only after centuries of work. The journals made it clear that the root had given him compatibility and nothing else whatsoever.

On the eighth day, Leon read for somebody other than himself.

He worked through it carefully and gave each of them options rather than an answer, because he did not intend to hand four people a decision that had to be theirs.

For Seraphine he pulled three: a lightning circulation from an absorbed northern sect that emphasized tempo and recovery over raw output, a light-natured protective method built around a sword-bearer’s stance, and a general sword-cultivation path old enough to be public everywhere.

For Ira, four, all of them concerned with compression and delivery — fire methods that treated the body as a barrel rather than a bonfire, one weapon-circulation study on driving heat through a spear point without destroying the spear, and a technique for stopping.

For Vyra he chose differently. Endurance methods. A flame path built for holding a line rather than breaking one, from a lineage that had guarded a mountain pass for six hundred years, and two studies on coordinated cultivation among linked practitioners.

For Loriel: life and plant methods, three of them, and a gentle body-spirit harmonization course meant for physicians rather than fighters.

Not one of them came from a sealed door. Every method he selected was public, collected, extinct-lineage, or so widely circulated that a competent wanderer from anywhere could plausibly have picked it up.

That evening he walked out of the library at dusk carrying nothing at all.

No books. No copied slips. Nothing in his sleeves but a jade token and the whole of it sitting behind his eyes, word for word.