SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 628: A Path That Keeps No Element

The circulation became easier with repetition. By the second day he could complete one without concentrating. By the fourth he could run four in succession. By the end of the fifth day the thread had thickened from something like lamplight to something like a candle, which was still absurd and no longer felt absurd.

Then he started putting affinities through it.

Fire went first, because he understood Fire as well as he understood breathing. He drew a thread, gave it fire nature at the intake, and sent it around.

It worked on the first attempt. The route carried it, the neutral section handled it without complaint, and the whole circulation closed clean.

Leon sat with that for a moment, pleased, and then ran Water immediately afterward to confirm.

Water made it to the neutral section and came apart.

It was not violent — the thread destabilized, boiled off, and dispersed harmlessly — but he felt exactly where it happened, and when he examined the route afterward he found what he should have expected.

The fire’s still in there.

Not much of it. A trace, a warmth in the walls of the central section, the beginning of the thing every complete method in the library did deliberately. The route had carried Fire once and had started, immediately, to become a fire route.

So durability wasn’t the problem. Ownership is.

He spent five days on that, and it was the hardest single problem of the month.

What he arrived at eventually was a change to the return path. Instead of letting the energy exit and leave its character behind in the walls, the return section drew the affinity out with it — stripping the elemental influence back into the thread on the way through, so that what left the route took everything it had brought.

It took thirty-one attempts to make that work at all and another forty to make it work reliably. He kept every one of them small. Twice the System flagged accumulating strain in a junction and he stopped for the day, instead of ignoring it because he knew he could heal the damage.

On the twentieth day of the month, Fire went around, and then Water went around behind it, and both completed.

The other affinities each broke it in a new way.

Lightning did not care about the neutral section at all and failed at the transitions instead — it wanted to arrive everywhere at once, and every junction in the route was a place where energy had to change direction. Leon spent two days redesigning four junctions with gentler curves.

Ice slowed. Wherever it passed, the circulation ran thicker and heavier, and a route that ran too slowly in one section and normally in another began to fight itself. A compensating segment cost him another day.

Light and Darkness were the pair he had expected trouble from and the trouble was not what he expected. Neither one damaged the route. They simply refused to enter it while the other’s trace remained — Darkness would not pass through a section that Light had used within the last few minutes, and the reverse was equally true. Once the return-path stripping worked properly, they stopped caring.

Space nearly beat him.

Space left no residue whatsoever, which he took as good news for one entire afternoon before he understood what it was doing instead. It did not change the route’s nature. It changed the route’s position — bending the geometry of the circulation slightly as it passed, so that the neutral section afterward was in a marginally different place than it had been before. Twice.

The third time he ran it, the return path no longer met the intake.

[Structural deviation: 0.4%]Cumulative deviation across 3 circulations: 1.1%

The System could tell him the number. It could not tell him what to do about it, and Leon spent five days on the answer. He stopped trying to make the route rigid and rebuilt the central section to accept temporary deformation, giving it a resting shape it could return to afterward.

That change turned out to solve two other problems he had been working around.

Ji watched several of the more dangerous tests from her place by the wall. She said very little. But she came to the chamber more often as the weeks went on, and on the day the Space deviation problem resolved she stayed for two hours and left without commenting, which Leon had learned to read.

She’s not here out of obligation anymore.

The disciple registers updated in the third week, and Jade Moon Palace found out about him.

Not much. The aptitude result stayed sealed and the bells stayed unexplained. What went into the public register was three lines: name, age twenty-two, personal disciple of the Palace Mistress — and an assessed cultivation of Peak Golden Core.

That last line did the damage.

Within four days it had reached every core and personal disciple on the mountain, and because the interesting parts were sealed, the explanations invented themselves. Some said he was the heir of a hidden family and Ji had accepted him to secure an alliance. Some said the Palace had struck a bargain with something in the Marches. Some said the assessment was deliberately false, which was closer than the rest and got less traction than any of them.

And on the fifth day, on a training terrace on the eastern side of the mountain, a young man in white and silver-grey listened to a friend read the register aloud and did not say anything for some time.

Wei Zhaoran was ninety-one years old, which for a personal disciple made him young. He had been a Peak Earth Immortal for six years. He had been born with a Lunar Sword Body, a constitution the Palace had recorded eleven times in its history, and he held one of Jade Moon’s forbidden moon techniques by his master’s authority. He had never lost a match against anyone at his own realm, and there were perhaps four people in his generation across the eastern islands who could claim as much.

None of that was a rumor. He had earned every part of it.

Eight years ago, before entering his present master’s lineage, he had asked to be taken as Ji Liansu’s personal disciple and been refused. His Supreme Elder ancestor had formally accepted him soon afterward. Wei had spent the years since explaining to himself that the Palace Mistress simply did not take disciples. It had been a good explanation. He had built quite a lot on top of it.

”Peak Golden Core,” he said.

”That’s what it says.”

”Read it again.”

His friend read it again.

Wei Zhaoran looked out over the terrace toward the sea for a while, and when he spoke his voice was perfectly pleasant.

”She’ll have had a reason,” he said. ”Everyone has a reason. The question is whether it survives being looked at.” He picked up his sword and turned back toward the practice ground. ”He’ll have to come out eventually. There’s a gathering at the end of the month.”

By the last days of the month, every one of the nine had run the route alone without permanently changing it.

One test remained, and it was the one the whole design existed for.

Not passing Fire through, and then later passing Water through. Going directly from one to the other — inside a single unbroken circulation, without stopping, without letting the route rest, without rebuilding anything in between.

If the neutral section truly owned nothing, that would work.

If it did not, he would find out in the most expensive way available.