SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 631: The Moon Meets the Myriad

The barrier closed, and the terrace fell silent.

Inside the circle, the sea became a distant murmur. Formation pillars hummed around the arena, and a cold current gathered where none had existed a moment earlier.

Wei Zhaoran stood forty paces away with his sword still sheathed. His cultivation remained exactly where he had placed it before the gathered disciples—Peak Golden Core, steady and without the slightest fluctuation. Whatever else could be said about him, he had kept his word about the restriction.

And he is still dangerous.

Leon saw it in his stance. Wei’s breathing had slowed, and the pale current surrounding him gathered along his arms and the line of his sheath. There was no wasted tension in his body. At ninety-one, he had never lost to anyone at his own realm, and that reputation had not been built on pride alone.

Good.

Leon had no interest in humiliating him. Thirty-one days of solitary practice had given the Formless Myriad Scripture a stable first stage, but every test had taken place inside a sealed chamber. Meditation could not show him what the neutral circulation route would do when another cultivator was trying to cut him apart.

He started the Scripture and allowed ordinary mana to flow through its central route. The Primordial Void Heart remained quiet. He did not touch the Divinordial Heart at all. Its holy energy had no place in a mana-based duel, and forcing the two energies together would create more danger than Wei’s sword.

Wei drew.

The slash was already finished when Leon moved. The blade passed through the place his shoulder had occupied and left a crescent of pale light hanging in the air.

Leon watched it for half a heartbeat.

Wei stepped left and cut again. His second stroke came nowhere near Leon, but the suspended crescent awakened and shot toward Leon’s back from an impossible angle.

Leon folded three inches of space and let it pass beside his ribs.

”Good,” Wei said.

He cut twice more.

Wei’s swordsmanship was economical, with every stroke either threatening Leon directly or leaving another crescent behind. Ice spread across the floor, cracking and refreezing under their feet. Moonlight distorted the reach of his blade: attacks that should have required another step arrived early, while strikes that appeared close stopped half a pace short.

Within two minutes, eleven crescents divided the arena into narrowing wedges. Wei was not chasing Leon. He was steadily removing every safe place Leon might use.

Leon answered with two affinities.

Space shortened his steps and shifted his body a few degrees at a time. Lightning remained inside his muscles, sharpening his acceleration without wasting mana on visible bolts. He avoided the crescents instead of destroying them and watched how Wei connected one sequence to the next.

Wei soon began freezing the ground ahead of Leon, predicting his spatial steps and taking away his footing.

Leon added Ice.

Rather than shatter the frozen surface, he seized control of it. His next three steps crossed ice that now answered him instead of Wei, and the crescent timed to catch his stumble struck empty air.

A murmur rose beyond the barrier.

Light came next. Wei placed his crescents edge-on inside blind angles, so Leon spread a thin glow across the arena and exposed their outlines. Darkness followed when reflected moonlight began multiplying across the ice and barrier. It swallowed the false images, leaving only the real blade and the crescents attached to it.

Leon introduced each affinity gradually. By the time all five moved through the same central route, the watching disciples had understood that this was not a sequence of separate techniques. A Peak Golden Core cultivator was circulating five affinities together.

Wei understood something else.

The first time he used a delayed-crescent bind, Leon needed four exchanges to escape it. The second time required two. On the third attempt, Leon was gone before the formation closed. When Wei tried it again, Leon allowed three crescents to converge, then stepped through a fold in space a fraction before they struck each other.

Wei’s expression hardened. Leon had not been struggling through his prepared sequences. He had been learning them.

Even so, Wei remained dangerous.

His Lunar Sword Body carried intent through muscle, bone, and blade with almost no waste. His control of the arena forced Leon to attempt affinity transitions faster than the unfinished Scripture could safely manage.

Wei also adapted once he understood Leon’s purpose. He stopped repeating complete sequences and began breaking them apart midway, turning a familiar bind into an immediate thrust or awakening a crescent earlier than its established rhythm allowed. One feint made Leon fold space toward what appeared to be the only opening, only for moonlight to shorten Wei’s next cut and meet him there. Leon twisted away, but the blade shaved ice from his shoulder and forced him to abandon the step.

That exchange changed the value of the practice. Wei was no longer displaying techniques for Leon to solve. He was watching Leon’s solutions and building traps for them. The Scripture now had to survive an opponent who understood that it was being tested.

At the eleventh minute, Leon moved directly from Lightning into Ice.

The two currents collided inside the trunk of the circulation route. Pain tore through his chest, and his footing slowed for less than a second.

Wei found the opening.

A crescent passed through Leon’s guard and cut his left side from hip to ribs. Blood darkened his robe as he retreated two steps.

Lightning cannot enter Ice directly at this speed. The neutral section needs time to settle.

Leon inserted a single beat into the transition and ran it again. This time, the route held.

The wound was real, but so was the answer it had purchased.

Leon stopped retreating.

He began dismantling the crescents before they activated. Light exposed an edge, Darkness severed the reflection feeding it, and a thread of Lightning broke its timing. Four crescents vanished in quick succession. Wei formed three more, and Leon destroyed two while advancing.

The audience saw the change. Wei was still attacking, but the space he controlled was shrinking around him.

Wei tried to rebuild the formation twice. Leon denied him both times, first by freezing the point where a crescent needed to anchor and then by folding its reflected partner into the same space. The two constructs struck each other and vanished. Wei’s next attack came without preparation, a clean sword thrust reinforced by his Lunar Sword Body, and Leon had to meet it directly. Their mana collided hard enough to fracture the ice beneath them.

Leon put Lightning into a spatial step and crossed the arena through the narrowest gap in the sword formation. Wei’s blade turned toward him at once.

Leon caught the flat with an ice-sheathed palm, smothered the moonlight along its edge with Darkness, and pushed.

Wei slid backward three steps.

For the first time since the duel began, surprise broke through his composure. Leon had reached him while testing an unfinished cultivation technique, and the gap between them was still growing.

Wei tightened both hands around his sword and drew the moon art inward, plainly attempting to keep it contained within the seal and end the duel cleanly.

Silver-blue light gathered beneath the barrier. A false moon began forming above the arena, enormous and cold enough to thicken the ice across the floor.

Then the technique touched Wei’s Lunar Sword Body.

The two resonated.

Wei’s face changed. He tried to stop, but the art fed his body, and his body returned more power to the art. Hairline fractures of light spread through the suppression seal beneath his ribs.

”No,” Wei said.

The first crack opened.

Power far beyond Peak Golden Core descended over the arena.