SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 642: What the Surveyors Left Behind

Its intactness was the first wrong thing. The shelter wards were still running, four posts and a canvas awning, though the light in the posts had gone thin and uneven and would not last another week. Under the awning there was a cooking pot on a cold stone, and what had been a meal in it had dried into a hard grey crust that had cracked away from the sides.

A record ledger lay open on a flat rock, weighted at the corner, with a stylus beside it. The last entry was a column of measurements that stopped in the middle of a line.

Tools everywhere. Marker stakes in a bundle. A measuring chain half-uncoiled. Somebody’s outer robe folded on a pack.

”No blood,” Seraphine said, walking the perimeter. ”No scorching. No broken ground. Nothing’s been dragged.”

Vyra had gone straight to the supplies and come back with a face Leon did not like.

”Nobody robbed them,” she said. ”There are two spare blades, a case of low-grade spirit stones, and three sealed sample containers with material in them. Anyone who killed nine cultivators would have taken all of it.”

”And their field gear’s gone,” Seraphine added. ”Personal weapons, belt kits, the sort of thing you carry rather than store. Which means they didn’t run out of here in a panic and leave everything. They walked away from camp doing normal work, with what they’d normally take.”

Ira found the formations herself.

All three sat where they had been placed, in a rough triangle around the camp’s northern edge, and all three were still running. Their power stones had held — barely, and one was down to a quarter.

Every needle pointed at the same place.

It was a patch of open ground perhaps thirty paces north of the camp, flat and dark, with loose stones scattered across it. Leon sensed no person, active formation, or obvious disturbance there. At first glance, it was simply empty ground.

The rain, which had been threatening since the ridge, started coming down.

It fell normally. It hit the awning, and the stone, and Leon’s shoulders, and it ran off the hard leaves of the low plants in ordinary drops.

Loriel made a small sound.

Leon turned. She was standing quite still with her head tilted back, watching a single bead of water that had detached from the edge of a leaf beside her.

It was going up.

”Nobody walks onto it.”

Leon said it before anyone had moved, because two of them were about to.

”The formations point there. That’s all we know.” He crossed to the northern edge of the camp and stopped a good ten paces short of the flat ground. ”Nine people did whatever came next after those needles turned. I’d like to find out what it was without repeating it.”

Seraphine was already moving to establish a perimeter. ”Ira, take the eastern ridge and stay visible. I’ll walk the western line. Loriel, stay inside the camp wards until we’ve marked it.”

”Markers first,” Vyra said. ”Then I’m moving the formations.”

She spent the next hour doing exactly that.

She lifted the first tracking formation, carried it forty paces west, and reseated it. The needle spun, wandered, settled — and pointed back at the same flat ground.

She moved the second one south, past the camp, and set it on higher stone. Same result.

The third she carried twice, once east and once to a point almost directly north of the target, and both times the needle came around and held.

”So it isn’t a directional fault,” she said, crouched over the third with rain running off her hood. ”A broken needle points somewhere consistent relative to the formation. These point somewhere consistent relative to the world. Move the box, the answer stays.”

”Which means what?” Ira called down from the ridge.

”It means three independently constructed formations, from three different surveyors, are all reporting the same thing. If one had failed, I’d say bad calibration. If two had failed identically, I’d say a shared flaw in the manufacture.” Vyra straightened. ”Three, agreeing to within half a degree, in three different positions — I can’t give you a number, but it’s unlikely enough that I’m going to stop treating this as a malfunction until something forces me to.”

”You’re not saying they’re right.”

”I’m saying they’re working. There’s a difference, and I don’t yet know which one matters.”

Loriel spent the same hour on her hands and knees.

She worked outward from the camp in a slow arc, and by the end of it she had a conclusion she was prepared to state.

”It’s only free water,” she said.

Leon crouched next to her. ”Explain.”

”Rain in the air. Standing water in the puddles. Beads sitting on leaves, on stone, on my sleeve.” She held out her forearm, and after a moment a droplet on the back of her wrist lifted clear and drifted upward. ”That’s going. But the water inside the plants isn’t.”

”You’re sure?”

”I’ve checked eleven of them. The sap’s moving normally. The roots are drawing normally. The moss on that shelf is wetter on the underside than the top, which is exactly what it should be.” She sat back on her heels. ”And it isn’t pulling on us. If it were pulling on living bodies you’d feel it in your blood before you saw it in a puddle, and I don’t feel anything at all.”

”So it takes water that’s free to move and leaves everything that’s held.”

”Held, or alive, or both. I can’t separate those two yet.” She frowned at the rain. ”It’s not strong, either. A drop takes a second or two to break loose. If a person walked through it they’d get slightly wet in an unusual direction and nothing else.”

Ira came down from the ridge with a piece of stone the size of a fist.

”Threw four of these onto the flat ground from twenty paces,” she said. ”They land. They stay landed. Nothing eats them.” She turned the last one over. ”But I threw the third one along the same line as the second, and it landed almost two feet short. Same arm, same weight, same throw.”

”Almost two feet.”

”I’m not guessing. I put a marker where the second one landed.” She pointed. ”It’s short.”

Leon went last, and he went carefully.

He sent out a thread of spatial perception — small, controlled, nothing that pushed — and ran it along the ground toward the flat patch.

The first probe went out fifty paces and came back reporting fifty-one.

He did it again from a different angle and got forty-nine and a half.

He set three of Seraphine’s markers in a straight line and walked around them, and from the camp they were perfectly aligned. From the eastern ridge, the middle one sat a hand’s width off the line. He walked back and it was straight again.

Then he reached out with spiritual sense, slowly, to the exact center of the flat ground — and touched it. The stone was there. It was ordinary stone. But the distance his sense had crossed to reach it did not match the distance his eyes reported, and when he tried it a second time the discrepancy had changed.

Something else is affecting this place.

He found no gate, formation, tear, or seam—nothing with an edge he could follow. There was only a region where distance no longer agreed with itself, the discrepancy small but unmistakable and strongest near that patch of ground.

He could feel where he would have to push.

He also knew that if he pushed and got it wrong, he had no idea what might come apart. His damaged cultivation route had carried ordinary circulation cleanly throughout his recovery, but it had only recently stopped resisting higher volumes. This was the worst possible place to test whether the last stiffness had truly faded.

He drew the probe back in and let it go.

”It isn’t behaving like a door,” he said. ”Distance is inconsistent inside that region. The simplest explanation is that another space overlaps this ground, but I can’t prove that yet, and I don’t have a safe way to reach through it.”

Author Note: If you have bought a privilege, thank you so much; if you haven’t, please do so, which would help me a lot.