SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 652: Fourteen People, No Door

”Since roughly two months ago.”

Yu frowned. ”We’ve been in the field for nine days.”

”Deacon, your final transmission reached the Palace nearly a month ago.”

For the first time, Yu’s control slipped.

One of the younger disciples laughed once, apparently expecting someone else to recognize the joke. Nobody did.

”Prove it,” Yu said.

Vyra opened her record plaque.

”Young Master’s mission order, our departure record, and every communication acknowledged by Han Suwen since then,” she said. ”The seals and timestamps are intact.”

Yu read the records in order. Mo Rui joined him for the second examination, checking the Palace seals before comparing their last transmitted entry against Vyra’s calendar.

Neither found an error.

”How long have we been here?” Yu asked.

”How long do you believe has passed?” Leon asked.

”Less than an hour.” Yu looked back at his team. ”We activated the three tracking formations around our camp. All three needles changed direction together and pointed toward empty ground. Mo Rui thought the calibration had slipped.”

”It had not,” Mo Rui said quietly.

”Then the rain began rising,” Yu continued. ”The wet basin and a dry one appeared over each other. There was a flash strong enough that I felt it in my teeth, and we found ourselves here. The camp was gone.”

”What did you do afterward?”

”Stopped moving until we understood whether the terrain was stable. When the distances began changing, we measured them. It was the only useful thing available to us.”

He looked down at Vyra’s plaque again.

”Nearly a month?”

”Outside,” Leon said. ”Inside, your bodies appear to agree with your estimate.”

Nobody among the surveyors was hungry, exhausted, or short of spiritual energy. None had needed sleep. Loriel examined them while Yu spoke and found no wasting or hidden depletion.

”All nine are healthy, Young Master,” she reported. ”This is not merely altered perception. Physically, they have experienced less than an hour.”

Yu accepted that with visible difficulty, but he recovered quickly.

”Then there is something else you need to know. About two kilometres northeast, near the centre of this version of the basin, we observed a buried stormglass platform. The exposed section is terraced and roughly forty paces across. It does not exist in the basin we surveyed before the transfer.”

”You reached it?” Leon asked.

”No. The changing distance kept moving it, but we observed it clearly from a high shelf. It emits a pulse every eleven minutes, near enough. After the second pulse, Mo Rui compared the signal against our formation logs.”

Mo Rui opened his own plaque and displayed the traces.

”It is the same signal our tracking needles followed at the camp,” he said. ”Whatever they detected came from that platform. We had begun working out a route toward it when your battle drew us back.”

The platform was their best lead, but it could wait until they had exhausted the safer option.

”Gather every portable record and formation tool,” Leon said. ”Leave the samples. We still have an open corridor to the real basin, and we return before anything else in this realm recovers.”

Yu did not argue. The surveyors packed with the efficiency of people accustomed to abandoning a field site in bad weather.

As they worked, Yu confirmed that their communication plaques and distress devices had failed immediately after the transfer. They had attempted both before resuming their measurements. None had found a connection beyond the secret realm.

Seraphine cleaned stormglass dust from her sword while Ira checked the edge of her lance. The constructs had delayed them and forced them to use more of their retained power than they would have preferred, but none of the five had been injured.

Fourteen people started back toward the paired anchors.

They had covered two hundred paces when Leon felt the energy beneath the corridor change.

The closed circuit between the anchors had remained stable throughout their advance and battle. Now the current vanished from the outer branches and poured into deeper channels under the secret realm.

”Young Master,” Seraphine said. ”The corridor is thinning.”

Leon reached for the alignment at once.

The two anchors were still intact, but the formation controlling the realm had redirected the stormglass charge sustaining them. Without that power, the paired plates could preserve nothing.

Leon circulated Space and Lightning through the Formless Myriad Scripture and used the Primordial Void Heart to take the returning pressure. For several seconds, he held the edges together by his own strength.

It was not enough. The original correspondence was disappearing beneath his grip.

He could attempt to force both spaces into contact. He had crossed worlds before and rebuilt a road the Upper Ones destroyed. This opening was smaller.

There were also fourteen people within thirty paces of it. If the two structures tore instead of joining, the collapse would pass through every one of them.

Not like this.

Leon released the alignment before his cultivation route began to strain.

The corridor narrowed until only a line of doubled ground remained. Then that line closed, leaving dry black stone between the two anchors.

Vyra opened her communication plaque. It searched and found nothing. Yu’s plaque did the same, as did every distress device carried by the survey team.

”Return talismans,” Leon said.

The five members of his household tore theirs one after another.

Not one activated. The paper remained cold, and the jade threads carried no response from the receiving formation in Jade Moon Palace.

The four women looked toward him. The nine surveyors waited behind them, still absorbing the fact that nearly a month had passed without them.

”Our next communication window is tomorrow at the third mark,” Leon said. ”When we miss it, the Palace’s response team leaves within the hour. My records, the three tracking formations, and the outer anchor are waiting in the abandoned camp.”

”How long before they arrive?” Yu asked.

”Eight days at best speed.”

”And when they reach the basin?”

”They will know how we entered. Whether they can reproduce it without the right storm is another question.”

Behind them, pale light began returning to the broken lines beneath the construct remains. The defensive formation was rebuilding its network, even if it could not yet produce another sentinel.

Far to the northeast, the buried platform released its next pulse.

Leon looked toward it.

They had found all nine missing cultivators alive. Now fourteen people were trapped inside the secret realm, and the only remaining lead lay at its centre.