SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 655: The Minute That Would Not Die

The second route ran east and downward, and for twenty minutes it was the easiest walking any of them had done since the corridor closed.

The spatial anchor held. The path stayed a path. Mo Rui’s stakes measured what they should measure, and Vyra’s count agreed with the nexus through one full pulse interval. Ira said aloud that she was starting to enjoy herself.

Then a chip of stormglass fell off the terrace wall ahead of them and struck the stone with a small clear sound.

Forty seconds later it fell again.

Leon stopped the column.

”Mo Rui. Did you see that?”

”See what, Senior Brother?”

”The chip.”

”What chip?”

Xie Lan had seen it. So had Loriel and Seraphine. Nobody else had, and the chip was lying on the terrace where it had fallen, and there was only one of it.

Forty seconds later it fell a third time, from a wall it was already lying beneath.

”Nobody move,” said Leon.

The loop ran about forty seconds and it took six cycles to establish that.

The chip was the readable part. It fell at the start of every cycle, and Vyra timed it, and it was consistent.

The second readable part arrived on the third cycle, when one of Yu’s surveyors — a thin woman named Fen — opened her mouth and said, ”Deacon, the wall on the left is—”

The chamber reset before she finished. Fen returned to her original position with her mouth opening around the same first word, but her expression changed.

”I remember that,” she said. ”My body went back. I didn’t.”

Everyone else remembered as well. Their positions and unfinished actions returned to the beginning of the interval, while their minds continued through it.

Not everything reset.

Loriel worked that out on the fifth cycle and it changed the situation entirely.

”Ira. Your pulse.”

”What about it?”

”It’s up. It was seventy-one when we stopped and it’s eighty-four now.” Loriel had two fingers on Ira’s wrist and her eyes shut. ”Yours too, Young Master. Everyone’s is climbing. The chamber puts our positions back, but our bodies still spend the effort.”

She went to her kit and took out the clay dish. The windwort had germinated during the journey, and Loriel had measured the shoot before they entered the second route. It had lengthened since then. The soil and dish returned to the same position with every reset; the living stem continued to grow.

”The growth matches the time our bodies have actually experienced,” she said. ”It isn’t being accelerated, but it isn’t being returned either.”

Leon looked at the shoot.

Terrain resets. Formations reset. Bodies don’t.

”Say it plainly,” he said.

”Plainly: this chamber is being put back to its starting state every forty seconds. Stone, formation energy, and our positions return. Living processes continue. Every attempt costs strength, but the distance we cross disappears.” Loriel returned the dish to her kit. ”We could exhaust ourselves here while remaining eighty paces from the anchor.”

Yu said something under his breath that Leon did not catch.

”Then we break it,” said Ira. ”Where’s the anchor?”

The anchor was eighty paces farther in. They failed to reach it through nine cycles because the loop kept returning them to where they had started.

Leon solved that by refusing to be reset with everyone else.

He could not touch time. He said so out loud, to the whole column, because the last thing he needed was thirteen people expecting him to stop a clock.

”I have Space and I have Lightning. I have nothing that touches time and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” He crouched and put his palm flat on the terrace. ”But this is doing it through somewhere. There’s a fold — the chamber goes out through it at the end of a cycle and comes back through it at the start. I can feel the shape of that.”

”And?” said Vyra.

”And I can stand outside it.”

It cost more than he wanted it to.

He found the fold, took a position in the correspondence outside the resetting volume, and anchored himself there with Space and Lightning running together through the neutral centre of the Scripture. Every forty seconds the reset came through and tried to take him with it, and every forty seconds he refused, and the Primordial Void Heart took the returning pressure off his channels before it could reach the junctions that had spent nine days healing.

The first few resets nearly dragged him back into the chamber. By the seventh, his position held.

”I’m holding,” he said. ”Vyra, I’m your fixed point. Anything you write while touching me stays written.”

That was what made progress possible. Everyone retained their memories, but ordinary markings, displaced stones, and changes to the formation vanished with each reset. Leon extended a narrow strip of stable space from his position. Ira marked its furthest edge before every reset, and the strip preserved that distance instead of returning with the rest of the chamber. Vyra kept her record against the same fold, where written measurements survived into the next cycle.

Loriel found the continuous channel after several more cycles.

”Not everything in that anchor resets either,” she said. ”Most of it does. There’s one circulation running through it that keeps going. I can feel it the way I feel a pulse, and it hasn’t returned to its starting state.”

”Which one?”

”Second from the left, low, running clockwise.” She pointed at the column without approaching it. ”It’s the only part of that thing that remembers.”

Ira had spent those cycles studying the anchor instead of striking it.

”I’ve been watching the feed,” she said. ”Lightning-fed, same as everything else here, and the charge arrives nine seconds after the chip falls. Every time. Never varies.”

”And?”

”And my flame doesn’t reset.” She said it flatly. ”I burned the wall three cycles ago to test it. The wall came back. The calamity heat I put into it was still in the air on the next cycle. It’s mine. It doesn’t belong to this place and this place can’t take it back.”

Leon looked at her, then at Loriel, and the shape of it assembled.

”Loriel’s channel doesn’t reset. Ira’s damage doesn’t reset. If Ira puts damage into Loriel’s channel, at the same instant, over enough cycles—”

”It accumulates,” said Vyra, already writing. ”In the one place the realm isn’t cleaning up.”

It took eight more cycles.

Seraphine gave the timing — a single point of lightning on the stone, nine seconds after the chip fell, every cycle, so Ira had a signal she did not have to count for.

Vyra held the fourteen of them to the same positions and timing. Everyone remembered, but a single person moving too early could alter the chamber’s starting arrangement and ruin Ira’s accumulated damage.

Leon held the fold and read Vyra her own notes.

Ira drove her lance into the second channel from the left, nine seconds after the chip fell, eight times in the same place.

On the eighth, something in the anchor gave.

Leon felt the false circulation stagger and did not wait. He came off the fold and got both hands into the severed spatial channel — displaced like the first one, drifted apart in the direction the loop had been folding through — and closed it while the cycle was still stumbling.

The second spike came out with the break. It was identical to the first.

The chip did not fall again.

Forty seconds passed. Then a minute. Fen walked to the wall and placed her palm against the discoloured section she had been trying to report.

”The wall on the left is a different colour than it was,” she said. ”I have been trying to finish that sentence for far too long.”

Temporal regulation: restored. Partial. The projection flickered. Local interval advancing. Cycle count closed at sixty-eight thousand four hundred and twelve.

”Our bodies,” said Yu. ”The month—”

”Nothing’s changed,” Loriel said, already moving between them. ”Nobody’s aged. Nobody’s lost anything. It has stopped the loop, that’s all. It hasn’t tried to correct the difference with outside and I would very much rather it didn’t try.”

Then the nexus produced a record, and this one was legible. Mo Rui read it aloud in a voice that got flatter as he went.

Unauthorized access, central layer. Extraction attempt: spatial-temporal core. Anchor severance detected — spatial. Anchor severance detected — temporal. Structural instability: critical. Emergency correspondence pulse initiated. External tracking correspondence detected: three aligned signals. Emergency transfer executed. Personnel transferred: nine—

”That’s it,” said Vyra. ”They came in to take the core out of this place. They cut the space and time anchors to reach it, and the realm destabilized. The nexus sent an emergency correspondence pulse.”

”And our formations answered it,” said Yu quietly.

”Three of them running together, close enough to the pattern this nexus recognized.” Vyra looked up. ”Your formations answered its distress call, Deacon. The nexus used that correspondence to pull all nine of you through.”

Yu was silent for a while. ”Where are they now? The people who did it.”

The nexus answered before anyone else could.

Third route unsealed. Defensive governance— The projection flickered hard. —defensive network reports competing administrative authority. Competing authority. Competing—