SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 660: A Heaven Not Yet Born

Giving the dais back took the rest of the afternoon, and the enemy’s notes turned out to be worth more than the enemy.

”He was good,” Vyra admitted, working through the fourth notebook. ”Not at formations — at being systematic. He wrote down everything he tried and everything that failed for a month, and about a third of it is useful.”

Leon worked the dais itself while she read to him.

The damage was ugly but shallow. The housing had been cut open and the surface plate lifted, and the core beneath it had been probed at and not removed — the saboteurs had run out of understanding before they ran out of nerve. Leon closed the housing, reconnected the four control paths they had severed to reach it, and stepped back.

The nexus came the rest of the way awake in stages over about twenty minutes, and its voice stopped being a broken loop.

Working from different parts of the chamber, they began to understand where they were standing.

Leon found it first and did not immediately believe it.

He had put his perception into the core to check the reconnection and found it doing something that made no sense: regulating a correspondence with a place that had no fixed position. Not hidden, not shifting — unfixed, the way a thing is unfixed when it has not settled yet.

”Vyra. What’s the energy budget in here?”

She had been asking the same question for ten minutes. ”That’s what I don’t like, Young Master. This complex uses about a fifth of what it draws. Everything else goes inward, through the core, into whatever’s on the other side.” She looked up. ”It isn’t a fortress running its own defences. It’s a pump.”

Loriel had gone to the chamber’s inner wall and put both hands flat on it, and had not moved for several minutes.

”There’s something living beyond this,” she said. Her voice had gone strange. ”Not creatures. I can’t find anything I’d call an organism. It’s — there’s an enormous amount of vitality out there and none of it has finished deciding what it’s going to be.” She turned around. ”Young Master, it’s like putting your hand on soil that hasn’t become a field yet.”

Seraphine’s contribution was the least mystical and the most useful.

”The stormglass,” she said. ”I’ve been assuming it was used to build this place. It wasn’t. Centuries of lightning have leaked through the threshold and fused the surrounding rock. The stormglass is a consequence of whatever lies beyond that wall.”

And it was Mo Rui who put the name to it.

He had been on the second terrace with Yu, comparing the newly stable readings against the anomaly data that had brought his team here in the first place, and he came down the temporary route at a dead run holding a rubbing he had taken off the outer rim.

”Deacon. Senior Leon.” He was breathing hard. ”These markers on the outer ring. I’ve seen this convention in the Palace archives — it’s a classification band used by old sects to identify independent spaces.” He held up the rubbing with a hand that was not steady. ”This mark means Earth-Grade.”

Yu took the rubbing off him and looked at it for a long moment.

”Say it properly, Surveyor.”

”It’s a Grotto-Heaven marker,” Mo Rui said. ”Earth-Grade.”

The nexus confirmed it four minutes later, in plain language, when Vyra asked it directly.

Threshold complex. Function: stabilisation and protection, developing independent realm. Classification: Grotto-Heaven, Earth-Grade. Formation status: incomplete.

The reaction on the terrace was the loudest thing that had happened all day.

Leon let it run for a minute, because the surveyors had earned it and because he wanted to hear what people who knew this world thought.

What they thought was that it changed everything.

”It isn’t a ruin,” Xie Lan was saying, to nobody in particular. ”A ruin has a bottom. You empty a ruin. A Grotto-Heaven has its own environment — it makes things, it goes on making them, a mature one produces for centuries—”

”Earth-Grade,” said one of the six surveyors. ”That’s — Deacon, the Palace doesn’t have one. Nobody in the eastern islands has one.”

”The Palace has three lesser pocket spaces, and they are the foundation of four peaks,” Yu said. He had not stopped looking at the rubbing. ”None of them is an Earth-Grade Grotto-Heaven. And this one is inside our monitored territory, in a basin we survey twice a year.”

And Leon understood, at last, why seven cultivators had decided to keep a secret from their own clan.

The nexus filled in the rest over the following hour, and what it gave them was classification and forecast rather than a map.

The forming realm’s dominant laws were storm, space, and time. That accounted for the basin above — the lightning that struck more here than anywhere on the continent, the stormglass, the rain that climbed, the tracking formations that gave impossible bearings. Centuries of a nascent Grotto-Heaven’s laws leaking through a wall.

It would likely produce varied regions once it settled: the nexus listed probable formations of storm-aligned minerals, thermal zones, and spatial materials, with a caution attached that any forecast of an unformed realm was a forecast and not an inventory.

Loriel could feel unfinished life through the wall and could not describe it. Leon could see, when he pushed his perception at the closed correspondence, distances that were still arguing with each other about how long they were.

Nobody saw anything. There was nothing yet to see.

And it could not be opened.

Inward route: sealed. Formation incomplete. Estimated remaining stabilisation: ninety to one hundred and eighty days. A pause. Premature access will destabilise the developing realm. Probability of total structural failure: high.

”Three to six months,” said Vyra.

”Three to six months,” Leon agreed.

Ira had come down at some point and was leaning against the wall with her arms folded.

”So we found the greatest thing anyone in this Palace has found in a century,” she said, ”and the answer is that we have to go away and come back later.”

”Yes.”

”I hate it.”

”You’ll hate what happens if we don’t wait even more.” Leon turned back to the dais. ”Whoever holds this door in six months holds the realm. Not whoever finds it. Whoever holds it.”

The nexus offered the second route a few minutes later — outward, to the physical basin, restored and usable.

Leon looked at it for a while.

”Deacon Yu,” he said. ”Prepare your highest emergency report. Everything you have, sealed, ready to send the instant we clear the isolation.” He put his hand on the dais and began locking the inward route. ”We aren’t opening this today. We’re making certain Jade Moon Palace owns the door on the day it opens.”