SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 661: The Highest Signal

Leon tested the outward route himself before he let anyone near it.

He sent a marked stone through on a line, then a second, then walked into the correspondence himself for four paces and came back out. It held every time, and it held without effort — with all three anchors live and the hostile authority stripped out of the dais, the route behaved like a corridor rather than a coincidence.

”It’s stable,” he said. ”Deacon, your people first, in order, no gaps.”

The nine went through as an organised group, and Yu counted them out loud and then counted them again on the far side.

The seven prisoners went next with their cultivations sealed, Seraphine leading and Ira behind them, and Leon watched Ira position herself so that any one of them who broke would go through her before anything else.

Leon crossed last. Before he did, he locked the inward route at the dais and set the control surface to refuse every command that did not carry the outer maintenance authority — which was, for the moment, him.

Then he stepped through into rain.

The basin had gone on without them.

That was the thing nobody was prepared for. It was still raining, and the abandoned survey camp was fifty paces away with its shelter wards still burning thin, and somebody’s outer robe was still folded on a pack where it had been folded for twenty-four days. The cooking pot still had a hard grey crust in it.

Deng sat down on a rock and put his hands over his face for a while, and nobody said anything about it.

The layers had kept different clocks. Twenty-four days had passed outside. The nine surveyors had experienced less than an hour, while the seven men kneeling beneath Ira’s attention remembered roughly a month. Leon’s household had experienced its own journey and the three anchor repairs in an ordinary sequence. Standing together in the same clearing did nothing to reconcile those different spans.

Vyra’s communication plaque woke up eleven seconds after she cleared the threshold.

”We’re out, Young Master,” she said. ”Properly out. It’s found the Palace.”

They sent everything at once on Leon’s order.

Yu submitted the formal missing-team recovery signal and attached a territorial emergency flag, which Leon gathered was a thing a deacon used perhaps once in a career. Four of the surveyors sent to their own assigned seniors on separate channels. Mo Rui sent the raw formation data.

And Leon’s direct-disciple token sent the core report to Ji Liansu.

”Why all of them?” Xie Lan asked. ”One would reach the Palace.”

”One should,” Vyra said without looking up from her plaque. ”If several independent channels report from the same stable location, the Palace can trust the coordinate quickly enough to risk emergency transit. Nothing could reach them from inside the threshold, and an array cannot lock onto a signal that never arrives.”

”How long, then?”

”If they spend what the transit costs? Minutes.”

The five emergency return talismans could have carried Leon’s household back to the Palace, but they could not transport nine surveyors, seven prisoners, and the evidence. Leaving the site unguarded was not an option.

Nobody stood around waiting.

Seraphine established a guarded boundary around the empty ground and set markers on it, because fourteen people had come out of it and she did not intend for anything to go back in unobserved. Vyra sorted the confiscated material into evidence and ordinary supplies and sealed the first category in three separate cases. Ira put the prisoners in a line where the whole clearing could see them and made escape look as impossible as it was.

Loriel went through the nine surveyors again, now that they were standing in ordinary time, and found nothing wrong with any of them.

And Leon walked the boundary of the flat ground and checked the threshold from outside.

It was still there. Still stable. And when he put his perception into it and reached past the closed inward route, he could feel the pulse — slow, enormous, and patient, coming through a wall from something that had not been born yet.

Ninety to a hundred and eighty days.

The surveyors had changed toward them, and they were careful about it, which Leon respected.

Nobody asked. Nobody said anything within his hearing about six Golden Core cultivators falling in nine seconds to four registered Peak Foundation Establishment attendants. But Mo Rui, who had been treating Vyra as a clever colleague for two days, now waited for her to speak first. Xie Lan had stopped looking at Loriel entirely, which was its own kind of statement.

Deacon Yu came over once, while Leon was checking the threshold.

”Senior Leon.”

”Deacon.”

Yu was quiet for a moment. ”Twenty-four days ago I was verifying a resource region. I am going to submit a report describing an ancient realm nexus, three severed anchors, a Nascent Soul saboteur, and an Earth-Grade Grotto-Heaven.” He looked out at the rain. ”I have been asking myself what else I am going to have to describe, and I have decided that the answer is: the recovery of nine Palace cultivators, by a direct disciple and his household, under conditions I was not qualified to assess.”

”That’s an accurate report.”

”It is a complete report,” Yu said, ”of what I am qualified to assess,” and went back to his people.

Leon read the confiscated records one final time while they waited.

Nothing in them contradicted the confessions. No completed dispatch. No message log. Seven unused tokens and a month of notes that never once mentioned the thing the notes were about.

They almost certainly never told anyone.

He wrote that down in exactly those words, because almost certainly was the honest version and he was not going to hand his master anything better than the truth.

The rain changed at the fourth mark.

It did not stop. What happened was that the cloud above the basin lit — moon-white lines spreading across it in the middle of an overcast afternoon, running out from a central point in an expanding lattice, locking down onto Leon’s token and onto Yu’s emergency plaque with a precision that made the hair on his arms rise.

”Formation,” Seraphine said sharply. ”Young Master — everyone back from the ground.”

The lattice completed.

Three presences came down through it, and Leon felt the basin itself react — the rain bending around them before they had arrived, the stormglass in the shelves lighting and going dark.

Ji Liansu landed first, in pale green and silver-grey with the veil across the lower half of her face.