SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 687: Nine Different Answers

The Earth branch settled into a slower rhythm, and Leon’s first thought was that he should have tried this months ago.

A small, constant effort eased. He had been correcting that branch for so long that he barely noticed himself doing it anymore. Now the current moved without his interference, steady enough that he allowed it another complete cycle.

That’s better.

Then it returned to the neutral route.

Water wavered at the junction.

Leon followed the disturbance through the next cycle. Earth’s slower return had changed how the two currents met, and Water now needed the attention he had just stopped giving Earth.

”Oh, fuck off.”

He reduced the input and restored his previous settings. The circulation steadied before the disturbance could become anything more than an uncomfortable pressure beneath his ribs.

For a moment, he sat looking at the unopened reservoirs.

Then he reached for his record book.

Less correction in Earth. More correction in Water. No overall improvement yet.

He underlined the last word.

The Lord’s observation had produced something real. Earth had run more comfortably when he let it depart from the matched rate. He simply had eight other branches that also needed to be comfortable with the arrangement.

Leon reviewed the two cycles again in his memory.

He had been measuring how much energy moved through each branch and how quickly it traveled. What he had neglected was the condition of that current when it returned, and what it encountered there.

The common route had worked under the old proportions. Changing Earth meant changing the meeting.

Fine. At least I know where to look.

He began again at a lower input.

For the first week, he changed only Earth’s rate. He repeated each trial with slightly different intake volumes, watching the return junction instead of concentrating entirely on the branch itself.

The results refused to give him one convenient answer.

A rate that reduced strain at low output caused Water to drift when he increased the supply. Another arrangement steadied both currents but forced him to compensate where Wind rejoined farther along the route.

He could make any individual section feel excellent if he ignored what it did to the rest.

That was becoming a deeply irritating talent.

By the end of the first month, his notes had changed. The columns of branch measurements remained, but beside them were sketches of the junctions and short descriptions of what happened as the currents met.

Earth returned more gently at one setting. Water needed a little more separation at another. Lightning tolerated a narrow range of pressure before its arrival began disturbing the neighboring flow.

He stopped treating each result as a setting to copy and began looking for the relationships behind it.

During the second month, he found a combination that held for most of an afternoon.

Leon kept it running while he ate.

He had a bowl balanced on his knee and was reaching for another mouthful when a familiar pressure developed near the lower junction.

He stopped chewing.

You waited until I was happy.

The problem took him two days to isolate. He had allowed the intake to rise gradually without adjusting the returning currents. The balance had been stable at the earlier volume. He had asked it to accommodate more and assumed it would behave the same way.

That mistake went into the record book in unusually large writing.

Xyra found him studying it later.

”You could move the food away from the diagrams,” she said.

Leon looked down at a spot of sauce beside the Water branch.

”I know what that mark means.”

”Does it mean Water needs more salt?”

He laughed despite himself and moved the bowl.

Xyra sat on the low wall beside the flat. Maintaining the accelerated zone required no visible attention from her, and she looked far more interested in the food than in the array.

Leon passed her a clean bowl.

For a while, they ate without discussing cultivation.

Then she glanced at the latest diagram.

”You keep placing Space after the other returns.”

”It’s disruptive. I wanted the others settled before it joins them.”

”Does that help?”

”Sometimes.”

”And the rest of the time?”

”It disturbs everything I’ve just settled.”

Xyra considered that while turning her spoon between her fingers.

”When I change how places meet, I have to consider what already crosses between them. I can’t arrange everything else first and expect the change to fit.”

Leon looked at the diagram again.

Her experience was not the same as circulating energy through a body. It did, however, make him notice how consistently he had treated Space as an addition to an otherwise completed arrangement.

”I should compare it earlier in the cycle,” he said.

”You should eat before you start.”

He finished the bowl.

The first variation failed. The second was worse. But the disturbance shifted to a different junction, and following it taught him something he had missed in the previous arrangement.

He kept working.

By the beginning of the third month, he had a circulation he genuinely liked.

The branches ran at different rates. Their returns were offset where necessary, with enough room in the neutral route for the currents to settle without one affinity dominating the next. He still watched the input carefully, but maintaining the arrangement required noticeably less attention.

Leon tested it through a long seated session.

Then he stood to fetch water.

The circulation drifted.

He stopped halfway to the cistern, followed the change, and felt three of the returning currents beginning to crowd one another.

Restoring the old baseline was easy.

Admitting why he had needed to restore it was less pleasant.

He filled his cup and stood there drinking.

Nearly three months, and it works best when I do absolutely nothing else.

His body could walk without troubling him. He could shape ice, release lightning, or fold a short distance through space with practiced ease. The weakness belonged to the new arrangement: it depended too heavily on the attention he gave it while sitting still.

He had made a comfortable cultivation pattern. He had yet to make one he could reliably carry into the rest of his life.

After that, he moved the tests off the mat.

He walked the flat while circulating. He turned abruptly, accelerated, slowed, and held conversations with Xyra while allowing his attention to follow what she was saying.

Drawing on one affinity changed the demands on the others. A brief lightning technique pulled the balance away from the proportions he had established at rest. Correcting too sharply then troubled the common route.

Leon practiced letting the circulation recover without forcing every current back at once.

Some arrangements were slightly less efficient on paper and far more dependable in use. He learned to prefer them.

He also learned when to stop.

After one particularly stubborn session, he spent an hour on the grass with his notes closed, listening to Xyra describe a change she wanted to make near the mansion. When he returned to the array, he found a mistake in his own measurements that he had been staring past all morning.

Near the end of the third month, the revised circulation held through a complete movement test.

Leon crossed the flat, shaped frost along his forearm, dispersed it, and released a narrow thread of lightning toward a marked stone. He folded four paces sideways, checked the returning currents, and continued walking.

The junctions remained comfortable.

He repeated the sequence at a different pace.

Then again, drawing less energy into the ice and more into the lightning.

By the time he stopped, he was grinning.

He sat down to record the results and realized that he had already begun thinking about the next cultivation session. He had not needed to keep dragging his attention back to Earth.

The improvement was modest enough to describe in a few lines. Living with it felt much better than those lines suggested.

Leon checked the remaining energy in the reservoir, set the intake for a sustained session, and put the movement notes aside.

He wanted to see how far this could take him.