SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 734: Every Color, One Source

Beyond the second door, the channels descended toward more energy than Leon had felt anywhere else inside the realm.

The stair was wide enough for six people abreast. Pale light moved far below, illuminating the outer wall and its five parallel channels.

He extended his senses carefully. Fire, water, earth, wind, and lightning rose from a common depth, alongside light, cold, and living green energy. He paused to distinguish the overlapping supplies. Their separation persisted well beyond the court above.

He had rationed expensive fuel and postponed experiments for lack of the right supply. Down there, he might finally have enough to work without counting every failed attempt against the next month’s cultivation.

”Young Master,” said Seraphine quietly. ”Now?”

”Now,” Leon said, starting down.

The stair ended in a hollow so large Leon couldn’t see the far wall.

The ceiling was lost in a pale mist that glowed from inside, which explained the light. Below it, the floor of the hollow fell away in broad terraces, and every terrace held a pool. Some of the pools were water. Some were sand that rippled like water. One was a slow red glow. One was nothing but moving air, held inside a ring of stone, and the grass around its edge leaned outward as if blown.

At the bottom of the hollow, in the very center, a column of light rose out of the ground and divided as it climbed into dozens of thinner streams, and each stream curved away to a different pool.

”The Hall of Many Streams,” Tobin murmured.

Leon walked to the edge of the first terrace and looked down at two pools side by side, one of fire and one of ice. They sat less than ten paces apart. Fire breathed heat across the gap, and ice breathed cold, and between them was a band of ordinary stone where a person could sit comfortably.

He watched for a while. The fire pool refilled fast, in quick pulses through a narrow channel. The ice pool refilled slowly through a wide, shallow one, and held much more. They took different amounts, at different speeds, by different shapes of route, and neither one starved or flooded.

Balance need not mean equal flow.

The Lord’s advice came back immediately. These neighboring pools were sustaining different demands without forcing either current to imitate the other.

A blue-coated expedition came out of a side passage on the eastern terraces, twenty or so of them, and Leon recognized the woman at the front before she had finished counting her people out of the tunnel. Orrin Vessian had the same short cropped hair and the same habit of looking at a place’s exits before she looked at anything else.

She saw him and raised a hand, and walked over along the terrace.

”I’d hoped we were first,” she said.

”You’re second,” Leon said.

”I can see that.” She glanced at Tobin’s green coat and nodded to him as well. ”We had a man at Asterbank market when the Steps started steaming. One of the old women there sells charms with that prophecy on them, and she told him the deep court opens when the steam leans east. We came round by the gorge. There’s an old door on that side too.” She looked at the column of light and was quiet for a moment. ”Well. This is a lot better than the mineral field.”

”We’d like to keep it peaceful,” said Leon.

”So would I.” She said it without any fuss. At the mineral field, she had watched him deal with the Ashvard crew and then take exactly the share he’d agreed to and no more. She seemed to remember that. ”Tell me what you’ve learned, and I’ll tell you what we’ve seen on the way in.”

They traded at the edge of the terrace. Tobin read out the calendar, and Orrin wrote the thirteenth day on the back of her glove with charcoal.

The treasure wasn’t hard to find. Everyone in the hollow was looking at it within the hour.

It sat in a cradle of white stone at the foot of the central column, a crystal the size of Leon’s palm. Colors moved through it slowly, red into blue into green into gold, always moving, always circling a small clear point at its center that never changed at all.

The cradle had writing around its rim, and a diagram cut into the floor in front of it: a hand holding a small flame over the crystal, then the crystal held over a heap of stones, then a flame rising from the stones.

Tobin read the rim. ”Give it a taste of what you want,” he said. ”Then feed it what you have.”

”That’s all?” Leon asked.

Tobin ran a finger over the damaged lettering. ”That’s all that’s left. The rest of the rim’s worn.”

Leon studied the crystal with his senses before he touched it. The clear point at its center was neutral. Everything that came near it lost its character for a moment, like water losing its color in a still glass. Around that center, a ring of structure waited to be told what shape to make.

He looked at Tobin and then at Orrin. ”I’m going to try it. Small.”

”Be careful with it,” said Orrin.

”I intend to be.”

He lifted it out of the cradle. It was cool and heavier than it looked, and it did nothing at all. It just sat in his hand and waited.

He touched one fingertip to it and gave it a thread of fire, plain and controlled, the way he’d give a sample to an alchemist.

The colors stopped circling. Red spread through the outer ring and settled there, steady.

He took a lump of earth-heavy ore from his ring. He had plenty of earth fuel; fire was what he wanted for this trial. He set the ore beneath the crystal.

The ore grayed. Then it crumbled at the edges, slowly, and from the top of the crystal came a small, clean warmth that ran into his palm and up his wrist, and it was fire, plain fire, exactly the kind he had shown it.

Leon felt his breath go out of him.

He stopped halfway through the lump. By his estimate, roughly two-thirds of its available energy had emerged as fire. The rest had been lost during conversion. He would need other tests to learn how much the loss varied.

I can afford that.

He tried the second thing without putting the crystal down. He walked to the edge of the wind pool, lifted the crystal into its current, and waited. It took longer. The air around it thinned, a faint draft gathered toward his hand, and fire trickled out the top of the crystal, slower than before and weaker, but steady.

”It drinks from what’s around it,” said Orrin.

Leon nodded. He couldn’t stop smiling.

Useful fuel no longer had to arrive in precisely the proportions his Scripture required. He could reshape a surplus instead of buying another rare material. The crystal worked gradually and lost energy in the process, but it could make resources he already owned serve a different branch.

I want this.

He lowered the crystal, still smiling. Tobin and Orrin were watching it with the same attention. Leon closed his fingers around the cool stone before either could reach for it.