SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 452: Rewards for Clearing the First Floor—4

Leon blinked at that. An itch. He’d been bracing for something considerably more dramatic.

Maybe I was right to be optimistic about this one.

Simultaneously, the same energy was working on the Primordial Void Heart floating before him. The silver patterns on its surface had shifted into a more active configuration, responding to the array’s presence with something that looked almost like recognition. The runic symbols in orbit around it moved faster, their paths tightening.

The itch on the right side of his chest deepened.

Became pressure.

Became pain—not extreme, not yet, within the very manageable range of what Leon had experienced and endured across this entire floor’s trials.

Then he watched his own skin part.

The flesh of his chest separated cleanly, without blood, the edges held open by the runic energy as if the array was simply politely asking his body to make room. Beneath it, bone parted next—ribs shifting and creating a passage with the same bloodless, controlled quality. The entire process looked like a door being opened rather than a wound being created.

The Primordial Void Heart drifted forward.

Connected to him now by a network of runic threads that wove between the heart and his own chest cavity, the black organ moved slowly through the gap, guided by the array with absolute precision. When its surface made first contact with his own flesh—just the outermost layer of the opening—he felt a coolness that spread outward from the contact point. Not cold as in pain, but cool as in relief, like pressing something smooth and clean against a surface that had been waiting for exactly that thing.

The heart slid inward.

The chest closed behind it seamlessly, the skin drawing back together, the bone returning to position, all of it managed by the array without a single drop of blood leaving his body.

Leon maintained his absolute stillness throughout. He’d learned from enough painful experiences that the moment he assumed the worst part was over and allowed himself even a fraction of relaxation, reality had a habit of disagreeing loudly. He kept his breathing measured, his focus intact, his body deliberately relaxed rather than tensed.

Not yet. Wait for what comes next.

What came next was the symbols on his body brightening.

Every thread that had been warmly tracing his skin shifted into a higher register—the black light intensifying from something subtle into something that obliterated the visual distinction of his features. He could feel his surroundings rather than see them as the brightness consumed his field of vision. From outside, he would have appeared as a figure at the center of an eruption of impossible dark radiance.

From inside, he felt his body beginning to change.

Not the surface. Not just bone and muscle in the conventional sense. The change was happening at a level below what those words could accurately describe—at whatever level the Divinordial constitution existed, at whatever fundamental layer his identity as that race was written. Something new was being written in alongside it.

His muscle, bone, tissue—everything was actively and simultaneously reconfiguring. The pain built steadily, working upward through the registers Leon used to measure such things, passing through uncomfortable, then genuinely painful, then the range where he’d normally allow himself to react vocally.

He didn’t shout.

But the sounds that eventually escaped him—low, compressed grunts that forced themselves out through clenched teeth despite his best efforts to contain them—told a true story about where the pain was sitting on his personal scale. This was a level where not making any sound would have been extraordinary even for him.

The worst of it centered on the right side of his chest.

Inside, had anyone possessed the ability to observe his anatomy in real time, they would have seen something remarkable. A second heart was integrating into a body that already had one—not replacing, not displacing, but being genuinely incorporated alongside the existing organ. New connective structures were forming, built from a strange white energy that the array was generating from the patterns themselves, constructing a physiological architecture that did not previously exist in nature.

The two hearts were being made to coexist.

It lasted less than five seconds at the peak intensity.

Then the runic threads began withdrawing—pulling back across his skin and retracting to the floor patterns with the same orderly precision with which they’d arrived. The brightness faded. His vision returned.

The pain receded like a tide going out.

Leon sat motionless for a moment after the symbols left his body entirely, taking stock.

Then he stood up.

The first thing he noticed was height. A small increase—perhaps a centimeter or two—but unmistakable once he registered it. The second thing was harder to describe precisely. His body had already been in exceptional condition—the product of the Divinordial race and years of subjective training compressed into an extraordinarily lean and defined physical form. Now every proportion of it had shifted into something that felt less like a very fit human body and more like the concept of a physical form expressed without compromise. Every ratio landed exactly where it should. Nothing deviated.

The feeling that accompanied this was stranger still.

He’d noticed, since becoming Divinordial, that he projected a kind of presence he couldn’t entirely suppress—something that made him difficult to ignore in a space regardless of whether he was trying to stand out. He’d been able to moderate it somewhat, to turn it down when he needed to move without drawing attention.

Now, standing in the arena after the merge, he understood with quiet certainty that this quality had become permanent and unmodifiable. Not overwhelming in the way of a brute power display, but embedded—as if the universe itself had noted his existence as something that mattered and decided to make this legible to anything that encountered him.

Interesting.

The thought was interrupted.

A sensation in his chest.

Thump.

Quiet. Tentative. Like something testing whether it was supposed to be doing this.

His second heart, beating for the first time.

He’d spent the last several minutes focused on pain and process and hadn’t even noticed whether it had been beating or not before this. He was accustomed to the rhythm of one heart—the Divinordial heart that had been his since the transformation tribulation. This new beat was different in quality: deeper in pitch, slower, with a resonance that extended outward into his bones in a way the first heart’s rhythm didn’t.

Then the Divinordial heart responded.

Thump.

Stronger. More assertive. The difference in character between the two beats was immediate and obvious—his original heart beat with authority and certainty, like someone stating something they were completely confident about. The new heart’s beat had felt, by comparison, like a question.

The question had been answered.

Two hearts. Operating simultaneously. I wonder what that—

His eyes dropped to the floor.

The array was still there.

All of it. The symbols covering hundreds of meters of arena, the intricate patterns he couldn’t read—none of it had disappeared when the runic threads withdrew from his body. It was simply... waiting. Still active. Still lit.

Leon looked at the array beneath his feet with a completely new expression than any he’d worn during the entire floor.

His eyes went wide.

The single thought that arrived, delivered to him with absolute clarity, was not complex.

Oh. Oh no.

He stood very still.

The creator of this world, the tower, whatever cosmic intelligence had designed this sequence of events—he directed toward all of them, with the full sincerity of everything he had, an extremely comprehensive and heartfelt condemnation.

Fuck you!

He had celebrated too soon.

He always, always celebrated too soon.

Why did this keep happening to him?