SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 493: Departure—1

Whatever the people standing beside James were whispering about, the murmurs were enough to make Leon feel mildly self-conscious — and Ira, catching fragments of it, kept glancing between him and the kneeling crowd with bright, curious eyes, clearly enjoying every second of it more than he was.

Beside James, Leon spotted Elowyn — the girl who had once summoned the Frost Veil Kirin, a beast that had genuinely impressed him back when it stood barely a notch below his own strength. Looking at it now, the creature seemed almost laughably weak by comparison. It sat curled beside her, the size of a small fox, shivering visibly the moment Leon’s gaze landed on it.

Standing protectively near her was her father, Garret, fully armored now — guard captain, a detail Leon already knew from Seraphine’s updates during her retreat training. Whenever he’d visited her for their private time together, she’d shared bits and pieces about the people running things here, so he wasn’t entirely out of the loop even without visiting personally. It suited the image of a distant, holy figure who let his believers manage daily affairs while he focused on higher matters.

Elowyn herself had transformed completely. He remembered her as a thirteen-year-old, cute in the way children are cute, full of nervous energy the first time she’d summoned that beast. Nine years had passed here. In the outside world, barely half a month.

She was twenty-one now. Striking. He could already tell, just from the way several young men nearby kept finding excuses to glance in her direction, that she’d been quietly breaking hearts around the settlement for a while.

He didn’t immediately spot Rudy or Max — they’d be around nineteen now, probably somewhere in the town, going about their business.

Standing just behind James was Mia.

The woman who had once tried to steal a gold coin from him during an act of kindness, who’d become his second slave after James’s desperate pleading on her behalf. From what he understood, she and James were married now. They had a daughter together.

Leon thought, working through the strangeness of it.

He didn’t mind at all — if anything, it was a relief, evidence that something good had grown out of all the chaos those two had been through. The girl in Mia’s arms looked healthy and settled, and Mia herself carried none of the desperate, scrappy edge she’d had when survival meant doing whatever it took. She looked like a mother now. Calm. Present. He felt genuinely glad watching her.

But the people he’d actually come here to see weren’t among this group. They had to be somewhere further into the settlement.

James stepped forward and bowed low, his voice carrying the particular cadence he always used when addressing Leon directly.

"My humble, virtuous, gracious, and most supreme God, this lowly slave has something to report."

Leon nearly choked internally on the string of titles.

He kept his face composed. "What is it, James? Tell me."

James visibly shivered, hearing his own name spoken directly from his god’s mouth.

Leon caught every flicker of it — nothing escaped his senses these days — and felt a familiar discomfort settle over him. He’d half hoped that becoming a father might have tempered James somewhat, smoothed out some of the intensity. It hadn’t. Still the same fervent, slightly unhinged devotion that made Leon’s skin crawl in measured doses, the kind of loyalty that was genuinely useful and genuinely exhausting in equal measure. James was loyal. James was also simply too much.

He remembered now — when his clone had ordered the perimeter restrictions keeping people away from the Pyran camp, James had been the one organizing the whole arrangement. And at that time, he’d said this exact phrase to the clone too. Something to report. Since the clone shared his mind completely, the memory arrived without delay, slotting naturally into place.

James, holding his breath with visible effort, told him what had happened.

The Divine Spoon — Leon recognized the reference immediately. The Spoon of Infinite Soup, technically only rare-ranked by classification, but one of the genuinely great auxiliary treasures he’d ever acquired. Nothing else in his current collection came close to matching its practical value for sustaining a population.

"Something’s gone wrong with it," James said. "A few days ago."

Leon’s attention sharpened.

If something had genuinely malfunctioned with the spoon, the consequences could be manageable on their own, but they’d complicate things considerably given the timing — thousands of Pyrans had just arrived, the world itself was mid-transformation thanks to Xyra’s work, and food stability mattered more right now than almost anything else he could think of.

"Explain it to me," Leon said. "Everything."

James spoke quickly, the words tumbling out with the urgency of someone who’d been holding this report for days and was relieved to finally deliver it.

About a week ago, the spoon had changed. For reasons James couldn’t explain, it had started producing five different kinds of soup instead of one — each variety equally delicious, the original recipe still among them but no longer alone.

Previously, when it only produced a single soup, people grew bored with it after enough repetition. That boredom had been doing useful work — it motivated them to take up farming and poultry-related labor just to get variety in their meals from time to time. The monotony had been, in its own strange way, productive.

Now, with five different soups to choose from whenever they wanted, that motivation had evaporated. People were refusing farming and poultry work in increasing numbers, choosing instead to earn merit through physical labor and construction tasks — work that also built their strength, which made it doubly appealing compared to tending crops or livestock.

The decline was already measurable. Twenty percent fewer people are working agricultural roles in just one week since the change began.

James’s worry was straightforward: he’d introduced these systems specifically to get the population farming and raising poultry for long-term sustainability. If this trend continued unchecked, he feared a future where literally no one wanted to do that essential work anymore, with everyone content to live on spoon-summoned soup and pursue merit-earning labor instead.

Leon had braced himself for something genuinely bad.

This was, against every expectation, an oddly pleasant kind of problem to have.