SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 512: The Temple—8

Around the same time, on the other side of the city, Luna found the clone.

She’d been looking for him — moving through the quieting streets with purpose, stepping around the aftermath of the battle, until she spotted the familiar silver-white hair and crossed the distance without hesitation.

She thanked him directly. No ceremony, no elaborate words. Just clear, genuine gratitude from someone who meant it.

The clone shook his head easily. "This is Loriel’s home city. I’d do it again without being asked."

Luna looked at him for a moment after that.

She’d already revised her understanding of him several times tonight. The healing, the fighters who had appeared from nowhere and turned what should have been a massacre into something survivable. Each revision had pushed her ceiling higher. That simple sentence pushed it somewhere she stopped trying to put a number on it.

She thought about her daughter. About the way Loriel said his name, the way her face moved when she talked about him, all the things Loriel thought she was hiding and wasn’t hiding at all.

Luna thought, warmly and without complication.

The clone didn’t linger on the gratitude. He moved the conversation forward naturally.

"I want to help on the main battlefield," he said. "The crack, the corruption, everything driving this — I think it can be ended. I’d like to try."

Luna almost lost her composure entirely. The excitement hit fast and bright, a sudden spike of it that nearly had her jumping before the memory of what she’d done during the healing arrived just in time. She pressed her lips together and answered like the dignified church leader she was.

"Yes. Please."

Then the clone asked something that landed differently from everything before it. His tone stayed easy, but she caught the shift in weight behind the question.

"Have you ever heard of a higher-ranked world?"

Luna went quiet and searched honestly. She wanted to help — that was clear on her face — but the answer came back empty. She shook her head slowly.

"Tell me more about what you mean," she said. "I want to help if I can."

The clone explained it simply. A world above this one, where the beings living in it would seem like gods to anyone here. Vyra — who was of Archon rank, which already sat above the ceiling this world placed on natural advancement — had walked out into it without any resistance, any suppression, anything. He’d expected something and gotten nothing. He still didn’t fully understand the rules, but he knew the direction he needed to go.

Luna listened with full attention.

And then something clicked.

Her expression shifted — the look of someone whose memory has just connected two pieces that had been sitting separately for a long time.

"The Ancient texts," she said. "Our church archives have records — very old ones, from before the domains were divided the way they are now. They mention people who descended from above. The church calls them the Upper Ones." She gathered her thoughts as she spoke. "According to those records, they arrived first at the City of Light, where the Church of Light is based. Both churches — ours and theirs — were established through them. And then they were gone. The records say their purpose was fulfilled, and they left."

The clone listened without a word.

Inside, things were moving quickly.

The domains — higher, middle, lower — he’d felt for a while that their structure wasn’t natural. The mana density shifts in clean steps between them. The invisible ceiling on realm advancement that changed depending on where you stood. The separation was too neat, too consistent, too deliberate to have grown that way on its own.

Now he had confirmation, buried in church records that most people had probably stopped reading carefully centuries ago or had no real access to, even if they wanted to. Beings from somewhere above had come down, built the foundation of what this world currently was — the churches, almost certainly the domains themselves — and then left when whatever they came to do was done.

Or when they thought it was done.

The City of Light was where they’d arrived first. If anything in this world pointed toward where they’d come from — any remnant, any mechanism, any record more detailed than what Luna carried in memory — it was there.

That was the destination. That was what came next.

He didn’t make a production of it. Didn’t offer elaborate thanks that would press the weight of debt deeper into someone already carrying too much of it. Luna’s face had been wearing that weight since the healing, and the right move was to treat this the way you’d treat information shared between people on the same side — naturally, the way family shared things. Ira’s family, as things were heading.

He simply asked the next practical question.

"Where is the City of Light from here?"

Luna pointed.

The clone went still for exactly one second.

The direction she was pointing matched perfectly with the pull his instincts had been registering since they’d arrived in this city. The same directional pressure he’d been reading as the crack’s location through his instincts — the source of the abyssal energy bleeding outward through the higher domain.

He kept his face easy. "How far is the abyssal crack then?"

"About fifty kilometers from the City of Light," Luna said simply. "That’s where the main front is. The crack sits right there — that’s been the primary battleground for months now."

She said it the way people said things they’d known so long that the significance had worn smooth. Just a distance and a location.

The clone’s eyes narrowed — barely, briefly, controlled — and then his expression was easy again.

Luna didn’t catch it. Or if she did, she let it pass.

What it meant was this: the crack in the world sat fifty kilometers from the place where beings from a higher-ranked world had first set foot in this one. The place most likely to hold the only real clues about where to go next.

That was not a coincidence.

Whether it was a disaster or an opportunity, he hadn’t decided yet. Probably both. The crack being that close to the City of Light meant whatever remnants existed there had been sitting at the edge of an expanding corruption zone for however long this crisis had been building. If the crack kept growing, the City of Light would eventually be swallowed.

If it were closed first, whatever was there would still be intact.

he thought.

He looked at Luna, who was watching him with the patient quiet of someone who had learned not to interrupt when a person was working something through.

He held her gaze for a moment and gave her a slight nod — easy, natural, the kind between people who understood each other without needing to say so. Not gratitude performed for her benefit. Just acknowledgment, between friends, that what she’d shared had mattered.

Luna received it exactly the way it was meant, and she was glad that it worked out this way, or else she would have drowned in the debt of his in this lifetime, while even if it was not said, she would still float on it and forever be grateful.