SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 545: Preparations Before the Awakening Dungeon—1

Leon checked his causality balance.

[Current Causality: 1,512,340,000]

He stared at it for a full second.

One point five billion.

He’d run rough estimates during the battle — tracking kill counts, calculating rough multipliers for the Archon-ranked beasts, the Sage-ranked cannon fodder — and the math had suggested something significant. Seeing it in actual digits was still different from expecting it.

One hundred million or so had been sitting there from before the fight. The rest had come from the horde outside the City of Light in the space of a few long hours.

He let the number settle, felt the genuine, uncomplicated thrill of it, and opened the shop properly.

Vyra sat twenty meters ahead of him, still cross-legged, the fire around her moving in patterns that had nothing to do with wind. He kept her in his peripheral vision while the translucent golden screen hovered between them. His intelligence handled both without difficulty — the training observation and the shopping running in parallel, neither suffering for it.

He went to the equipment first.

Seraphine.

He thought about her as he browsed — the specific quality of how she moved, the way her combat style was built around being completely unimpeded. Lightning and light working together, precise and fast. She didn’t need armor that absorbed hits. She needed armor that didn’t exist as a constraint.

He found it quickly.

Stormveil Regalia (Epic – Armor Set)

Ultralight composite weave. Increases lightning affinity response by 40%. Reduces air resistance to movement by 60%. No encumbrance penalty.

Price: 3,200,000

Vendor: Silverwind Tailor

She’ll move in that like she’s wearing nothing, he thought, and bought it.

The weapon took longer because he cared about the details. She’d kept the katana he gave her past the point where most people upgraded — had built something with that design, a relationship with the shape and weight of it. He wasn’t breaking that.

He searched specifically. Katana type. Lightning and light compatible. Epic ranked.

Radiant Edge — Thunderveil Katana (Epic – Weapon)

Blade forged from condensed lightning-steel threaded with light-element crystal veins. Conducts both affinities simultaneously without interference. Increases dual-element output by 35% on strike.

Price: 2,800,000

Vendor: Stormforge Hana

He read the design description and felt immediate certainty. The shape was right. The balance notes matched how she held a blade. She was going to love it and wouldn’t admit how much for at least a day.

He bought it.

Ira.

Different calculation. Where Seraphine was precise, Ira was committed — full power, forward momentum, the kind of fighter who didn’t redirect so much as overwhelm. Her fire ran genuinely hot, hotter than most fire users he’d encountered, and she’d push it further in the dungeon.

The armor needed to handle heat from inside as much as from outside.

Ember Sovereign Set (Epic – Armor Set)

Forged from volcanic ironweave. Immune to heat damage from the wearer’s own affinity output. Enhances fire affinity intensity by 45%. Increases physical impact resistance by 30%.

Price: 3,600,000

Vendor: Cinderkeep Forge

She can go as hot as she wants and it won’t burn through her own equipment, he thought. Bought it.

Her weapon was simpler — she’d always used a spear, with the natural ease of someone for whom it was simply the correct extension of how she thought about combat.

Blazing Fang Spear (Epic – Weapon)

Spear shaft and head forged as a single piece from fire-tempered dragonsteel. Fire affinity compatibility: native — grows with the wielder’s affinity rather than capping at the current level. Increases fire output on thrust by 50%.

Price: 2,400,000

Vendor: Ashblood Weaponsmith

Grows with her, he noted. She’ll push that listing past its current display over.

He bought it and felt good about the choice.

Vyra.

He paused here longer than the others. She’d been leading people in combat since before his concept of a long time had any meaning. The wrong choice would be more obvious to her than to anyone else. He didn’t want to give her something she’d tolerate. He wanted something she’d respect.

He thought about how she moved. Economical. Nothing wasted. She committed to a strike only after she’d already decided it was landing.

Crimson Sovereign Plating (Epic – Armor Set)

Segmented design — each piece is independent, with zero movement restriction. Fire affinity enhancement passive: ambient heat is absorbed and converted to affinity output. Increases fire Aura intensity by 40%.

Price: 3,900,000

Vendor: Pyrewing Armorer

It feeds from the environment, he thought. She’ll appreciate that. Nothing wasted, including what’s already in the air around her.

The spear took the most time. She’d been using weapons longer than most civilizations had existed — she had opinions, and those opinions were probably correct. He looked for something that would feel like a choice rather than an assignment.

Sovereign’s Lance — Eternal Flame (Epic – Weapon)

Ancient alloy construction. Fire affinity resonance: deep-structural rather than surface-enchanted. The weapon responds to the wielder’s intent rather than technique — output scales with the user’s understanding of fire rather than rank. No ceiling.

Price: 4,100,000

Vendor: Ageless Forge — Keeper Unknown

Scales with understanding, not rank. He read that twice. For someone who’s been developing that understanding for centuries, there’s genuinely no ceiling.

He bought it.

Loriel.

One item. He’d thought about this carefully. The situation between them wasn’t officially named, and buying her the same volume as his confirmed partners would generate questions he didn’t want to navigate while dungeon preparations were underway. Seraphine noticed everything.

One well-chosen defensive artifact was defensible. She was a healer going into a dungeon where healers died first because they were the priority target for anything intelligent enough to understand what they were.

Sanctuary Veil (Epic – Artifact, Passive)

Generates a reactive barrier that activates the moment the wearer takes damage, absorbing the first strike fully regardless of source. Cooldown: 60 seconds. Cannot be destroyed by indirect or area effects.

Price: 2,100,000

Vendor: Warden’s Guild — Anonymous

First strike absorbed, no matter what hits her. She wouldn’t see what was coming in that dungeon. This gave her one moment to respond instead of none.

He bought it.

Revival treasures next.

Seraphine and Ira both had one each from before. He bought two more for each — three total, the threshold he’d decided between prepared and excessive. The phoenix-feature revival treasure he usually bought at the lower price tier had two units left. He took both immediately. Then five standard ones are distributed across all four of them.

Ira’s father got one. Standard tier, not a Phoenix feather. Leon thought about it for exactly one moment — the history between them, the complicated reality of that relationship — and bought it anyway. Ira would be devastated if something happened to him. That was sufficient reason.

He moved through mana recovery artifacts, healing pieces for the general dungeon population, potions in bulk — two thousand one hundred mana potions, two thousand one hundred healing potions, each costing ten thousand causality. The numbers were large, and the spending was fast, and he didn’t slow down for either.

For the broader dungeon group — nine hundred and seventy people confirmed, he’d learned from his clone’s exchange with Xyra — he bought one thousand rare-ranked healing artifacts and one thousand rare-ranked mana recovery artifacts. At the quality tier he was targeting, each normally ranged from one hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand casualties. Buying two thousand of them at once gave him enough leverage to secure a bulk price averaging around one hundred and eighty thousand causality per artifact.

All of it lent. Not given. People who came back with satisfactory results received them permanently. People who didn’t return them. He was providing more support than anyone entering a class-reawakening dungeon had a right to expect — that was his choice, and he made it without reservation. But he wasn’t running a charity, and there was a difference between generosity and simply handing valuable resources away without expectation.

For weapons and armor for the general group, he had over a hundred rare-ranked pieces already in inventory. Whatever gap remained, Luna would help fill. Asking her wasn’t shameless — that was simply what it meant to have people who trusted you.

Additional items for Seraphine and Ira specifically — a ring each with resistance to illusion and mind-control effects, a spatial anchor pendant for Seraphine, a concealment artifact for Ira.

For Vyra — nothing additional. Her strength put her above the threshold where anything he was buying today would meaningfully contribute. He trusted her capability more than he trusted the items.

He checked the balance when he finished.

The number was significantly smaller than one point five billion.

He looked at it for one second and felt the familiar brief ache of watching wealth become resources.

Then he let it go, because everything he’d spent had a face attached to it and a reason that mattered, and that was the correct way for causality to be used.

One item remained.

He scrolled to it and felt something settle in him — not excitement exactly, more the quiet recognition of something that had been a long time coming finally being within reach.

Cradle Seed of Elements (Mythical – Item)

Once planted in the body, it gradually enhances all elemental affinities.

Price: 790,000,000

Vendor: Keeper of The Dimension

He looked at it for a moment.

Not hesitating. Just sitting with it — the item he’d been watching since he first found it in the shop, calculated toward, been too short of causality for through every battle and every clear until today.

He pressed buy.

The golden screen flickered once.

The air in front of him bent slightly at the edges, reality folding in the specific way it did when the cosmic shop delivered something physical, and the Cradle Seed of Elements began to materialize.

On the rock twenty meters ahead of him, Vyra’s fire burned brighter.