SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 588: The Road Left Unsearched

Chapter 588: The Road Left Unsearched

Two days after the memorial, Leon planted the Legendary Instance Seed.

He chose prepared land near the principal settlement, far enough from the expanding residential districts that future growth would not crowd it, but close enough for healers, guards, and training officials to reach it quickly.

Half the nearby town seemed to follow him there.

The walk showed him how much had changed. This place had once been a collection of shelters built by people grateful to have walls. Now it was a large town approaching the point where nobody would be able to call it one for much longer.

Construction covered entire districts. Scaffolding climbed across rows of new houses. Smoke rose from completed forges in a workshop quarter that remained only half roofed. Foundations marked the future school, granary, public bathhouse, and administrative hall. The main roads had been paved; crews were extending the secondary streets while another team prepared the outer wall for defensive formations.

The tools, materials, and formations Leon had purchased from the Cosmic Shop had changed what was possible. Tasks that should have required years could be completed in days. Taken together, the improvements pushed development forward at something close to a thousand times the pace their old methods could have achieved.

It still did not make the town finished.

Temporary housing stood two streets from permanent homes still under construction. Ditches waited for drainage lines. Several districts were more stakes and marked earth than buildings. The city this place was becoming could already be seen, but it had not arrived yet.

Leon stopped in the center of the prepared ground and withdrew the reward he had received from Floor Two.

[Legendary Instance Seed]

It rested in his palm, small enough to appear unimpressive until he let it touch the soil.

The earth answered.

Lines of light spread beneath the ground in branching patterns. The Seed sank from sight, and the cleared field trembled as space folded inward around a forming center. Stone rose in a wide ring. Within it, a dark entrance appeared—not an open hole, but a stable boundary leading into something larger than the land around it could physically contain.

System information formed above the entrance, identifying the instance and its basic conditions. Leon read every line before he allowed anyone closer.

The Seed had become what Floor Two promised: a permanent place where the inhabitants could challenge themselves and earn advancement through effort. It would not hand out endless rewards, and it would not remove the need for preparation, discipline, or skill.

Leon did not pretend danger alone made training valuable.

Before anyone entered, he called over the settlement leaders and established rules. The first teams would be experienced fighters chosen to test the instance carefully. Every entrant would register before entering. Healers would remain nearby. No one under the approved strength would be allowed through, and nobody would enter alone until they understood what waited inside. The rules could change once they learned more, but ignorance would not be treated as courage.

One group of younger survivors had already begun arguing over who should lead the first run.

Leon pointed toward the registration table being carried across the field.

"You can start by helping build that."

Their enthusiasm faded with impressive speed.

"Still want to be first?" he asked.

"Less than before," one admitted.

"Good. That means you have begun thinking."

The crowd spread around the new structure, reading its information and discussing teams. Healers inspected the ground selected for their station. A training officer began drafting an entry schedule before Leon asked. Workers argued about whether the road should curve around the instance or lead directly to it.

Leon watched all of it and felt a quiet satisfaction settle in his chest.

They did not need him to manage every detail. That was the point.

The dimensional world had once been land he owned. Then it had become a shelter dependent upon him for resources, protection, and direction. It was no longer either of those things. Thousands of humans and Pyrans lived here now. They had leaders, workers, healers, soldiers, families, an economy, a town becoming a city, and now a permanent path of advancement they could organize for themselves.

His attention could finally turn elsewhere without leaving emptiness behind it.

Leon had wanted to reach a higher-ranked world for a long time.

The desire was not new, and he did not question it now. The abyssal war, the world-rank merger, the Class Reawakening Dungeon, and the Ascension Tower had all been more urgent. So had the lives being built inside this world.

For once, the nearest crisis was not demanding that he delay.

He found Xyra in her mansion near the tower and gave her the question exactly as it existed.

"If someone descended into Velaria from another world, could I follow the connection backward?"

Xyra remained silent long enough to prove she was considering it rather than preparing something impressive to say.

"A passage between worlds leaves traces," she said at last. "Even after the structure collapses, part of its destination may remain imprinted in the space it occupied. A scar remembers the shape of what made it."

"That sounds possible."

"That is the easiest part." Her silver eyes sharpened. "You would need to identify a foreign coordinate from within Velaria’s laws, reverse a route designed for descent, and stabilize a passage between worlds governed by different structures. Carrying this dimensional world through with you would magnify every weakness in the route."

"Can you do it?"

"No, I can’t go outside"

The direct answer did not trouble him.

"I can examine what you find," Xyra continued. "I can tell you why it fails and help maintain this world while you test it. I cannot give you a destination I do not possess."

Leon nodded. "Then I’ll find one."

He left the dimensional world that evening with Seraphine, Ira, Loriel, and Vyra.

Luna met them in Velaria. She had remained outside the dimensional world, and Leon had contacted her before leaving so she could begin arranging access to the oldest Church records.

Their trail began with the Upper Ones.

According to the oldest histories, they had descended from a higher-ranked world and first appeared around the City of Light. Leon had intended to investigate that arrival long ago. War and the transformation of his world had pulled him away before he did.

Now he returned to the question he had left unfinished.

Luna’s name opened doors, but not instantly. The oldest Church of Light and Church of Life records were divided among institutions that distrusted one another and guarded their vaults as fiercely as they guarded relics. She spent hours negotiating while Leon resisted Ira’s repeated suggestion that locked doors were only philosophical obstacles.

By nightfall, three collections had been brought into a single secure archive.

The records contradicted one another on almost everything: how many Upper Ones came, what they looked like, what they said, and whether they were people or gods. Centuries of politics, translation, worship, and deliberate revision lay between Leon and whatever had truly happened.

He did not read them as a historian.

He read them as someone who understood space.

The earliest accounts all agreed on one detail. The Upper Ones appeared at the same place, yet no record described them travelling there. No road. No vessel. No procession from beyond the city.

They were simply present.

Several ancient maps also distorted the same portion of the original settlement. Different hands had drawn them across different eras, yet each left the same absence. The oldest measurements of the artificial domains used the City of Light as their origin point rather than any geographic center.

Then Leon found the line that made the rest fit.

The earliest surviving version described the sky folding downward.

Later copies replaced it with heaven’s glory descending.

He laid the two passages beside each other.

"This was not a miracle," he said.

Seraphine studied the altered wording. "Someone wanted it remembered as one."

"Or wanted the mechanism forgotten."

The maps told him where to begin.

Leon rose from the archive table and extended his spatial perception beneath the oldest foundations of the City of Light.

Far below them, something in the structure of space answered.