SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 595: A Line of Pale Light

Chapter 595: A Line of Pale Light

Leon did not stop walking. Whatever had placed the mark inside his shadow was waiting to learn when he noticed, and any reaction would reveal the reach of his perception.

The mark was formed from shadow and spatial energy woven together in a way he did not yet understand. A faint tension joined it to the darkness beneath a nearby shelf, then disappeared into deeper shadow. Leon touched it with his senses, felt it pull taut like a fishing line, and withdrew.

For the next hour, he lied with his body. He let a false limp appear, knelt too long at a stream, and exposed his back to a stand of black rock. Nothing attacked, but when he rose, the rock’s shadow had shifted against the moonlight and the mark below his heart had darkened.

Leon chose a shallow bowl of pale stone with broken ridges on three sides and few natural shadows. While pretending to make camp badly, he sank a cold lattice into the ground and left four points of hardened space along the northern approach. His fire created the final lie: a man who needed light to see the dark.

He lay against the rock and slowed his breathing.

The attack came in the fourth hour.

It descended from overhead, pouring through the ridge’s shadow toward the back of his neck. Leon had positioned the fire so that shadow fell exactly there. He moved a quarter second early and struck where its throat would appear.

Half the blow passed through a body that was not fully solid. The rest broke its descent sideways, revealing a long, sleek beast with a coat blacker than the night around it and pale crescents where its eyes should have been.

It landed and rushed him through the darkness on the ground. Leon answered with compressed frost, avoiding fire or light that might be seen beyond the ridges. His blade struck the point where the moving shadow joined the stone. The beast stuttered as its momentum arrived before the rest of it, and Leon’s next attack opened its flank.

Steaming blood touched the ground. The creature withdrew twenty paces and stared at him, no longer treating him as helpless prey.

[Moonless Shadow Leopard — Level 114]

[Rank: Ethereal Lord]

[Affinity: Shadow, Space]

The leopard stood twenty levels and a full rank above the centipede. Worse, it used its Shadow and Space affinities with an instinctive precision Leon had only begun to understand on a decent level.

He could escape into his world, but the mark beneath his heart remained. Opening a dimensional passage before a creature built to enter places through shadow could lead it straight toward thousands of people whose defenses were not made for an Ethereal Lord.

That choice disappeared.

The leopard tested him with two lunges from opposite shadows. Leon avoided both, but the beast withdrew before he could punish either attempt. Then every shadow in the bowl deepened, and the ridge’s darkness spread across the stone.

Leon set his feet and gathered power into the Void Heart. The spatial fold he intended had worked only twice before. It would expose his presence for fifty kilometers and likely leave him injured, but it could carry him through the attack.

The darkness came at him from six directions.

Pale fabric stirred on the western ridge where no wind moved. A woman stood half-concealed among the stone, watching the killing strike close around him. She remained still until Leon raised his head toward the converging dark and moonlight fell across his face.

Her sword moved before the rest of her did.

A line of pale light crossed the bowl.

It arrived without sound or warning, a stroke of edged moonlight drawn across the world a foot before his chest. The mark vanished from Leon’s shadow without pain. Every shadow in the bowl flattened, exposing the leopard on bare stone, and a shallow white wound opened parallel to the one Leon had made.

The beast screamed.

Leon turned his head.

The woman stood on the western ridge in pale gray-blue robes that moonlight seemed unable to touch. A silver crescent rested at her collar, while a crescent-shaped jade at her waist held a thin line of light pointing south across the Desolation. Her sword looked plain until Leon noticed how completely the surrounding energy avoided it.

The cut had crossed the bowl before she finished stepping into view. The leopard saw her insignia, backed away with its tail low, then vanished beneath the rocks. The pressure of its hunt disappeared with it.

The woman descended and stopped six paces from Leon. Her gaze rested on him longer than the situation required. Then her expression closed, and her voice emerged colder than he expected.

"You built a fire," she said. "In the Desolation. At night. With a Moonless hunting nearby."

"I did."

"Do you know what one is?"

"It’s fast, travels through shadow, and marks its prey before attacking. I learned that tonight." Leon inclined his head. "Thank you for cutting the mark. I couldn’t remove it."

That earned him a long, unimpressed silence.

"You wounded it."

"Once. With cold."

"Show me your sect token."

"I don’t have one."

"Your registration jade."

"I don’t have that either."

Her gaze moved across his plain clothes, boots, and cloth pack. She believed none of them, though Leon could not tell which detail had betrayed him.

"Qingyue," she said. "Of Jade Moon Palace."

She stopped there, clearly expecting the name to be sufficient. Leon had no idea what Jade Moon Palace was, so he gave her a polite nod.

"You’ve never heard of it," she said.

"No."

"Where are you from?"

"A sealed inheritance space. I was inside a long time—I’m not sure how long. The entrance collapsed, and I emerged two days south of here." He allowed some weariness into his voice. "I don’t know the region or its roads. I’ve been following the water north."

Qingyue’s eyes moved to the crescent jade at her waist. The pale line within it trembled, still pointing toward the ground Leon had crossed.

"The space collapsed when you emerged?"

"Completely."

Qingyue studied the way he stood, breathed, and held his hands. Her attention settled twice near his chest, but Leon kept both hearts beating at the pace of a tired traveler until she moved on.

"Your energy doesn’t circulate," she said at last.

"Doesn’t it?"

"No." She did not elaborate. "An inheritance space would explain some of it. Not all of it."

"I can only tell you what happened to me."

"You have told me much less than that." She sheathed her sword with a small sound. "Your explanation is poor, but better than the other possibilities. That is the only reason we are still speaking."

She looked south once more, toward the disturbance her jade had been following, then at Leon. A moment later, she turned north, past the broken rim of the bowl, to where a faint smudge of light sat low on the horizon—so faint that Leon had mistaken it for a difference in the rock.

"Alone, without a sect or token, and unable to recognize a Moonless before it marks you, you will be dead within a month. Probably a week." Her tone remained cold. "That is not advice. It is what will happen."

Leon looked at the smudge on the horizon.

"Which way is the nearest city?"

She started walking.

She neither invited him nor ordered him away. She crossed the bowl at an unhurried pace, and the moonlight still refused to touch her as it touched everything else.

Leon stayed where he was for several breaths. He put the fire out with a handful of grit and picked up his pack.

Then he followed.

He was perhaps thirty paces behind her when her head turned a fraction — not enough to look at him. Just enough to confirm the distance.

She kept walking.