SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 598: Forty-One Alive

Chapter 598: Forty-One Alive

Leon went straight to the people most likely to die.

A guard lay pinned beneath a wagon axle with a punctured lung. A servant woman’s belly had been opened. A boy of fourteen had stopped bleeding for the wrong reason. Leon healed those three completely, light pouring from his hands until several nearby survivors backed away in awe.

Then he stopped healing and began stabilizing.

He set bones, closed dangerous bleeding, and dulled enough pain for wounded men to stop fighting the people helping them. Ordinary cuts and bruises remained for medicine and time. A man who restored forty people to perfect health in one afternoon would become a story long before he reached the city, and Leon had already revealed more than he wanted.

The young woman worked through the wreckage from the opposite direction. She sent uninjured servants to collect scattered medicine chests, ordered guards to inspect the wagons, and gave one grieving merchant the task of recording the dead. Twice she swayed. Both times, she steadied herself against a wheel and continued.

Leon reached her last.

"Sit down."

"There are others—"

"There aren’t. You’re the last person still bleeding."

She studied him, then sat on a crate and allowed him to examine her shoulder. The cut was messy and painful, but shallow enough to remain moderate. She had worsened it by working and reopened it when she caught the rescued child.

Leon closed the wound with light. He left the soreness and exhaustion alone. Removing those as well would have displayed a degree of healing he preferred to keep hidden.

"You treated the guards first," she said.

"They were dying."

"Most people would have begun with my father."

"Your father wasn’t dying."

She watched his face with the same quiet attention Qingyue used, though Leon suspected her calculations concerned different things.

The older merchant approached with two servants trying and failing to support him. He freed his arms and bowed deeply.

"Shen Baoyuan, of the Shen house in Moonfall. This is my daughter, Yanning." His voice remained steady until he looked at her healed shoulder. "There were fifty-three of us this morning. There are forty-one now, and all forty-one are alive because you came over that hill. I do not know what to offer a man like you."

"Nothing yet," Leon said. "How many wagons can move?"

"Three now. A fourth can be repaired by morning. We are three days from Moonfall Frontier City." Baoyuan glanced toward the bodies on the road. "If you and the lady will travel with us, I would rather not test our fortune twice."

Leon looked toward Qingyue.

She had descended from the slope and now stood beside one of the fractured ice walls, studying what remained of it. Her silence felt analytical rather than indifferent.

"Moonfall is where I’m going," Leon said.

"Then it is settled," Yanning replied before her father could. She had already risen from the crate. "The fourth wagon will be ready by dawn. We also carry spare clothing. You’ll want something local before we reach the gate."

She had spent the last few hours working through a bleeding shoulder and had resumed organizing the caravan seconds after Leon closed it.

Leon liked competent people.

They camped beside the wreckage. Repairs continued through half the night while the dead were prepared beneath covered cloth. Nobody celebrated surviving. The absence of the twelve who had not survived occupied too much space.

At dawn, the Shen house buried them.

After the stripped bones and staked corpse Leon had found upon entering this world, and the nine men left exposed on an old battlefield, he had not known what customs to expect. Here, at least, expedience did not erase duty to their own dead.

The survivors dug twelve graves. Yanning personally marked the burial place with a formation stake and recorded every name in a ledger before the first body was lowered.

Leon helped dig. Nobody asked him to. Qingyue stood at the edge of the road, watching with an expression he could not read.

By the time the four wagons began moving, the sun had cleared the hills.

Shen Baoyuan made the repayment before they had travelled two kilometers. He opened a strongbox on the tail of the lead wagon in front of witnesses.

First came a heavy purse of ordinary silver and a smaller pouch that the merchant handled more carefully.

"Low-grade spirit stones," Baoyuan explained when Leon examined it. "For cultivators’ goods."

Next came provisions, a waterskin, and clothing in a plain dark blue-gray cut. Finally, Baoyuan offered a flat piece of dark wood with the Shen mark burned into one side and a thread of sealed qi woven through it.

"One serious favor, at any time, for as long as my house stands. We are not a great family. We cannot shield you from a sect, a great clan, or the magistrates if you give them cause. But within our legitimate reach—goods, coin, routes, papers, introductions, or a discreet place to stay—this token will be answered. If I am absent, my daughter will answer it."

Baoyuan rested two fingers on the token before releasing it. "You also have no local papers. When we reach Moonfall, my house will guarantee that you entered the region in our company and explain why you arrived without a registration jade. It will not grant you permanent standing, but it should get you through the gate without being treated as a criminal."

That assistance was worth more to Leon than either purse. Money could be earned. A credible explanation for a man who had appeared from nowhere was much harder to obtain.

Leon accepted everything.

A man who saved forty-one lives and refused all repayment would become a legend or a liar. A man who accepted money, supplies, and a useful favor looked more like a wandering cultivator who had encountered a profitable disaster.

The caravan moved slowly, which suited him.

Yanning joined him beside the lead wagon before midday.

"Do the clothes fit?"

"Well enough."

"Good. They won’t hide your face, but they should stop every gate guard and merchant from identifying you as a foreigner before you speak." She waited one step before adding, "Silver is for inns, meals, baths, and ordinary tools. Spirit stones are for anything a cultivator sells—pills, materials, formation work, or information. Don’t offer silver in the eastern market. They will take it, and they will remember that you didn’t know better."

The advice was practical. The question hidden beneath it was not.

"And if I need to sell something?" Leon asked.

"Come to me first. Even if the Shen house cannot buy it, I will know who can—and which buyers ask fewer questions than they should."

She made the offer sound like ordinary business. The brief warmth in her expression suggested that business was not the only reason.

Leon answered what she asked and nothing more.

Yanning smiled slightly, as though that answer had told her something too.