SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 612: A Name This World Will Accept

Chapter 612: A Name This World Will Accept

By the second morning the estate had stopped feeling like a house waiting to be hit.

Masons arrived to repair a section of the eastern wall that had needed repair for four years, and while they worked, two of Yanning’s people seated three new formation nodes into the footing beneath them. A cart of roofing tile came in, and a great deal more than roofing tile came off it. The rear garden gate stayed barred, and the story in the servants’ hall was a spoiled spirit-beast carcass that had to be dealt with.

Shen Yuanhe took Leon down to the cellars before the day started.

"I have moved them," the old man said. "The agent is under the north wing. The Void Immortal stays where he is. Three tokens open the first door, three different ones open the second, and nobody holds a set for both. Not Baoyuan, not Yanning, not me — I hold two of three for each, so I cannot open either alone."

"That’s careful."

"That is a family whose inner estate was breached once already this week." He put a hand on the doorframe. "Show me your seal before you go."

Leon spent an hour on it.

The existing fold had held without Leon standing beside it, but its structure was still formed entirely from his power. That was inadequate for a prison meant to last after he left. He anchored the fold into the chamber’s formations and closed the maintenance loop around the routes between the man’s manifested body and his Ethereal foundation. The estate’s array could now sustain it without Leon.

He walked the old man through it twice, including the parts he disliked.

"It holds against him. It won’t hold against everything," Leon said. "Someone strong from outside who knows what he’s looking at can break it — it’s a wall, not a law. And if he sits with it for months he’ll find the seams. It wants checking."

"Every week," Shen Yuanhe said. "I’ll do it myself."

The registration hall looked exactly as it had the first time: long counters, ink and wax, a queue of caravan clerks arguing about tariff schedules.

The registrar was a different man, older, with a face built for saying no.

Leon set the temporary jade on the counter, cloudy at the edges the way they went as the term ran out.

"Still valid," the registrar said, turning it over. "Renew or convert?"

"Convert," said Shen Yuanhe.

The registrar looked up, looked at the old man properly, and his whole posture changed.

"Elder Shen."

"I am guaranteeing him. Personally."

"Then you know what I have to say next, and I’ll say it anyway because the law requires it." He pulled a heavy ledger over and opened it. "A personal guarantee from a cultivator of your standing means the city holds you responsible. If this man turns out to be a fugitive, an infiltrator, or a criminal under another name, the penalty falls on your seal, your house, and your bond. He goes to a cell. You lose considerably more."

"I helped write half of that law."

"So you did." The registrar dipped his pen. "Then let us be exact about the wording. Vagueness is what ruins guarantors."

It took most of the morning. The registrar rejected as too broad, refused to place the lost realm at an invented location, and would not leave the lineage line blank.

What they finished with was short.

"That last line matters," the registrar said without looking up. "Anyone checking sees a stranger who came through a gate and was converted later. A record appearing from nowhere is worse than a thin one."

Leon gave the blood and qi signature into the bowl a second time and shaped what went in exactly as before — stable, coherent, continuous, nothing else. The old man pressed his seal into the wax, laid his cultivation imprint over it, and signed a bond amount that made the registrar’s assistant look up.

The tablet was heavier than the temporary jade, dark green, the city’s mark on one face and no expiry cut into the other.

Outside on the steps, Qingyue read it twice.

"This will do. The Palace will accept it as enough to begin an assessment." She handed it back. "Understand what that sentence contains. It answers whether you may stand at the gate. Nothing past that."

Leon turned the tablet over before putting it away. Killing three Void Immortals had not bought him this. Shen Yuanhe’s seal had given him a name this world’s institutions would recognize.

He handled the rest of it that evening, in the guest wing, with the door shut and the lamp out.

The Shen archive material on the Earthmarrow Fern went through first—four generations of feeding records, harvests, recovery notes, and three failed transplant attempts.

"Quarantine’s stable," she said. "It drank about a fifth of what I offered and stopped. I think it’s rationing, which is good — that’s a plant that expects lean years." A pause. "Where are you?"

"Leaving Moonfall in the morning. Going somewhere much harder to hide in."

He told them the shape of it — a major sect, an assessment, elders who would look at him properly for the first time since the crossing.

Seraphine got there first, as usual. "Their guest quarters will have privacy formations."

"They will."

"A formation close enough to keep the world out may also be close enough to listen."

"I know. I’ll take whatever room they give me apart before anyone comes out. If it doesn’t check clean, nobody comes out."

"How long?" Vyra’s voice held an edge. "I have been a passenger since we crossed into this world, Leon. I am not built for it, and neither are my people."

"I can’t give you a date. I can tell you it’s days rather than months."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the true one."

Ira cut in, bored-sounding, which was how she sounded when she had decided something was a job. "Leave her be. It’s a placement operation, and you don’t move people into a position until it’s scouted." A beat. "Scout it properly. Rush this and we come out in front of the wrong elder, and we’re all finished."

"Are there gardens?" Loriel asked.

Leon smiled in the dark. "There’ll be gardens."

"Then find out if they have a plant archive. Ask what they keep. Don’t ask about ferns specifically."

Leon sent through four bundles of ordinary clothing purchased in Moonfall. "Wear these when you come out. Keep your signatures down as well. Your energy doesn’t circulate the way theirs does, and that difference may draw attention."

They saw him off at first light.

Shen Baoyuan said very little, which Leon appreciated. He had made his speech already in a garden full of bodies and had the sense not to make it twice. He shook Leon’s hand, said, "The guest wing stays yours," and left it there.

Yanning handed over a folded paper with eleven names on it: factors, an honest ore assayer on the coast road, two innkeepers, and a woman in a port town who could get letters onto Jade Moon supply boats.

"They’ll deal with you on the token," she said. "The ones with a circle beside the name will deal with you without asking questions. The ones without a circle will ask, so give them boring answers."

"Thank you."

"Don’t." She stepped back. "You left us a wall, two prisoners, and a network we can watch. We’re square, and my great-grandfather is going to spend a year telling people otherwise."

Leon put the identity tablet down on the table beside the Shen inner-network token and looked at them together for a moment: a lawful name, and proof that somebody in this world was willing to stand behind it.

Then the light coming through the courtyard changed.

Something silver-green came down out of the morning sky over the estate, long and slender, its underside cut with formation lines that drank the light instead of reflecting it. It made almost no sound at all.

Qingyue stepped off it onto the courtyard stone.

"Bring only what you are willing to have examined," she said.