SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 622: Power Before Cultivation

Chapter 622: Power Before Cultivation

The practice chamber was built into the mountain, forty paces across, its walls covered in overlapping containment formations that Leon could feel breathing quietly against his perception.

"Nine," Ji Liansu said. "Small. Controlled. Show me each one, and show me only those nine."

Leon did as he was told, and did it well.

Fire came first: a fist-sized sphere hovering a meter off the floor, its surface perfectly still, holding the exact shape he had given it without flickering once. Water next, a rotating disc of it, edge-on. Earth rose from the stone floor in a smooth column and stopped where he stopped it. Wind ran a circuit around the chamber without disturbing a hair. Lightning arrived instantly, forked once, and held. Ice grew from nothing into a lattice of six repeating arms. Light stayed exactly as bright as he wanted it, edge-defined, no bleed. Darkness formed a contained sphere that swallowed the Light beside it and did not spread a finger’s width past its boundary.

Space he demonstrated by folding a corner of the chamber and putting his hand through it to touch the far wall.

Ji Liansu watched all nine without a word.

"Your skill execution is exceptional," she said finally. "I want that stated plainly, because everything I say afterward will sound like criticism and none of it is about your technique. Your control is better than any disciple on this peak. Your Space work is better than several elders’."

"But."

"But watch."

She raised one hand and produced a sphere of water.

It was the same size as his, spun at the same rate, held the same shape. Leon put his perception on it immediately and felt the difference before he understood it: her sphere sat in the air as though the air had agreed to hold it. His had been an argument he was winning.

"Match it," she said. "Both of us hold. We stop when one of us needs to add power."

Leon put his water back up and held it.

Two minutes passed. Three. At four, he felt the first small slippage — the sphere’s outer layer beginning to lose coherence — and he fed it, a light touch, hardly anything. At six he did it again. At nine minutes the corrections had become continuous, small and constant, like a man keeping a coin balanced on its edge with tiny movements of the finger.

Ji Liansu’s sphere had not changed at all. She had put nothing into it since it formed.

"Stop," she said.

Leon let his fall. It broke on the floor in a splash. Hers rose, unhurried, back to her palm and vanished.

"How much did you spend?" she asked.

"More than you."

"Four to five times more. Possibly six." She turned her hand over. "And this is what I want you to understand: my skill is not better than yours. If we were both handed identical energy at the same instant and told to make a sphere, yours would be at least as good as mine, and your Space is unquestionably better."

"Then what’s the difference?"

"The energy went into my technique already prepared," she said. "You put raw power into a perfect result and made the result do the work of refining it."

She walked to the wall and set her palm flat against the stone.

"A native cultivator has three stages before the technique ever happens. The spiritual root draws in what is around us and converts it — that is the first filter, and it is where impurity is removed. The meridians circulate it, and circulation is not transport. Every pass conditions the energy and conditions the channel. A method that runs a route ten thousand times leaves both the energy and the body changed." She turned back. "And the cultivation technique itself is the instruction for all of it — which routes, in which order, at what pressure, toward what quality. By the time a Dao Palace expert throws a flame, that flame is receiving fuel that has been refined specifically to become flame."

"And I’m pouring in whatever’s in the tank."

"You are pouring in something extraordinary that has never been refined for any purpose at all, and then compensating with precision so fine that it usually works." Ji Liansu’s tone stayed level. "It has kept you alive. I have read what you did in that merchant’s garden, and a Peak Ascendant has no business doing it. Your method is not stupid. It is expensive."

"How expensive?"

"You waste power on every single technique you use. You generate internal strain that a properly circulated cultivator does not, and you will feel that strain accumulate over decades even if you never notice it in a day. And in a long engagement—an hour, six hours, a running fight across three days—your stability degrades while that of a native cultivator with comparable reserves degrades far more slowly." She let that sit. "Any Void Immortal who understood what you are would simply refuse to finish quickly."

Leon thought about the Moonless, which had been perfectly happy to prolong the hunt, and said nothing.

"Now the difficult part," Ji Liansu said. "Jade Moon Palace has no core inheritance suitable for a Ninefold Elemental Harmony Spiritual Root. We have never needed one. Every method in our vaults was built for two or three elements at most, and the finest of them are the narrowest." She looked at him. "And whatever you are actually carrying beyond the nine makes the problem worse, not better. Forcing one of our protected inheritances onto your foundation would either fail outright or take root badly, and a badly rooted core method is worse than none."

"So you’re not going to teach me one."

"I am going to give you the library."

She said it as though it were a small thing.

"General collections, all of them. Foundational texts, public methods, collected foreign techniques, elemental treatises, historical research, complete techniques up to and including your current realm, and every failed experiment we have ever bothered to keep — and we keep a great many, because failures are cheaper to store than successes. Only the named core inheritances stay closed to you."

Leon took a moment with that.

"And what do you want in exchange?"

"Three months," Ji Liansu said. "At the end of them, you will bring me a complete first-stage personal cultivation technique. Your own. Built to accept every element I know you possess, and structured so that it does not have to be torn down when you eventually admit to the rest."

"First stage only?"

"First stage only. You will not break through during this, and I am telling you now, clearly, so that you cannot later claim you misunderstood — do not force an advancement while you are experimenting on your own foundation. People die that way. Talented people die that way more often, because they get further before it goes wrong."

"And if I can’t do it in three months?"

"Then you will tell me why, and I will decide whether the reason is good." She moved toward the door. "I will not hover over you and I will not solve it for you. If I designed it, it would be my method wearing your name, and it would fit you the way somebody else’s boots fit. Come to me at the end and I will inspect what you have built."

At the threshold she stopped.

"Your talent bought you this opportunity," she said. "Talent by itself only makes the eventual failure more expensive, because more was spent getting there. Do not disappoint me."

Then she was gone, and Leon stood alone in a forty-pace practice chamber with the water still spreading across the floor where his sphere had broken.

He turned the problem over and found, underneath the weight of it, something he had not felt in a long time. For years—through the tower, the classes, the reawakening, and the crossing—every step forward had been a matter of acquiring something that already existed. A skill, a rank, a relic, a level.

Nobody had ever asked him to construct an entire path from first principles. This time, there was no finished reward waiting for him. He would have to make the road before he could walk it.

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