SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 625: A Foundation Without Walls

Chapter 625: A Foundation Without Walls

The residence appeared exactly as Leon had left it. He spent the next hour making certain appearances were not deceiving him.

All eight formation layers were present and unaltered. The four threads running out of the compound carried exactly what they had during his first inspection, and the boundary stones remained untouched. He checked the plum tree’s array, the training yard, the roof beams, and the floor of the main hall. Nothing anywhere in the residence had been added, moved, or awakened since his first inspection.

Only after satisfying himself did he begin copying.

For the next two days, Leon reconstructed the selected manuals from memory. He preserved their original names and publicly known origins so his companions would have plausible answers if anyone questioned them. What he removed were Jade Moon catalogue numbers, archive notes, and anything revealing where his copies had come from. He added his own observations in the margins and wrote a separate guide to the Palace’s ranks, forms of address, and basic customs.

When the last stack was ready, he built his own isolation inside the main hall: a self-contained spatial shell seated within the walls, drawing on nothing of theirs and pressing against nothing. He stood in the middle of it until he was certain the room could not be heard from outside.

Only then did he open the connection.

The portal lasted four seconds. He chose the exit point carefully—Xyra’s quarantine plot in the eastern flats, three hundred paces from the nearest cultivated field and already enclosed by layered barriers. The bundle of rewritten manuals dropped onto the bare soil. Leon closed the portal immediately and spoke to the women through their existing connection, which required no physical opening at all.

"There are several options suited to each of you, plus six general circulation texts everyone should read," he said. "Nothing in there is a Jade Moon inheritance. Every one of them is public, collected, or from a lineage that died out. If anyone ever asks where you learned it, the answer is boring."

"How much time do we have?" Seraphine asked.

"A little under three months out here. Which is—"

"More than two years inside," Vyra said. "Give or take."

"Give or take."

He laid out the rest while they read. Each of them was to test her options rather than commit to the first one that worked. They would choose the method that accepted a foreign foundation with the least resistance, grow auxiliary channels slowly under Loriel’s eye, and reach the point where drawing and circulating this world’s energy felt ordinary rather than like an achievement.

"And all of you need to learn to be smaller than you are," Leon said. "Publicly, you’re wandering cultivators who picked up decent methods and worked hard. Not one of you ever mentions a class. Not one of you fights at full output where anyone can see. Assume any elder who examines you properly can tell more than you want them to."

"Then the cover," Seraphine said. "Say it now, because I’ve been building objections since you left us, and I’d like to know which ones still apply."

"When you’re ready, I travel to a large city—somewhere busy enough that four capable people appearing is unremarkable. You arrive there separately. I take you on openly as personal attendants and register you under my token. Then we return through the front gate in daylight with paperwork."

"Roles?"

"You’re chief attendant and personal guard. Ira is my combat guard. Vyra is my steward and adviser. Loriel manages the medicinal garden."

There was a pause.

"," Ira said. "That’s what it says? On a form?"

"On a form."

"That’s the most respectable thing anyone has ever accused me of. I’m going to be insufferable about it."

"You’re going to be about it," Vyra said, "which is the actual problem."

Her voice became more serious when she addressed Leon. "We have enough time to learn the circulation. What gets us caught is a woman who bows wrong, uses the wrong word for a senior, or doesn’t know that you don’t step onto another elder’s peak. I found your guide on manners and seniority. I’ll drill all four of us, but send anything else you learn."

"I will."

"Good."

"Leon." Loriel spoke carefully. "These life methods. The third one is—" She stopped. "It’s very good. Whoever wrote it understood something about how a body wants to heal that I’ve never seen written down anywhere."

"Then use it. And Loriel—"

"I know," she said more quietly. "Nobody sees what I actually am. I know."

"Not forever. Just until I understand what these people do with someone like you."

Seraphine’s voice came last, after the others had returned to their reading.

"You sound better," she said.

"I’m being taught. It’s been a while."

"Then let her teach you." She paused. "And come back."

He closed the connection, released his isolation, and left the Palace’s formations exactly as they had been issued.

Leon returned to the library the next morning and spent four more days refining his design. On the last of them, he understood that he had been building the wrong thing from the beginning.

By then, the design covered two tables: nine routes, one for each public element, each stripped down to its underlying principle and rebuilt from scratch so that no channel became conditioned against another. It was elegant. He had solved the conflict between heat and cold with a shared neutral segment. He had given Space its anchor points without letting the earth circulation cross them. Counting his earlier research, it represented nearly two weeks of good work, and it was very close to functioning.

He was checking the sixth route against the second when one thought brought the entire design down.

Nine routes. Nine channels. A structure built to hold exactly nine things and no more.

The stone in the examination hall had been an excellent artifact. It had reached into him honestly, found nine compatibilities, filled nine sockets, and stopped because nine was all its makers had thought to provide. Three thousand years ago, none of them had considered that someone might arrive with more.

Leon was about to impose the same limitation upon himself. He would spend three months constructing a beautiful nine-route foundation while every affinity he still concealed remained outside it with nowhere to go. The first time he tried to bring another one in, he would have to tear down the whole structure and rebuild it with ten routes. Then eleven. Then however many came after that.

Leon sat back and looked at two tables of excellent work.

What he needed was not a collection of routes. He needed a center—a framework within his foundation that carried no elemental character at all. It would take in energy of any kind, refine it, condition it, and pass it onward without caring what it was. Individual elemental principles could connect to that center, feed from it, and return to it, but none of them would own it or change its fundamental nature.

If he added a tenth element, nothing would need to be rebuilt. The new path would simply attach to what was already there.

He sat with the idea for a long time, searching for the flaw, and found several. He had no idea how to create a circulation that refined energy without shaping it toward something. Every neutral method he had studied was neutral only because it was weak. His center would have to be stronger than anything he possessed, yet he had not worked out what it would be made from. Nothing in the Palace archive described such a framework ever existing.

It was a much harder problem than nine routes.

It was also the right one.

He gathered every page of the nine-route design, stacked them, and set them aside rather than destroying them. Parts of the abandoned design would survive into whatever came next.

Then he took out a blank sheet and drew a single circle in its center, with nothing attached and no number written anywhere.

He still had most of his three months. For the first time since Ji Liansu had closed the practice chamber door behind her, Leon knew what he was actually trying to build.