SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 626: Too Much for the First Step

Chapter 626: Too Much for the First Step

The new design took six days and covered most of the main hall’s floor.

Leon rewrote it four times. What survived would not have been recognized as a cultivation technique by anyone in the library. It possessed no elemental character, used no scriptural language, and promised nothing about what it would eventually produce.

It was simply a route.

Energy entered through the lower channels, completed a circuit through the trunk of his body, passed into a central section built to belong to nothing, and returned along a path that ended where it had begun.

That central section was the entire idea. Every complete method in the Palace conditioned its channels toward the type of power it existed to create. Leon’s route had to remain neutral after Fire passed through it, then Water, then every affinity he was still hiding from the Palace.

The System could identify his problems. It offered no solutions.

[Cultivation Technique — Unnamed, Personal]

Structure: Incomplete

Unresolved structural points: 6

Circulation: Not attempted

Compatibility: Unassessed

The assessment remained unchanged every time he checked. It counted the problems he already knew existed while declining to tell him what belonged in those places. After the third day, Leon stopped hoping it would do more and returned to solving them himself.

On the seventh day, he sent word to Ji Liansu that he was ready to test the route.

The chamber she gave him was cut deep into her personal peak. It measured twenty paces across, and its walls had been built in three shells of containment work, with a channel of running water around the outer edge. Whatever went wrong inside would remain inside.

Ji studied his diagrams while he waited. She took long enough that Leon resisted the urge to speak twice.

"I find no theoretical conflict," she said at last. "The neutral section is unusual, but I cannot immediately say that it will fail. Your junction placement is sound, and your return path is exceptionally well constructed."

She set the pages down.

"Understand precisely what I have told you. The design contains no error I can identify on paper."

"That’s not the same as safe."

"It is not remotely the same as safe. A cultivation route is more than a diagram or formation. It is something you establish inside a living body that has never followed it before." Ji moved to the edge of the chamber. "Begin small and stop at anything that surprises you. I will be here."

Leon sat in the center of the floor and closed his eyes.

The first part came easily. Drawing energy inward was something his body had done since the moment he arrived in this world, and the ambient power surrounding Ji Liansu’s peak was thick enough to feel against his skin. He gathered a small amount within his lower channels and held it there.

He knew the quantity he wanted. Years of practice had taught him exactly how much energy any given task required, and this was a small task—a first attempt using a fraction of what he would have committed to the simplest technique he possessed.

By every standard he had relied upon for years, he was being extremely conservative.

He moved the energy.

The first section of the route did not open. It tore.

Pain struck before he understood what had happened. White pressure split upward through his chest and spread along both arms as the energy entered a channel that had never carried anything. Instead of widening slowly over years of cultivation, the channel was forced open in an instant. Leon felt its wall give way, followed by something deeper behind it.

He tried to pull the energy back and discovered that it was no longer entirely under his control.

The half-formed route had begun drawing power on its own. Ambient energy poured toward the tear, feeding the surge. The surge widened the opening, and the larger opening drew in even more. Pressure climbed inside his chest. His ribs creaked. Blood rose into his mouth, and he swallowed it as he worked.

The shape of the problem was clear enough: close the intake, release pressure through the second junction, and seal the wall behind it.

None of those solutions were working fast enough.

An ordinary beginner would already have lost consciousness. The first rupture would have overwhelmed them, and their body would have shut itself down before the damage could spread.

Leon’s body refused to grant him that protection. It held together, kept him conscious, and allowed the energy to continue ripping through pathways he had spent six days designing.

The containment shells began to hum.

Then the ambient energy in the chamber vanished.

It did not drain away or gradually fade. It ceased to exist as something the damaged route could reach. An absolute seal closed over the chamber, cutting off everything outside Leon’s body. At the same moment, the energy escaping through his skin was forced back down and contained.

Ji Liansu had cut off the fuel and closed the leak. The unstable circulation inside him, she left in his hands.

Leon stopped trying to control the entire route and dealt with it in pieces. He choked the intake. He deliberately collapsed the third junction, which hurt worse than the original tear, then bled the remaining pressure slowly along a return path that had also been damaged.

It took nearly two minutes.

When it ended, Leon was on his hands and knees, staring at his blood on the stone.

Light gathered around his hands without being summoned. He let it work. Torn channels closed, ruptured vessels sealed, and the deep bruising across his chest faded over the next dozen breaths. By the time he sat upright, nothing remained physically wrong with him.

Ji Liansu had not moved from the wall.

"You didn’t heal me," Leon said.

"You do it better than I would, and considerably faster. There is no virtue in a master performing a task badly merely to appear attentive."

She came forward and crouched, examining the residue hanging in the air above the floor with two fingers held apart.

"Tell me what you did wrong."

"The design—"

"The design is intact. Look at it properly."

Leon did. He opened the System’s record and found the answer waiting in plain sight.

[Circulation Attempt — Failed]

Rupture points: 14

Primary cause: Intake volume exceeded pathway tolerance at section one

Secondary damage: Cascade from primary rupture

Fourteen tears. Thirteen were consequences. Only one was the original mistake.

"How much did you use?" Ji asked.

"A fraction of what I’d put into a small technique."

"Yes. And how much had you cultivated before today?"

Leon fell silent.

"You possess the raw power of a Peak Golden Core cultivator," Ji said. "It is genuine. I do not know how you acquired it, and this morning it nearly crippled you. Whatever your strength, you have never completed a single cultivation circulation in your life. Your body is extraordinary, but the pathways cultivation actually uses are those of a child who has not begun."

"So a fraction of my strength—"

"Was perhaps forty times what that channel could survive." She stood. "This is what your durability conceals from you. An ordinary beginner cannot make this mistake because his body faints and saves him. Yours will let you continue while you destroy yourself, and it will make you believe you are managing the damage."

"And if I’d forced it open anyway?"

"Then the route would work," Ji said, her voice level. "That is what makes forcing it tempting. A damaged channel still carries energy, but it also carries the scar. The scar becomes a habit, and the habit becomes part of the shape of your circulation forever. At Golden Core, you would notice nothing. At Nascent Soul, it would cost you a little. Somewhere in the immortal realms, that weakness would split open under pressure at the worst possible moment, and you would not understand why."

She looked down at him.

"I have seen what follows. The damage does not always kill quickly, and by then repairing the foundation may be harder than rebuilding it."

Leon absorbed that.

"You’re not telling me to stop."

"No. Your design is good, and your instinct concerning the neutral section may be genuinely original." Ji moved toward the door. "You will rebuild the circulation around the smallest quantity of energy you can meaningfully control. Not a small quantity by your standards—the smallest amount you can still feel and direct. Begin where a child of nine begins, and do not concern yourself with what you already are."

She paused at the threshold.

"Everything that happened today can be traced to one decision. You tried to make your body catch up to your strength in a single step. It cannot. Nothing can."