SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 627: Healing Was Not the Point

Chapter 627: Healing Was Not the Point

Leon returned to his residence in Jade Moon Palace, checked every formation, and raised his private spatial isolation. Once he was certain no one could observe him, he opened a portal into the dimensional world and stepped through.

He emerged in the study, intending to collect a clean set of clothes and see how the others were progressing with their manuals.

Seraphine looked up from her reading. The moment she saw him, her expression changed.

"That’s blood."

Leon glanced down. The robe had dried stiff across the chest and both sleeves, and he had entirely stopped noticing it somewhere in the last two hours.

"It’s mine," he said, "and it’s old. First cultivation attempt went badly. I healed it before I left the chamber."

He explained the rest while searching for a clean set—the neutral route, the mistake with the intake, the fourteen tears, and Ji sealing the room. He kept it brief and accurate, the way he would have reported it to Kaela. When he finished, he turned around expecting to discuss the redesign.

Seraphine was standing very still.

"Fourteen," she said.

"They were internal. Nothing structural. The Light closed all of it inside a minute—"

"Stop talking."

He stopped.

"You just told me that you tore open fourteen places inside your own body," she said, "in the tone of a man describing a delivery that arrived late."

"Because that’s what it was. An experiment that failed, with a cause I understand, which I’m not going to repeat—"

"Leon." Her voice did not rise, which was worse. "Do you know how long it has been since you talked about your own body as something that can be hurt?"

He opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

"You heal," Seraphine said. "You’ve always healed. Every wound you’ve taken since the Tower has closed inside a minute, and somewhere in the last few years you stopped counting them. Now you make decisions as if you’re the one person in any room whose safety doesn’t have to be part of the calculation."

She stepped closer.

"You sent us inside so we’d be safe. You wouldn’t open the connection with the leopard’s mark on you because a door might endanger the city. You shielded four people through an entire fight and let a plate open your back doing it, and you didn’t mention it for three days. Every one of those decisions was correct. And every one of them treated Leon as the acceptable cost."

"That’s not—"

"It is exactly that. And it works because you can heal. Until the one time it’s something you can’t heal, and then it isn’t your problem anymore." Her jaw tightened. "It’s ours. You don’t get to be the one who dies and calls it efficient."

Behind her, Ira appeared in the doorway.

"Fourteen holes," Ira said. "You couldn’t stop at three?"

"Ira."

"I’m getting there." She came in and dropped onto the arm of a chair. The humor left her face entirely. "She’s right, and I’m going to say the same thing badly. I’ve spent more than three months learning a lightning method because you handed me a book, and the entire time I’ve been assuming that when this is finished, I’ll be standing next to you again. That’s the whole plan. That’s the only reason any of us are doing any of this."

She looked directly at him.

"So stop being casual about the part where you’re alive."

Vyra had appeared in the doorway as well, her arms folded.

"The experiment was correct," she said. "You had to test it, and there was no safe way to find out except by finding out. I’d have done the same." Her gaze moved to the ruined robe. "But you walked out of a room where you nearly crippled yourself, decided it was solved, and came here to change your shirt. That’s the part."

Loriel said nothing.

She had entered behind Vyra and was staring at the front of his robe with her hands pressed flat together. When Leon looked at her properly, she turned her face away and failed to hide any of what she felt.

That was what actually landed.

"All right," he said.

He sat down on the edge of the desk.

"This one was preventable. I know exactly what I did—I used what felt cautious to me, and cautious to me is forty times what a first circulation can survive." He looked at Seraphine. "I went into it confident because I’ve spent three years knowing I can repair anything that happens to me. That’s the honest version. I wasn’t brave. I was careless in a way I’ve stopped being able to notice."

"You’re not going to promise you’ll stay out of danger," Seraphine said.

"No. I’d be lying, and you’d know it."

"Good."

"What I’ll promise is procedure. Every test from here goes at a fraction I can feel, with the smallest workable increase, and I stop the moment anything reads as strain instead of resistance. Ji sits in the chamber for the dangerous ones. And when something goes wrong, I tell you the same day."

Seraphine held his gaze for a moment longer.

"Acceptable," she said, letting out a breath. "I’m still angry."

"I’d think less of you if you weren’t."

"Don’t be charming. It’s been a bad afternoon."

Leon stayed long enough to see where they were with the manuals, which turned out to be less far along than the noise in the study had suggested. Seraphine had eliminated one of her three options and was arguing with the other two. Ira had tried to run the compression method at full output on the second day and had been talked out of it by Vyra, who had spent most of her first week studying general circulation texts before touching an elemental path. Loriel had read all four of her methods twice and chosen none.

"They’re all wrong in different ways," Loriel said. "I need to feel one before I’ll know."

"Then take the time. You’ve got years in here."

Leon changed into the clean robe before leaving. Then he reopened the portal, stepped back into his residence at Jade Moon Palace, and sealed the dimensional passage behind him. After confirming that his private isolation remained undisturbed, he released it.

He rebuilt the route over the following four days, and the rebuild was not a repair. It was a different idea.

The first design had assumed he would establish the whole circulation at once and then refine it. That was how every complete method in the library described the process, because every complete method had been written for a body already conditioned by a preparatory course during childhood.

So Leon discarded that assumption. He would build one section at a time, using a thread of neutral energy so thin that his first attempt to gather it took nine minutes because he kept overshooting.

Ji gave him the chamber again. She remained by the wall and offered no instruction.

The first attempt dispersed at the second junction, which Leon had not known was possible. The second stalled halfway through a transition and remained there until he released it. The third returned along the wrong path and escaped somewhere through his left forearm, producing no damage and a great deal of useful information. The fourth failed for a reason he did not identify for two hours. The seventh went most of the way before simply thinning out, like water sinking into sand.

None of them hurt. That was the strangest part. After fourteen ruptures, failing quietly felt like nothing at all.

Each failure went into the record, and the record began to prove useful.

[Circulation Attempt 11 — Failed]

Dispersal at junction 4

Transition angle inconsistent with sections 3 and 5

He corrected the angle. Attempt twelve failed somewhere else.

On the nineteenth attempt, the thread entered the first section and continued moving.

It traveled slowly enough for Leon to feel every part of the journey: the lift at the second junction, the long quiet stretch through his trunk, and the odd, weightless moment when the neutral section accepted the energy, held it, and returned it without adding anything. The thread entered the return path, reached the end that was also its beginning, and settled there.

One circulation. Complete.

It had required less energy than lighting a lamp.

Leon opened his eyes. Nothing visible had happened. There was no aura, pressure, light, or sensation of power anywhere in the chamber. Ji Liansu still stood against the wall with her hands folded.

He had carried enough force to kill Void Immortals for weeks, yet none of it had ever felt like this.