SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 654: Where the World Was Cut

Chapter 654: Where the World Was Cut

"It thinks we work here," said Ira.

"It thinks works here." Vyra had already climbed to the first terrace and was walking its edge with a hand out, testing where the authorization ended. "It has been waiting a very long time for them, and something is broken badly enough that we look close enough."

They spent an hour finding out how much that was worth.

The answer was limited: access to the outer terraces, several fragmentary diagrams, and nothing else. Vyra could raise parts of a schematic by touching certain channel junctions, but it used conventions neither she nor Mo Rui had seen. Broad commands did nothing. When Yu asked directly for an exit, the nexus repeated the line about the three anchors twice and then fell silent for four minutes.

"It isn’t a guardian and it isn’t intelligent," Mo Rui said eventually. He had spent the hour studying every fragment Vyra could raise. "It’s an administrative system. It has been running maintenance procedures with nobody to perform them, and half of what it says refers to functions that no longer answer."

"Four functions," said Vyra, tracing the schematic. "Space — where things are relative to each other. Time — the local flow. Defence. And exits." She tapped the fourth. "Exits are sealed the other three report catastrophic faults. It won’t open a door while it believes the room behind the door is broken."

"So we fix its three faults."

"We fix its three faults, or we spend eight days waiting for a Palace force that has no idea how to get in."

The nexus opened the first route twenty minutes later without being asked — a channel of light running off the western terrace and down into ground that had not previously had anything in it.

Leon and Seraphine took the front of the shortened formation. Vyra kept the remaining twelve close behind them, with Ira at the rear and Loriel in the centre. After what had happened on the road, nobody suggested sending two people alone into another divided route.

The route to the spatial anchor did not stay one route.

It divided within sixty paces — the same terrace, ahead of them, in four slightly different versions, all equally solid. Seraphine put light down each and got four identical answers.

"Lightning," Leon said.

She used it carefully, a fine discharge along the boundary between two versions, and for half a second the boundary showed as a seam in the air.

Then she used slightly more on the next division and made it worse. The charge went into the wrong version, and instead of one seam showing, the division doubled — eight terraces where there had been four.

"Understood," Seraphine said. "Too much charge and I’m feeding the split."

"How fine can you go?"

"Finer than that."

After that they used the pulse.

Leon had noticed it on the way in and it turned out to be the whole answer: when the nexus pulsed, every false version stayed dead and exactly one carried the pulse through. That one still had a genuine connection to the platform. The rest were geometry with nothing behind it.

They crossed division after division that way. Wait for the pulse. Watch which version lit. Take it.

Near the end, Leon and Seraphine slipped into an adjacent layer while the remaining twelve stayed on the last stable terrace.

Leon looked back and found the twelve people less than thirty paces away. Vyra’s arm was still moving in the count, but the space between them no longer corresponded to the visible distance. He could see them clearly and could not have reached them by walking.

"They’re fine," he said.

"I know," said Seraphine. "Young Master, the terrace divides again in forty paces and I’d like to know whether to prepare the fine discharge or the coarse one."

She did not ask him to explain the offset or suggest retreating. She had watched him solve the same kind of separation earlier and trusted him to tell her if this one was different.

"Fine," Leon said. "Then a coarse one along the left seam once I’ve picked the live version."

"Yes, Young Master."

They found the anchor beyond the final division, in a chamber that sat on no terrace at all. The other twelve remained visible through the boundary, close enough to exchange signals even though only Leon and Seraphine could cross the last correspondence.

It was a column of stormglass rising three paces out of the floor, with a dozen channels running into it from directions Leon’s eyes could not follow. Nine were dark. Three ran faintly.

And driven through the thickest channel at its base was a spike.

Leon crouched beside it and did not touch it.

Black metal, a foot long, square-sectioned, with a spiral of cut characters running down two faces. The stormglass around it had gone dead grey for a hand’s width in every direction.

"That isn’t part of this," Seraphine said.

"No."

"It isn’t even close. Look at the finish." She crouched opposite him. "Everything here was cut in a curve. That was hammered flat and cold by somebody in a hurry."

Leon put his perception on it and found a residual formation signature sitting in the metal. Faint as it was, the structure was familiar. He had felt the same method in Moonfall when the Shen estate raiders used a flat disc to silence the household wards.

"This is connected to the Shen estate attack," he said.

Seraphine studied the cut characters. "The same people?"

"The same formation-breaking method and the same construction style. That proves a common source. It doesn’t tell us who gave the orders."

Removing it took another forty minutes, most of it preparation.

Leon mapped the severed channel first — where it had run, where the spike had cut it, how far the ends had drifted apart in however long the thing had been sitting there. They had recoiled, which was the danger: pull the obstruction and they would spring further apart before anything could catch them.

"When it comes out, that channel has about a heartbeat where it’s open and unpowered," he said. "If there’s nothing in it, the ends go and I don’t get them back."

"Then there will be something in it." Seraphine studied the three channels and chose one point from which her lightning could divide cleanly among them. "I feed all three the instant you pull. How much?"

"Enough to hold a load. Not enough to jump the gap. Overfeed it and you’ll charge the wrong side of the break, and I’ll be pulling two live ends apart instead of two dead ones."

"Give me a number."

"I can’t. You’ll have to feel it."

Seraphine considered that, said, "All right," and went to her mark.

She fed the three intact branches on Leon’s count. He took hold of the spike, drew it out clean in one motion, and had both severed ends in a fold of space before the metal was fully clear of the stone.

For a second and a half the channel fought him.

Then Seraphine’s charge arrived from three directions at once, the dead grey stormglass lit pale from the inside, and Leon folded the ends into correspondence and let go.

The column came on.

The boundary between the chamber and the final terrace collapsed. Vyra led the remaining twelve across within moments, confirming that the repaired anchor had brought both layers back into correspondence.

The change was noticeable within seconds and was not spectacular.

The route stopped multiplying into separate versions. On the walk back, the terraces divided twice more, but both false paths collapsed within a few paces. When Leon looked away from a ridge and looked back, the ridge had not moved.

All fourteen returned to the platform in under twenty minutes along a route that had consumed nearly two hours going out.

"It’s better," Vyra said before he could report. "We watched the correction from the last terrace. Most of Mo Rui’s marker line shifted back into proper spacing."

"It’s better," Leon agreed. "It isn’t fixed. There are still directions where the platform is much further away than it looks."

He put the spike down on the terrace where everyone could see it and explained what it was, along with everything he could support about its connection to the Shen estate attack. Thirteen other people would have to make decisions inside the realm, and none could do that on partial information.

Yu picked it up and examined the cut characters.

"The attack on the Shen estate and this sabotage used tools from the same source," he said. "That reaches far beyond a merchant household."

"It appears so," Leon said. "I won’t claim more until we have evidence for it."

Then the nexus spoke again, fractionally clearer than before.

A pause.

The projection flickered and produced something new: a fragment of record. Two figures, indistinct, human, standing in the chamber Leon had just left. One of them crouched at the base of the column with something in his hand.

The timestamp, when Mo Rui converted it, fell four days before the survey team’s last transmission.

the nexus said.

The number cut out.

"Sixty-eight thousand," Xie Lan said. "We were in here for less than an hour."

[Author: If you have bought privilege, thank you so much; if you haven’t, please do that would help me a lot]