SSS Cultivation: I Can Conquer Earth's Rank System
Chapter 64: A Secret room

Chapter 64: A Secret room

The place looked a little too spooky for a fantasy section. Or maybe it’s just the horror section. The walls here appear more caved in, dust brown in colour, and the shelves are made from a careless design that looked like they belonged to the rocky surfaces instead of being made from wood like normal shelves. "No wonder students don’t come to the library."

"So, are you going to pick a book or what?" Leo asked.

"You pick a book. I’m not interested," Rosa said.

"I’m also not interested. I’ll just sit by that corner and rest my head then."

Amanda was now back to the perfect beautiful girl Leo saw earlier, but this time, her hair is white and short and styled into a bob. Leo shook his head. "Why can’t she stay put for at least five minutes?"

Amanda shot a sudden glance at Leo who was about to sit on a long bench, as if she was hearing his frustrating thoughts. "Can she read minds too now?"

Rosa gave a stiff nod as if trying to pass a coded message to Amanda. Amanda looked back at one of the shelves with a slight frown, then craftily like she was performing some ancient magic, she started bringing out and returning books in and out the rocky shelf. One book from the top with one hand, another from the bottom shelf, switched, replaced, scattered, shuffled... possibly in a bid to confuse whoever was near so they don’t get the secret behind what she eas trying to do. It would have worked for anybody else, but not for Leo. He looked with keen interest at what Amanda was doing and with his mind, he was following her swift and fluid movement of hands. He saw what books she took, which ones she replaced, which ones she returned back to their original positions even after turning them all around the rows and columns of the shelf.

He didn’t miss anything.

And of course, he knew why Amanda was doing this. He has seen a lot of movies when he was on Earth back then. Stuffs like this look like an ancient coded pass to enter a locked place. Only when someone gets the combination right will the secret door open. He was about to wonder why that old technique is being used here, then he remembered that the library was built to look like an ancient settlement. "Odd choice."

As to how he got to be so alert and be able to follow Amanda and her cryptic movements, all could be attributed to his gambler dad and Leo’s almost photographic memory. Whenever Laura, his mom was away from home, Rayden, drunk and in the gambling spirit would bring out a deck of cards and tell Leo to pick a card, then started shuffling the cards right in front of Leo in some magician sort of way. Then he spreads the card out on the table so Leo can pick what he thought was the card that he had pointed to earlier.

This was no magic trick, but a way of Rayden trying to teach his son on how to focus and never lose sight on the target. So, his way of teaching this is what he knows best, the cards. Leo would fail and fail and fail, until one day. He might have picked the right card out of luck but since that day, he never missed the right card again. Each time he picked it right, Rayden would yell for joy and carry the little Leo up in the air and do his little street dance with the boy.

This was one of the few happy memories Leo has of his drunkard dad.

"Her combination is too easy. She’s repeating the same process, but making it longer and then reversing the combination at the end to confuse us," Leo thought.

Amanda finally slotted one last brown book back into it’s place gently and then a soft click was heard. Rosa smiled. "You always get me with this your book shuffling thing. How can someone ever get to discover the trick?"

"Duh," thought Leo.

"Come check this out, Leo," Rosa called.

Of course, Leo was eager to see what was behind that secret door that required such a long and boring combination of book switching. He rose at once and trodded magesticslly towards the shelf which has opened with a little slit by the left side.

Amanda stretched her hand out to stop him. She turned to Rosa and said, "can we really trust him?"

"Don’t worry, we all have a common enemy. Plus Riley approved," Rosa assured her.

"Excuse meeee?!"

"Rosa, If things be north, you gon’ take the blame, dig?"

Amanda was using that old gang language that Leo recognized from his father, again. She must have a read a lot of those old books. Either that or she was also alive before the Xollante nuked Earth, which doesn’t seem possible unless she had an immortality quirk on her or was in a coma for 78 years or so like he was. Leo cringed at the thought.

Rosa looked lost at the sudden switch in the type of information being passed by Amanda, but it seemed she got the meaning a few seconds later. "Don’t worry about that."

Leo hid his laugh. He liked the lost look in Rosa’s face.

"Worry not yourself. Me lips shut like it be glued for real. About a thing, ye bother not," Leo said to Amanda with a sly smile.

"Sorry, what?" Rosa was completely lost this time. If Leo had been slower in the way he said that, she might have understood.

Amanda was a little pleased and shocked at the same time. She always pride herself when it comes to using those old gang language to confuse people. She always loved the confusion in their faces when she speaks like that, but she never expected anyone to speak that language so fluently like Leo did just now. Not even if they read the old books more times than she did— which doesn’t seem possible as far as Amanda was concerned. She’s the best reader here, apparently.

"I just told her not to worry about a thing," Leo explained to Rosa.

Amanda’s eyes were still stuck on Leo. Her watery, ever dancing eyes. She was dumbfounded. Now, she was a little bit certain about Rosa’s objective about Leo. Maybe he was using his knuckles on the door because he was really born before the Xollante’s attack.

Leo was not bothered about being suspected like this. He would simply deny any speculation tabled before him about his origin. Nobody had any evidence of him on earth whatsoever.

"Can we go in now?" Leo asked.

Rosa smiled and said to Amanda, "I told you he is an old fat."

Amanda recovered. "Yes, let’s go in."

"She hasn’t changed her form in the last five minutes," Leo noticed. "That’s probably a new record set for her."

Amanda grabbed the thick door made with the thick shelf and pulled it with a little bit of power. It creaked as it opened to reveal a lit room filled with a lot of dust that clouded the room.

But even through the dust, Leo could see whatever it was that made this room a secret and what might have interested Rosa to something like this. It’s nothing much though, but too much to be handled by them.

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