The morning after the estate walk Raze sat in the east corner of the summer garden with Bephe beside him and the climbing plants making their quiet work of the old stone wall overhead and did something he hadn't done in a year.
He opened his system.
Not that he'd forgotten it existed. The system had been present the entire Academy year the way it was always present — available, patient, indifferent to whether he consulted it or not. But the Academy's environment had been so saturated with external measurement — point tallies, ranking brackets, cultivation assessments conducted by faculty whose perception operated at Paragon level — that the internal accounting of his own status window had felt redundant in ways it hadn't before the Academy.
Now, in the quiet of the estate garden with the summer morning doing its unhurried work around him, he let it surface.
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[Status Window]
Name: Raze Dragonheart
Age: 19
Rank: Master (Peak)
Core: Crystalline (Mid)
