The darkness of the Sleep Room signalled the start of the Rite.
World Tree Acacia. It was said that the tree would reach out to students and invite their conscience to its domain.
For most students, the transition was described as peaceful, slow dissolution into warmth and acceptance.
For Isaac, it was violent.
While others drifted into the Rite like objects settling through still water, Isaac fell into the deep void.
It was a sensation of being stretched across a vast distance to an extent where his senses groaned under the tension. Everything was a blur and darkness in his sight.
Then, the pressure snapped.
All of a sudden, his feet were touching down on cold grey silt that felt more like pulverized bone than earth. The air was stagnant, tasting of ancient copper and ozone.
This was the Field of Selection—the metaphysical domain of Acacia where the skills would call for their destined owners. It meant that the Rite of Manifestation has begun.
The horizon didn't exist here. Above him, a swirling violet-tinged nebula of unformed mana churned with the potential of a thousand unborn skills. Beneath it, the ground was scattered with stones of every conceivable shape, each vibrating at a frequency that resonated somewhere in the marrow of his bones.
Regaining his senses, Isaac recalled the Gospel of the Stones—the guideline developed to help the children choose the best skill possible. It wasn't hard to recall, for every child in Aetherion was extensively taught about it.
The Luminous—S-rank: stones that blazed like miniature suns, their light so piercing it cast shadows in a realm with no sun. Rare, arrogant things that chose their masters based on overflowing raw potential. To hold one was to hold something the Kingdom would spend considerable effort keeping close.
The Vibrant—A and B-rank: stones that hummed with saturated color, deep violets and striking crimsons. The Pillars of the military who changed the shape of a battlefield with a single gesture.
The Solid—C and D-rank: common, sturdy stones that felt like warm river rocks. The backbone of society.
The Dull—E and F-rank: small, grey pebbles that barely pulsed. The texts called them worthless. The streets called them failure; skills that required more effort to manifest than the meager utility they provided, assigned to the invisible work the Kingdom depended on and preferred not to think about.
Isaac stood in the center of the field, a lone figure in a landscape of destiny. The blurry shapes of other students moved around him, each pulled toward the sections that corresponded to whatever the Acacia had decided they were.
Then, somewhere in the distance, a golden flare erupted as a Luminous stone accepted its master. The field was alive with resonance. All the blurry shapes of the others paused, having noticed the glorious scene.
Taking his eyes of the silhouettes, Isaac looked around.
All the stones in his sight… they were silent.
Worthless.
He chuckled, feeling numb. He was used to this; he had spent ten years being told that silence was what he produced.
His hand instinctively reached the iron charm that Elara gifted.
Dry. Puddle. Unworthy of the name of Valerius.
There was a story every child in Aetherion knew by the time they could walk the Field unassisted. A prince, unnamed in the version passed down to children, had once stood in a field like this one and been offered a Luminous stone.
He had walked away from it. He had chosen ten Dull stones instead and obtained ten F-rank skills therefore. He believed that a fine combination of those skills would outdo what one S-rank skill could do.
It turned out that such wasn't the case—ten F-rank skills were ten F-rank skills and nothing more. The prince had regretted his choice for the rest of his life.
The story's moral was the same in every nursery and every Academy orientation: the System knows what you are. Trust what it offers. Choose the skill of highest rank available to you.
To Isaac, there was no choice.
The Luminous stones responded with absolute silence. So did the Vibrant Stones. So did the Solid Stones.
Grimly, he walked.
The sapphire boulders that whispered of floods. The golden sparks that promised dominion over light. None of them responded to him. He walked past all of them with the same economy he brought to everything, and they registered him as someone unworthy of their power.
He moved toward the periphery, where the fog thickened and the nebula above had shifted to bruised charcoal. He was standing in the graveyard of the Dull. It was the place where the Acacia deposited what it had decided wasn't worth categorizing as anything else.
"Hah…"
Isaac felt hollow.
He struggled harder than anyone. He always knew that he wasn't talented like the great Caspian Valerius.
…From the start, he wasn't interested in becoming powerful or being praised by the others. He… just wanted to be accepted.
Now, there was nothing that accepted him. Not even the stones.
Chuckling, Isaac sat in the middle of the graveyard. Looked up to the nebula.
"Why make me a son of Valerius in the first place?" He whispered. "If I truly am worthless, you should've made me a beggar by birth."
He then shook his head, knowing that such words were pointless.
"Forget it." He stood up, now about to choose a random Dull stone among the pile of it.
Then, he paused.
Something was falling from the sky. It landed nearby the graveyard, mixed among the pile of the Dull.
As if drawn to it, Isaac slowly walked toward the site. He rummaged through the pile, and eventually located one peculiar stone.
Half-buried in the silt was an irregular, ugly stone.
It was matte-black in color. Upon closer inspection, it was more than just ugly. It looked like a void so deep that it refused to reflect even the violet light of the nebula overhead.
Most of the shapes in this section of the field were dull and grey and identical in their insignificance, but this one was different. Not brighter. Not louder. Just fundamentally different in the quality of its silence.
Isaac held it and brought it closer to him. It was pulsating in accordance with his heart beat.
Then, his eyes, trained by a decade of forcing observation into spaces other people dismissed, discovered what the casual glance would have missed entirely.
It wasn't one stone. It was two.
Somehow, the two stones were fused so completely that without a close glance, no one would detect it. They looked like one of the Dull, but by sensation, Isaac knew that they were fundamentally different.
Then, the two stones glowed.
"Even the stone—or stones—look different," Isaac couldn't help but mutter, "Stones meant specifically for me."
It were the stones that had the greatest resonance with him among the pile of the Dull.
There was no hesitation.
His fingers touched the surface.
The world didn't just change. It shattered.
The cold didn't come gradually—it slammed up his arm, turning the marrow of his bones to ice in a single wave that reached his chest before he had time to register the first sensation.
This wasn't the "warm acceptance" described in the Gospel. This was something that had been waiting for a specific person and had decided, upon contact, that the specific person had arrived.
The stones imploded, and Isaac was sucked into it.
A physical force slammed into his lungs and vision simultaneously. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. The heat of the air, the pressure of the fog, the vibration of the silt beneath his knees—it all flooded into his mind at once as raw data, in a form of a bright chaos.
Gradually, his mind was filled with the information that his stones provided.
One stone had provided a medium. What the second stone provided was something peculiar and unlike any other—a lens that no one but him could and would be able to perceive.
The crystalline ringing faded. The prismatic light collapsed inward.
He was still in the field. Still kneeling.
But the field looked different now. Not visually—the grey silt and the violet nebula were unchanged.
What had changed was his resolution on them.
He could see the individual moisture molecules suspended in the fog. He could feel the precise pressure differential between the silt's surface temperature and the air above it. He could perceive the specific frequency at which each stone around him vibrated, and the specific reasons some of them vibrated and others sat inert.
He had received precision.
___
On the observation balcony above the Sleep Room, the air was heavy with sandalwood incense and the specific social calculus of people watching other people's futures being decided.
"Look at the Fulgur boy," the King's Chancellor murmured, his gloved finger directed at a monitoring crystal pulsing with gold. "S-rank: [Lightning Spear]… the same skill as the Fulgur Patriarch. The Fulgur line remains as vital as ever."
"The World Tree has been generous to the golden generation," a nobleman in white and gold said, his voice carrying the specific reverence of someone who considered this observation theological rather than political. "Three S-rank skill users among the students of this year now. Five S-rank skill users overall in the entire Kingdom. The signs are—"
"The signs are assessment data," the Academy Dean said, without looking up from his crystal. "The World Tree measures. It does not editorialize."
The nobleman in white and gold looked at him flatly.
King Aetherion sat at the center of the balcony, his chin resting on a ringed fist with that of boredom. His eyes scanned the monitoring displays until they found what they were looking for.
"And the second son of Valerius?" he asked, his voice dropping the room's ambient conversation to nothing. "The one who spent ten years working to reach average. Does the 'Hardworker' find anything in the field?"
The Valerius Patriarch, sitting a step behind the King, stiffened. His aura—cold and stagnant—flickered with a brief flash of something between irritation and discomfort.
In the projection crystal, Isaac was a solitary point in the field's outermost section. The Luminous stones around him had not reacted. Not one flicker. They treated him as part of the scenery.
"Pathetic," an Ignis-affiliated noble said, fanning himself with silk. "Not even the majority of the Dull stones are resonating. The System itself appears to be squinting at him, trying to find anything worth manifesting."
"He lacks the Volume required," the Valerius Patriarch said. His voice had the flat quality of a verdict delivered without feeling. "That's all that I have to say."
"He doesn't just lack Volume," the Fulgur Patriarch added, his voice carrying the dry crackle of contained electricity even in conversation. "He lacks presence. My boy generates a resonance field by walking into a room. This one—" He gestured at the crystal. "The Acacia is working to find something to give him."
The King sighed. He turned back toward the blazing gold of the Fulgur crystal. "A shame. The miracle won't happen twice in Valerius, it seems."
"The shadow only makes the light seem brighter, Your Majesty," the Valerius Patriarch replied, in the tone of someone delivering a line they had prepared before entering the room. "Whatever Isaac produces today only serves to demonstrate what Caspian represents. My eldest will be the only tide Aetherion requires."
Then, the display above Isaac's position changed.
A grey icon. A single water droplet, rendered in the flat, affectless style the System used for its lowest classifications.
F-rank: [Condensation].
The laughter erupted. It came from multiple directions simultaneously—the specific, unrestrained amusement of people who had been waiting for a particular result and found it even more satisfying than anticipated.
"Condensation! Valerius, your son isn't a Pillar—he's a humidifier!"
The Valerius Patriarch stood without a word. He didn't look at the King. He didn't look at the crystal. His face was red, however, for he was enraged of the situation that humiliated him.
___
Down on the Sleep Room floor, Isaac sat up slowly.
His chest still ached from whatever had happened in the field—not pain exactly, but the specific sensation of something having moved through him at a scale his body was still processing.
He turned to the display beside his couch.
F-rank: [Condensation].
Around him, the room's response was immediate. Students who had been watching their own displays glanced over. The Inquisitor near his section made a brief notation with the flat efficiency of someone recording an expected result.
From across the hall, Silas's monitoring crystal blazed.
S-rank: [Lightning Spear].
People looked awed by the revelation.
Unlike them, Isaac wasn't watching Silas.
He was watching the moisture in the air.
Not metaphorically, but literally. He watched the specific distribution of water molecules suspended in the Sleep Room's atmosphere, each one legible at a resolution he had not possessed twenty minutes ago.
He could see the condensation forming on the cold silver trim of the couches nearest the stabilization runes.
He could perceive the precise humidity differential between the section near the ventilation and the section near the rune-heated floor.
He could trace the trajectory of every molecule of water vapor in his immediate radius with the same ease he had previously traced the architecture of his own mana flow.
The F-rank display beside his couch was accurate. [Condensation] was what the machine had measured.
Condensation. Dehumidification. Useless at a surface, but the skill offers an extreme degree of versatility, when combined with…
The machine listed one skill, but Isaac was chosen by two stones simultaneously.
There was no display for his second skill. The monitoring crystals on the balcony above had not registered it. The Inquisitor's notation had recorded F-rank: [Condensation] and nothing else, because the instruments were calibrated to detect mana output and the second stone produced no output.
Yet, the skill was definitely there. Isaac held out his palm. He instinctively knew its name.
SSS-rank: [The Prism].
The moisture in the nearest cubic meter of air responded to his attention.
A bead of water formed on his fingertip cleanly and instantly.
He looked at the drop.
He applied a single filament of focused pressure and watched as the bead began to compress.
Smaller. Denser.
The surface tension fought the force he was applying at molecular resolution.
To a passerby, it looked like a small bead of water was sitting on his fingertip.
Through the lens of [The Prism], Isaac saw the molecular density he had achieved.
The drip the gallery had laughed at was not a drip.
He released the drop. Let it fall to the floor as nothing.
"F-rank indeed," Isaac said, quietly enough that no one nearby could hear it. "With immeasurable potential, that is."
Every research institution in Aetherion had concluded, across three centuries of investigation, that rank evolution was impossible.
That conclusion no longer applied to him.
He stood up.
The iron charm from Elara was still in his pocket.