Rayleigh's brows drew together when he realized Alfia's ability values had not changed at all.
He looked at the divine letters floating before him, expecting at least some movement, even a small increase.
After all, Alfia had survived the Great Feud, fought, endured, transformed, recovered, and lived through experiences no ordinary adventurer could ever imagine.
Yet the result showed no increase at all, not even a single point.
Her Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Agility, and Magic remained frozen exactly where they had been.
That meant one of two things.
Either there was no Excelia inside her body waiting to be updated, or the remaining Excelia was so small that it could not raise even a single ability value by one point.
Rayleigh's gaze moved toward the line representing her Level.
There was still one thing that could change.
Her vessel had already reached its limit, and if she wanted to move forward, only one path remained: a Level Up.
Rayleigh's fingers paused above the divine text.
He held back for a moment.
Update potion had limits.
It could never serve as a convenient replacement for a god, and it certainly could never allow someone to casually tamper with another person's Falna.
At most, it was a secret medicine capable of briefly loosening a locked blessing and performing stored Falna maintenance under special conditions.
Even that was already illegal enough to make most gods and Guild officials pretend they had never heard of it.
Normally, update medicine could only draw out information already stored inside the Falna, and even then, it required someone who understood the divine text well enough to guide the process.
It had no power to create miracles out of nothing, force a Level Up where no qualification existed, or replace a god's authority in any complete sense.
What Rayleigh was doing now was only possible because Alfia's situation had been abnormal from the very beginning.
Her Hera Falna had lost its stable, ordinary state the moment he tore open the boundary of her soul and remade part of her existence into something close to a Shinigami.
Her excessive talent had been sealed into that silver dagger, her body had become partially spiritualized, and their souls had been linked by a faint thread that even Falna itself seemed unable to properly classify.
The update medicine was only a catalyst.
The thing truly allowing him to touch the divine text was the connection between their souls.
In other words, this was a method no one else could copy.
It was a one-time miracle born from Alfia's broken fate and Rayleigh's interference with her soul.
"Alfia."
Rayleigh's voice became serious.
"You can level up."
A stretch of silence followed.
To most adventurers, a Level Up represented glory, hope, and the greatest proof that they had carved their name into the world.
For Alfia, it had once been a death sentence.
Unlike Zald, she was still young.
Her potential had not yet been fully drawn out, and if she had been born with a healthy body, the world might have witnessed an even more terrifying version of the woman called the Silence.
Yet precisely because her talent was too overwhelming, that future had nearly been cut off before it could bloom.
She had reached the peak of Level 7 long ago. If she had wished to level up, she could have done so at any time.
Her body simply could not endure it.
Her illness, her absurd talent, and the curse-like blessing known as Gif Blessing had already been tearing her apart from within.
If she had stepped into Level 8 back then, the power filling her vessel would have accelerated her collapse instead of opening a path toward the future.
Magic was born from wishes, and Silentium Eden had been born from the deepest wish inside Alfia's heart: the wish for silence, and the wish to suppress the excessive power she had never asked for.
That was why Silentium Eden went far beyond ordinary defensive magic or a simple barrier.
It was an enchantment capable of nullifying magic while also greatly reducing the power of Alfia's own spells.
Its very existence proved that some part of her had always wanted to restrain herself.
That was the kind of monster she had been, a woman so gifted that her own soul had wished for a way to silence her power.
Now, however, things had changed.
Rayleigh had sealed her uncontrolled talent into that silver dagger, turning it into something closer to an Arrancar's Resurrección than a normal Skill.
Her body had been treated again and again with Kaidō.
Her spiritual body had stabilized. Her breathing, sleep, and pain had all improved little by little.
The old Alfia would have been destroyed by Level 8.
The current Alfia should be able to withstand it.
After a long silence, the woman finally spoke.
"Update my Level."
Her voice was calm, though Rayleigh could feel the faint ripple beneath it.
For her, this meant far more than a number changing. This was the future she should never have been able to reach.
Rayleigh nodded and focused on the divine letters before him.
For some reason, operating someone else's Falna felt completely different from watching Hephaestus update his own Status.
When Hephaestus did it, everything was as natural as breathing.
The divine text obeyed her as though it was part of her hand.
For Rayleigh, it felt like reaching into a machine made of light and law, touching gears he could see without fully understanding.
Every movement carried pressure, and every line seemed to resist him faintly.
Even so, the soul thread between him and Alfia pulsed softly.
The divine letters trembled.
Then the number in the Level column changed.
Level 7 became Level 8!
At that instant, the atmosphere in the room seemed to still.
Rayleigh felt it before he saw it.
A quiet, overwhelming presence spread from Alfia's back, vast and deep, with none of the violence of a sudden explosion, yet heavy enough to make the air itself feel thin.
For a moment, the phrase strongest adventurer alive crossed his mind, though even that felt too small.
If one ignored the dead legends and only looked at the current Lower World, Alfia had now become something even more absurd.
Alfia was Level 8.
A new line began to appear in the Skill column.
Rayleigh's eyes sharpened.
"It's a new Skill."
Alfia did not turn around, though he could tell she was listening.
As the letters continued to form, Rayleigh froze when the Skill name appeared before him as a string of warped symbols his eyes could not make sense of, no matter how long he stared.
The divine letters flickered like a broken reflection on disturbed water, twisting into marks that refused to settle into any language he knew.
[????]
・Permanent
・Constantly active
・Unique constitution
・????
・????
Rayleigh stared at the garbled text.
"What is this?"
Even after focusing his spiritual sight, he still could not properly parse the characters. The problem seemed larger than a gap in his knowledge.
The text itself appeared unable to decide what shape it should take.
After a moment, he copied down what little he could read and handed the note to Alfia.
She accepted it, still holding her clothes against herself with one hand, and glanced over the copied text.
Then she laughed softly.
"This is my first time seeing something even the Falna cannot explain."
"Probably because you aren't completely human anymore," Rayleigh said after a moment.
Alfia looked at him.
Rayleigh continued, "Your body, your soul, your Skill, the dagger, the connection between us... none of it follows the normal rules anymore. Falna can read adventurers, monsters, spirits, and even reincarnated souls, while your current existence sits halfway outside those categories."
"So even the omniscient gods would be unable to explain it?"
"Perhaps only partially."
Another person came to mind: Cassandra Ilion.
Among Orario's three great cheat-like existences, Cassandra's abnormal Skill was also something even gods could not properly name.
The characters did not appear in ordinary divine text, and Miach had only managed to give it the temporary name 'Princess of a Tragic World' through guesswork and intuition.
Prophetic dreams, near-perfect predictions, a future that everyone refused to believe, and most terrifying of all, the possibility of changing a tragedy once she crossed the despair carved into that dream.
That went beyond ordinary prophecy and touched the script of the world itself.
If Cassandra's Skill could exist, then Alfia's unreadable Skill was also possible.
It was simply proof that the world had failed to classify her.
Rayleigh folded the note and placed it aside.
"We'll treat it as unknown for now. Until we understand more, don't test it carelessly or fully release your dagger."
"You sound like a doctor."
"I am your doctor."
Alfia gave him a faint look.
For a moment, the room fell quiet.
Then Rayleigh's gaze shifted down by accident.
Before he could even understand what had happened, his body had already flown out of Alfia's bedroom and slammed face-first into the floor.
For several seconds, he lay there motionless.
As expected of Level 8 Alfia, he had seen absolutely nothing.
There had been no visible shift in her muscles, no change in her breathing, and no attack trajectory for him to follow.
By the time his mind caught up, his entire body had already been launched through the doorway.
When she was Level 7, Alfia could casually one-shot Level 5 Ottar with a hand chop.
Now that she had reached Level 8, a casual strike from her could probably take his head clean off if she meant it.
Rayleigh slowly lifted his face from the floor.
'Tch.'
When would he finally be able to stand properly in front of that woman?
Zanpakutō alone were not enough.
He needed more wielders, more growth, more Excelia, and more people walking forward with his blades while carving new stories into the world.
Rayleigh's eyes slowly sharpened.
It was time to stop waiting for suitable people to conveniently appear.
If the right wielder existed somewhere in Orario, then he would make them come to him.