CHAPTER 10 — Rules of Power

*Unknown attributes.* Rijan sat with those two words for a long time after the interface went quiet. Not unknown to him — that part he'd accepted. Unknown to the system itself, which was a different and more unsettling proposition. The trial had assessed his survival probability with numerical precision on the first day. It had classified the Golem as a sub-boss entity with a threat rating of *critical*. It had tracked his resistances and unlocked them at the exact moment they'd been sufficiently tested. The system was not, in his working model of it, something that admitted uncertainty casually. = So what did I absorb that it can't name? = He looked at the skeletons. Four of them now held the faint internal quality he'd noticed on the nearest one — the fifth, the oldest, showed nothing. Fully spent, or the residue had degraded past whatever threshold the ability required. He hadn't moved from his position against the wall. He was doing what he always did when a new variable arrived without a manual: he was sitting very still and thinking about it before he touched anything else. The ability notification had called the process unconscious. Passive trigger, proximity-based, already running. Which meant the question wasn't whether he could activate it — it was whether he could control it. Understand it. Map the rules of it before those rules became relevant in a moment that didn't allow for learning curves. = Test it. Carefully. = He moved back toward the nearest skeleton and stopped at roughly three meters. Watched the interface. Nothing new appeared — just the ambient blue edge of the status screen at the periphery of his vision, steady and unresponsive. He stepped forward one meter. Then another. At one meter, the interface pulsed. // ECHO DETECTED // // ABSORPTION: ACTIVE // He stepped back to two meters. The pulse faded. Forward again — one meter. Pulse returned. = Proximity threshold. Roughly one meter. Consistent. = He stepped back and processed this. The ability operated within a defined range, which meant it had rules. Rules meant understanding was possible. He found this steadying in the way that any confirmed structure was steadying — not because it made things safe, but because it made them navigable. He spent the next several minutes moving between the remaining four skeletons, testing the threshold distance on each. Consistent. Approximately one meter across all four, give or take the cave's uneven floor shifting his footing slightly. He wasn't absorbing deliberately — the system said passive, and passive meant it ran without his input — but being in range and being *aware* of being in range felt like a distinction worth establishing. When he'd finished the circuit, he summoned his status screen. The familiar layout appeared. He read it the way he'd read every new data source in his life — systematically, left to right, top to bottom, looking for changes against the last known state. STR — 4 AGI — 4 INT — 5 VIT — 5 WIL — 5 He held the numbers in his head. Held the question against them. The absorption had already run — the earlier notification had confirmed the transfer — but the numbers weren't higher than they'd been when he'd first noticed the change. Which meant either the absorbed attributes had gone somewhere he couldn't see yet, or the system's display was operating on a different update cycle than the absorption itself, or — = Or the display only shows base stats. And absorbed sits separately until a threshold is met. = He sat down against the wall again and opened the status screen fully. Studied the layout. Everything he'd seen so far was consistent with a system that had been designed to be legible — it announced its own notifications, described its own processes, used terminology that was precise even when it was cryptic. A system like that would have documentation somewhere. Rules embedded in its structure that could be accessed if approached correctly. = Ask it. = He felt slightly absurd about this and did it anyway, forming the question as clearly as he could in his own mind, directing it at the interface the way he'd learned to direct his attention at the status screen to summon it. *What is the Tier system?* The interface sat still for a moment. Then it expanded, the way it had when something genuinely new was being presented, and a structured table assembled itself in the blue light, line by line, with the system's characteristic unhurried pace. // TIER CLASSIFICATION — POWER SCALING // // Tier D — 5 per stat // // Tier D+ — 10 per stat // // Tier C — 20 per stat // // Tier C+ — 40 per stat // // Tier B — 80 per stat // // Tier B+ — 160 per stat // // Tier A — 320 per stat // // Tier A+ — 500 per stat // // Tier S — 750 per stat // // Tier S+ — 1000 per stat // He read it twice. Then read it a third time, the way he read things that he needed to be absolutely certain he'd understood correctly rather than approximately. Each tier was not a total. The notation was per stat — a single attribute at five reached Tier D for that attribute. Not the sum of all stats, not an average. Each one measured individually, progressing on its own scale against its own threshold. He pulled up his status screen beside the tier table and held both in his visual field simultaneously. STR — 4 AGI — 4 INT — 5 VIT — 5 WIL — 5 INT at five. VIT at five. WIL at five. Three stats sitting exactly at the Tier D threshold. STR and AGI at four — below it. Below the lowest named tier in the entire classification structure, against a scale that extended to a thousand. The cave did not change. The stream ran somewhere behind the wall. The amber-tinted dark of the skeleton chamber continued its patient existence, indifferent to the numbers floating in the pale blue light. = Five is the floor. And three of my stats are sitting exactly on it. The other two are below it. = He had known the numbers were low. He'd known from the first day, looking at STR 3 and AGI 3 and thinking *these feel like a problem*, that he was not entering this trial from a position of physical strength. But low and *below the bottom of the named scale* were different categories of information. The first was a disadvantage. The second was a structural position — a location in a hierarchy that had been built to contain far more than he currently represented. He thought about the Golem. The system had called it a sub-boss entity. He didn't know its stats. Didn't know its tier. But he had watched it cover fifteen meters in two movements and send a broad-shouldered engineer four meters through the air without apparent effort, and whatever tier contained that capability was not a tier that shared a number with anything on his status screen. = How far up is it? And how many things in this world sit between where I am and where it is? = The tier table still hovered in the interface, the progression laid out in its clean, systematic increments. He looked at the distance from five to a thousand and understood, with the same evenness he applied to everything, that he was not looking at a gap. He was looking at a definition of what this trial considered a finished person, and by that definition he was at the beginning of a scale that extended so far beyond him it was functionally incomprehensible. = I'm at the bottom. = He said it the way a surveyor says the elevation reading. Not with despair — despair required energy he was conserving — but with the specific, clear-eyed acknowledgment of a starting position. You couldn't navigate from a location you refused to name. He looked at the remaining skeletons. Four still carrying their residual echo, their absorbed-unknown content, whatever the system had been unable to classify sitting inside their bones in the dark. He looked at the tier table. He looked at the distance between four and a thousand. = Everything in here is above D tier. The Golem is above D tier. The lizard on the surface is above D tier. Every creature in this trial was designed for candidates who are expected to reach higher than five. = The interface pulsed once, adding nothing new — just confirming it was still present, still recording, still holding the tier structure in the air beside his inadequate numbers. = Which means the trial wasn't designed for who I am. = He let the thought complete itself. = It was designed for who I'm supposed to become. =