The mud was colder than it had been thirty seconds ago. Ren noticed this and could not explain why he was noticing it, except that his hands were pressing flat against the stream bank and his hands were reporting temperature, texture, grit, and the slight shift of silt under his palms with a thoroughness they had never bothered with before. He could feel his own pulse in his fingertips.
'Okay,' he thought. 'That's new.'
He pushed himself upright. His legs moved faster than he expected and he almost overstood, arms going wide for balance before he caught it. The hollow was the same hollow it had been two minutes ago, same stream, same canopy, same last orange thread of light bleeding out behind the ridgeline.
His heartbeat was steady, too steady, a slow thick thump that sounded very loud in his own ears. He could hear the stream. He could hear something scratching in the bark of a tree three meters to his left.
'Check the status,' he thought. 'Just do that first.'
He had read about this part. You focused perception inward, simple, according to everything he'd ever found on the subject. His hands were already shaking.
He focused.
The readout appeared.
```
[ Blueprint Grade: SSS ]
[ Rank: 1 — Kindled ]
[ Creature: unclassified ]
[ Affinity: none ]
[ Strength: 12 ]
[ Agility: 14 ]
[ Intelligence: 15 ]
[ Vitality: 18 ]
[ Perception: 35 ]
[ Advancement: 0 / 100 ]
[ Lifespan: ~400 years ]
```
Ren stared at the top line. There were three letters where one letter should be.
The scale he knew ran F to S, one letter. Every exam sheet, every registration doc, every conversation he had overheard from Hunters passing through Harken used one letter per grade, single characters and clean categories. He had read the Association's public classification tables twice to be thorough and they did not contain anything that required three slots.
'That's not a category,' he thought. 'What the hell is that?'
His first guess was that the readout was broken. His consumption had gone wrong, the spiritual body restructuring had fried the status, whatever he was looking at was not real data. That was possible.
Except the rest of the readout was clean. Rank, creature type, affinity all displayed exactly as the manuals described. Broken readouts generally broke everything, and this one was very specifically weird in one place.
The Advancement line was sitting at zero of one hundred. That was the field every awakened Hunter had, the line that updated as you ate cores and reset on rank-up. Children in Harken learned to read it before they learned letters, because it was the most common status line anyone ever looked at and the one every parent pointed to first. His sat at zero because he had not eaten anything since the core. The meter was doing exactly what a meter was supposed to do, and that was additional evidence the readout was not glitched.
Then he looked at the stat block, and the thing that happened in his chest was relief.
Strength 12, Agility 14, Intelligence 15, Vitality 18. Every number was below the Rank 1 average he had memorized, 25 for a standard awakened, range 18 to 30. Four of his five stats sat below even the lower end of that range. Vitality scraped 18, right at the floor, and the others were clearly under it.
That was an F-grade washout profile, clean and complete. If the grade line said F, this would make perfect sense. He could walk into Harken tomorrow, show Tess the registration card, and every number would line up exactly where everyone expected it to sit.
'Okay,' he thought. 'So the stat block is fine. The stat block makes sense. The grade letters are just glitched.'
Then he read the Perception line again. Thirty-five.
'That's my specialty stat,' he thought, and felt the relief hold for exactly two seconds. Specialty stats were a real thing, documented in the general records he had read at the Harken library. Standard blueprints bumped one stat significantly above the others, into a range roughly 50 to 75 for Rank 1, depending on the creature.
Fire-types had high Vitality. Speed-types had high Agility. It was the signature of the blueprint's orientation.
So Per 35 was just a low specialty, a quiet bump from an unclassified creature with no obvious orientation still nudging one stat upward.
Except 35 was not specialty range.
He had memorized the numbers because numbers were free and useful. Rank 1 specialty started at 50, and his Perception was 35. It sat above the normal Rank 1 average of 25 but below specialty range, in the gap between the two, and no standard blueprint he had read about was documented as producing that gap, because every known blueprint either boosted a stat into specialty or left it at roughly average.
The specialty hypothesis failed. He sat with that for a moment.
'So I have: four stats that say F-grade, one stat in a gap no standard blueprint makes, and a grade line with three letters.' He looked at the three letters. 'Perfect. Very helpful.'
Upslope, something moved.
He went still automatically. Something was moving upslope, heavy footfall not quite a crunch, a Rank 2 beast making its circuit along the ridge about sixty meters north, not close but close enough.
The Fringe did not pause for personal crises, and the Rank 2s were starting their night circuits. He needed to file the status question and pay attention to the world.
He looked at the bottom of the readout.
`[ Lifespan: ~400 years ]`
He'd learned the rough math from a Hunter at the mine, an older woman who didn't mind answering questions from kids who kept their mouths shut otherwise. Baseline human life expectancy was roughly a hundred years. First awakening, the Rank 1 transition, doubled that, to around two hundred years give or take. He'd filed it alongside everything else he'd ever learned that might matter someday.
His readout said four hundred.
That was double the Rank 1 number, four times baseline. He stared at it, and the relief he'd almost assembled about the stat block dissolved completely because this was a specific number and it was not the one that should be there.
The three letters could be a display glitch. The Per 35 could be a variant he'd never read about. The lifespan was a number that had to come from somewhere, and the somewhere it was coming from was not a normal Rank 1 awakening.
'This isn't a glitch,' he thought.
The Rank 2 footsteps shifted course, moving lateral and closer, forty meters away maybe. The sound was very clear and very loud in his improved ears, and that was its own problem he was not going to think about right now.
He stood up.
His body stood up smoother than it had any business doing. The legs just worked, no stiffness from kneeling in cold mud, no creak of protest from three days of bad sleep and not enough food. He was upright before he'd finished deciding to be, and the first step he took east sent him two inches further than he intended because he overcorrected on the push.
'Come on,' he thought, catching his balance.
He started walking. The hollow slid past on either side, dark and ordinary, uninterested in his situation. East was toward the boundary. The boundary was two and a half hours on foot. The Rank 2 was behind him and not following.
He had, approximately, until he reached the boundary to think through what he was going to do.
He couldn't go to Tess with three letters, a Perception anomaly, and a lifespan that doubled the Rank 1 standard. Tess was a twenty-year clerk who had been stamping registration cards since before Ren learned to read. She would see the grade letters, not understand them, and do the thing any competent clerk did with anomalous data. She would escalate it. Someone above Tess would see the escalation, not understand the grade letters either, and escalate further.
He did not have a name for what he was. That was what would get investigated.
The decision arrived flat, no drama attached to it. He was going to lie.
He was going to tell Tess F-grade. He had consumed an unclassified core, the density meter was going to read whatever it read, and if the number came back low he would say F-grade washout profile and hold eye contact for the right amount of time.
The grade itself was easy. The grade was just a letter. The rest of the performance was harder, and he worked it through in his head as he walked, starting with posture and voice, then the exact length of the pause before he answered, then the expression his face had to produce when Tess filed the card and slid it across the counter. He'd watched enough men bring bad news home from the mine to know what it looked like from the outside.
A bird broke from cover ahead of him, sharp crack of wings, three meters off the path.
Ren did not just startle. His whole body flinched, weight shifting sideways, one hand coming up before his brain had finished registering the sound. His heart kicked once hard. He stood still in the middle of the path for a moment and listened to the bird settle somewhere in the upper canopy. His Rank 1 body had reacted to a sparrow with more speed and force than he had deliberately produced in three full days of trying to stay alive.
'That's going to be a problem,' he thought.
He kept walking east. The plan had holes, and his own body was already adding new ones.