"Edmund Rhys."
The hall did not go silent, exactly, but something in it stilled, attention sliding toward me the way it always seemed to whenever my family name got said out loud in a crowded room. Baron Rhys’s son. Sera’s brother. I had felt the weight of that pairing my whole life, even before I had understood what it meant to actually be Edmund.
’Here we go.’
I stepped away from Arthur and walked toward the center of the pentagram, the purple light pulsing slow and patient beneath my feet, waiting for me the way it had waited for every name before mine.
Up close, the purple lines were not simply glowing. They were moving, slow currents beneath the stone’s surface like something breathing at the bottom of a very deep well. I knelt, and the cold of the floor bled up through the fabric of my trousers, and for one absurd second all I could think about was how badly I did not want to kneel on something that looked like it belonged in a summoning circle.
I placed my hand flat against the stone.
The pressure hit me before the light did.
It was not painful, not exactly, but it was enormous, a weight settling over my chest and skull all at once, like the entire hall’s worth of attention had condensed itself into something physical and decided to sit directly on top of me. My ears rang faintly. My vision blurred at the edges. Somewhere very far away, I was aware of my own heartbeat, loud and fast and completely out of my control.
’This is a lot. This is genuinely a great deal.’
Then the cold came.
It rose up from where my palm met the stone, not painful either, but sharp and clean and absolute, spreading up my arm in a way that felt less like something happening to me and more like something waking up inside me that had always been there, patient, waiting for permission. Frost crept outward across the purple lines beneath my hand, delicate white patterns blooming against the glow, and the light itself shifted from bruised purple to a pale, glacial blue.
The pressure in my chest cracked open, and for one dizzying moment I felt like I could see the whole hall from very far away, every candle flame, every held breath, all of it distant and small and cold.
Then it passed, and I was just a boy kneeling on a stone floor with frost curling faintly around his fingers.
[System Alert]
[Host Has Awakened Core: Seed Stage]
[Affinity Detected: Ice]
[Remember, this is not your true affinity]
[True Affinity Will Be Unlocked After Advancement to Bronze Core]
’What? Why?’
[Baseline Package Unlocked: Physical Boost, Poison Resistance]
[Plot Points Awarded: +10]
[Shop Unlocked!]
I kept my face very carefully blank. ’Not now. Deal with that later.’
The professor’s expression did not change much, but his eyes lingered a beat longer than they had on anyone else that afternoon, something calculating behind the practiced neutrality.
"Ice affinity." A pause, brief and deliberate. "C-Rank Talent."
Applause followed, polite and unremarkable, exactly the reaction I needed and had quietly hoped for. Not the highest talent in the room. Not the lowest. Just another first-year with a functional Core and an elemental affinity, forgettable in exactly the way I wanted to be forgettable, at least for now.
I rose, and the floor tilted very slightly under me, not from the pressure this time but from something else entirely. My trousers sat wrong against my ankles, a good half-inch of bare skin showing above where they had covered a few minutes before. My boots felt tighter across the arch. When I flexed my hand, the frost fading from my fingers, the motion itself felt different, sharper, like someone had taken the version of me that existed five minutes ago and quietly sanded away some of the friction.
’I did not need the System to tell me what had happened. I could feel it happening.’
Still, the second alert came anyway, smaller than the first, almost an afterthought.
[Body Recalibration Complete]
[Height: 165cm → 170cm]
[Strength: 20 → 25]
’Five centimeters. I did not know whether to be thrilled or mildly insulted that my body had apparently been waiting for a magic array to grant it permission to grow.’
Arthur’s eyebrows shot up when I stepped back to his side. "Did you get taller?"
"I do not know what you are talking about."
"You did. You are looking me almost in the eye now. That is deeply unfair."
"Some of us awaken Cores. Some of us grow leaves. I do not make the rules."
"I hate you. Still. More, actually."
I would have argued further, except a small, curious itch settled somewhere behind my eyes, the same instinct that had made the frost cling to my fingertips whenever I concentrated too hard on something. I chased it, half out of habit and half out of the simple, greedy curiosity of a boy who had just been handed something new to poke at, and the moment I did, translucent blue script unfolded quietly in front of me, visible to no one but myself.
[Status]
Name: Edmund Rhys
Title: N/A
Core Stage: Seed
Affinity: Ice
Talent: C-Rank
Vitality: 11
Strength: 25
Endurance: 13
Dexterity: 14
Spiritual Power: 8/8
Weapon Equipped: None
Plot Points: 15
I stared at it long enough that Arthur waved a hand in front of my face, and I blinked the window away before he could ask what exactly I was staring at.
’Fifteen Plot Points. Twenty-five strength. Five centimeters I had not asked for and would probably not stop thinking about for the rest of the week.’
Above us, along the upper tier, I caught a flash of dark hair and knew without needing to check that Sera had been watching the entire time. She did not wave. She did not need to. The small, satisfied tilt of her head said everything it needed to say, and I found myself standing a little straighter because of it, taller now in more ways than one.
’Ice,’ I thought, turning the word over. ’Well. At least I know what I am working with right now.’
Around us, the ceremony continued, more names, more silence, more sudden bursts of light against dark stone, and I settled in to watch the rest of my year discover exactly what they had woken up as, one careful, private thought sitting quietly underneath all of it.
’I have fifteen Plot Points already, and the actual story has not even started—Poof, let’s see who is the protagonist of era. The originals, or me.’