Chương 6: Chapter 5: Selection

Initialising System interface... The letters settled across Elizabeth's vision. The awakening stone was still warm beneath her palms, and somewhere below the platform a chair leg scraped against the floor. No one reacted to the words. Establishing connection... A pressure developed that she could not locate. She checked her hands first, then her wrists, arms and chest. Nothing matched it. Her breathing shortened before she caught herself.

Body identified: Elizabeth White Age: 11 Mana saturation: Elevated The identification told her very little. Whatever had happened in the execution chamber, the System recognised this body as Elizabeth White's. Assessing spiritual structure... Pain gathered behind her eyes. The stone remained warm, but her fingertips had begun to numb. For several seconds she could hear the room without judging distance properly; Vane spoke from somewhere below, his voice close and oddly remote at once. Then three lines appeared.

Soul-body integration: Incomplete Spiritual integrity: Reduced Foreign deformation detected Elizabeth read them again. There was finally something measurable that did not fit the life Elizabeth White had been living before the execution. It still did not tell her what had happened. The deformation might have come from the crossing, from a pre-existing condition she knew nothing about, or from whatever relationship now existed between Elliot and this body. The System had identified a problem.

That was enough for now. One of Vane's instruments clicked. She kept her hands where they were. Interface stabilised. The pressure eased. A status display replaced the diagnostic text. ELIZABETH WHITE Class Level: 0 Class: Unselected Strength: 6 Dexterity: 7 Agility: 7 Vitality: 6 Spirit: 3 MP: 45/45 Her lessons gave her only rough comparisons. Forty-five MP was a strong result for a newly awakened child. Spirit three was not. The lowest examples Lady Renwick had shown her began at five.

Her thumb shifted against the crystal. The headaches and bouts of mental fatigue from the previous week came to mind, but she had no reason yet to make the number responsible for them. She memorised the values and waited. Affinity assessment complete. Space - Extreme Air - High Water - Moderate Fire - Moderate Earth - Low The last four were broadly plausible. Elizabeth's body had spent eleven years developing under House White's cultivation, diet, environment and repeated elemental exposure. Space was different.

No treatment she knew of had involved it, and none of the family memories she trusted contained a White relative with a spatial affinity. The crossing was the first explanation she had. It was not the only one she could imagine. Caution: Primary affinity exceeds current spiritual tolerance. Unsafe spatial development may cause permanent spiritual damage. Her palms were beginning to ache. Whatever Spirit measured, the System considered three insufficient for the strongest affinity it had found in her.

The display changed again. Class generation complete. Five class options generated. Apprentice Vitalist - Uncommon Noble Scholar - Rare Prismatic Magician - Epic Riftborn Magus - Mythic Experimentalist - Unique Lady Renwick's recognised ladder ran from Common through Mythic. Unique had never been mentioned. Elizabeth opened the first option. Apprentice Vitalist - Uncommon A class focused on the observation, treatment and controlled alteration of living systems.

Biological Appraisal - Level 1 Minor Restoration - Level 1 Toxin Recognition - Level 1 The offer was difficult to explain through Elizabeth White's education alone. Household medicine and anatomy lessons were one thing; a class centred on living systems was much closer to the knowledge Elliot had carried into this life. It tempted her. Biological Appraisal could make living tissue easier to study, and Minor Restoration might reduce the cost of mistakes. But the class pointed strongly towards one field.

The question that mattered most could not yet be reduced to biology. She closed it and read Noble Scholar. Noble Scholar - Rare A class shaped by formal education, disciplined study and noble training. Structured Recall - Level 1 Accelerated Study - Level 1 Composed Bearing - Level 1 This one made sense without explanation. Tutors, etiquette, history, music, mathematics - eleven years of preparation were written all over it.

Structured Recall held her attention because her access to Elizabeth White's past remained uneven. She could use it. She did not need to build her future around it. The third option took longer. Prismatic Magician - Epic A broad elemental class formed through sustained cultivation across multiple conventional affinities. Mana Sense - Level 1: Perceive nearby mana and distinguish broad elemental characteristics. Guided Conduction - Level 1: Regulate compatible elemental mana through existing mana channels.

Prismatic Attunement - Level 1: Reduces the difficulty of developing skills across multiple conventional elemental affinities. Starting skill: Select one basic Air, Water or Fire spell. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Elizabeth reread Mana Sense. For six days she had tried to learn about mana with a damaged crystal, a clock, her own pulse and whatever household objects she could borrow without attracting attention.

One class choice could remove the central limitation from all of those tests. She could step away from the stone able to perceive mana directly, and House White already had the tutors and equipment to teach her what to do with it. She found herself looking for a reason to dismiss the option because it was the result Alistair wanted. There wasn't one. Prismatic Magician was powerful, useful and safer than experimenting blindly. Her hands remained on the stone while she read the description once more.

Then she opened Riftborn Magus. Riftborn Magus - Mythic A spatial class associated with extreme spatial affinity and anomalous spiritual deformation. Spatial Awareness - Level 1: Sense local distances, boundaries and spatial distortions. Soul Anchor - Level 1: Reinforce the connection between body, soul and location. Fold Step - Level 1: Cross a short visible distance through spatial compression.

Structural compatibility: High Recommended Spirit for stable selection: 8 Current Spirit: 3 Warning: Selection presents severe risk of spiritual injury, class instability or death. The warning did not make Soul Anchor less attractive. If the System's diagnosis reflected an unstable connection between body and whatever it measured as a soul, this was the first ability she had seen that addressed the problem directly. She wanted to know what it would do.

She also had no model for Spirit, no understanding of what permanent spiritual injury meant and no method for repairing further damage. Elliot Black's brain had already died once. Elizabeth had no evidence that whatever followed would happen again. If Riftborn Magus killed her, there would be no second trial. She stayed on the option long enough to memorise the wording of Soul Anchor, then closed it. The final class did not appear immediately.

Pale lines formed, vanished and rearranged themselves before the text settled. Experimentalist - Unique A research class shaped by sustained observation, controlled investigation and the pursuit of reproducible knowledge. Progression favours significant, reliable discovery over routine repetition. No fixed development path. Research Log - Level 1: Maintains private records of observations, procedures and results. Working Hypothesis - Level 1: Formalises testable predictions.

Variable Analysis - Level 1: Assists comparison of observed variables. Controlled Procedure - Level 1: Improves consistency in repeated deliberate processes. Mechanistic Replication - Level 1: Analyse a System-granted skill as a mechanism and attempt reconstruction after sufficient understanding. Unique Trait: Empirical Progression Meaningful investigation, discovery and application contribute more to class progression than routine repetition alone. Elizabeth read Mechanistic Replication a second time.

The System had not explained how skills worked. It had not told her whether a skill was created by the System, supported by it or merely expressed through it. But it was offering a way to treat one as something that could be studied rather than accepted whole. Only then did she notice how hard she was pressing her palms into the stone. She eased the pressure without taking her hands away. The other skills were less dramatic.

They would make records easier to keep, force her hypotheses into a form that could fail, and improve consistency when she repeated a process. None supplied an answer by itself, which suited her. She returned to Prismatic Magician. Mana Sense was still the most immediately useful ability on the list. With it, the next week of research could begin with direct observation instead of guesses based on skin sensation. Riftborn Magus was harder. Soul Anchor might stabilise the condition the System had just identified.

Rejecting it could turn out to be a mistake she would understand only after the damage became worse. Then she opened Experimentalist again. Elliot Black's brain had been destroyed. Yet she was here, reading a private interface through Elizabeth White's eyes. What, exactly, had continued? She had spent her old life trying to defeat the limit imposed by death. The execution had destroyed his brain, and awareness had resumed here anyway.

If she ever wanted that outcome to become deliberate rather than accidental, she first needed to know why it had happened. Prismatic Magician could give her magic immediately. Riftborn Magus might give her the fastest route into the anomaly surrounding her arrival. Experimentalist gave her a method that did not decide in advance where the answer had to be. She focused on the name. Select Experimentalist - Unique? Class selection is permanent. Confirm? Someone below the platform shifted position.

The movement pulled her attention back to the ache in her hands and the stone under them. Elizabeth confirmed. The other class names vanished. Class selected: Experimentalist Classification: Unique Class Level: 0 Initial skills acquired. Cold spread through her chest and down both arms. She waited until the sensation passed before trying to move.

"Lady Elizabeth?" Vane's voice sounded ordinary again.

"I can hear you."

"Release the stone slowly." Her palms came away with pale pressure marks across them. The first step down from the platform made her legs feel unreliable, so she took the next two more carefully. Vane waited at the bottom rather than reaching for her.

"Any pain?"

"A headache. Mostly fatigue." He checked one of the instruments.

"Within expectation. What class did you select?" She had already decided which parts of the interface would remain private.

"Experimentalist." Vane's pen paused above the assessment sheet.

"I don't recognise the name. Did the System give it a classification?" Unique was the first fact she intended to hide. Epic was plausible, valuable and already part of the recognised hierarchy.

"Epic." Alistair reached them as Vane lowered the pen to the paper.

"We will discuss the details after you have recovered."

"Yes, Father." She said nothing about the diagnostic warnings, the Space affinity, Riftborn Magus or Mechanistic Replication. Vane wrote Epic beside Experimentalist.