Chapter 4: The Genesis Wheel

The Awakening Crystal stood on the platform at the front of the Great Hall, on a pillar of black stone.

It was taller than a man and as clear as still water, and the light from the high windows broke inside it into soft colors on the floor. Every Awakened person in the kingdom had once stood in front of a crystal like this. Kings had, and so had beggars, because the crystal didn’t care who you were, or so the priests liked to say. It only showed what you could become.

’Funny how the beggars always seem to become beggars with slightly better posture.’

The first-years sat in the front rows in the order of the list, with the older students on the benches behind them and the teachers, guests and important parents up in the gallery. Aren was in the second seat of the first row, which put him closer to the crystal than any commoner had been in a hundred years. He could feel people staring at the back of his head.

Vivienne Ashgrave sat on his left.

She had not looked at him once since he sat down. She held herself perfectly straight, hands folded in her lap, the silver pendant around her wrist, and up close he could see that her knuckles were white.

’Nervous? You? Good to know you’re human.’

Professor Crane stood beside the crystal with a scroll. Next to him, an alchemist held a silver tray of tonic vials. Headmaster Ysolde Marr, an old woman Aren had only ever seen from far away, sat in a tall chair at the side of the platform with her eyes half closed.

"Vivienne Ashgrave," Crane read.

The hall went completely silent as she stood.

The alchemist held out the tray, and she took the vial with her name on it, the one with the slightly imperfect label Aren had written by lamplight two nights ago. She didn’t even glance at the label. She uncorked it and drank it in one smooth motion.

Aren let himself glance quickly across the aisle. Darius Holt was watching her drink with an expression so carefully calm it was almost funny. In the third row of the older students, a nervous young man who smelled of burnt herbs had gone white as milk.

Vivienne climbed the steps and laid her right hand on the crystal.

For a heartbeat nothing happened, and then the crystal slowly filled with light from within, soft silver at first, then brighter and brighter until it hurt to look at. Wind moved through the hall, though every door was shut, and somebody in the gallery gasped. The light climbed to the very top of the crystal and gathered there, and words appeared inside it in glowing silver.

Class: Silver Moon Empress

Rarity: S

The hall exploded.

People were on their feet, shouting wildly. The older students hammered the benches with their fists. In the gallery, a tall man with Vivienne’s grey eyes rose from his seat, which Aren guessed was as close as the Duke of Ashgrave ever came to cheering. Even the Headmaster opened her eyes all the way.

An S-rank class. There were maybe a dozen S-rank Awakened alive in the whole kingdom, and Vivienne Ashgrave had just become one of the most valuable people in Aldermere, at seventeen, in front of everyone.

Across the aisle, Darius was clapping with everybody else. His smile looked nailed on. Behind him, Pell had his head in his hands.

’Enjoy the show, Darius. You paid for it.’

Vivienne took her hand off the crystal and the light faded. She bowed to the Headmaster, bowed to the hall, and walked down the steps with the same calm face she wore every day. Only when she reached her seat did Aren see her let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it for a week.

She sat down beside him without looking at him.

"Aren," Crane read. He paused, then added, with no expression at all, "No family name."

Laughter rolled through the hall.

Aren stood up, a little stiffly.

As he walked to the platform, the noise changed. The cheering for Vivienne turned into something lower and uglier, full of jokes and whistles. Somebody near the back shouted thief. Somebody else shouted check your pockets! A few people laughed so hard they had to hang on to their neighbors.

There was only one vial left on the tray with his name on it, a cheap one brewed by an apprentice, slightly cloudy. He drank it. It tasted like cold water and nothing else.

From the top of the platform, the hall looked enormous: a thousand faces, all waiting to watch the thief fall again.

He put his hand on the crystal.

It was much colder than he had expected, and for one long, horrible second nothing happened at all, and he heard someone in the front row start to snicker.

Then the blue screen opened.

[Primary Anchor progressed: Class Awakening (S).][Source: Investment recorded. Risk taken on behalf of Anchor.][Return generated. Stored returns: 3.][Host Awakening in progress.][First Return detected.][Stored returns merged.][Genesis Spin unlocked.]

The hall went silent.

It was not the ordinary kind of quiet, either. The laughter stopped abruptly in the middle of a breath. A boy in the third row was frozen with his mouth open. A girl in the gallery was frozen halfway out of her seat. Dust hung in the window light as if it had forgotten how to fall, and Crane, right beside him, was frozen with one eyebrow raised.

Only Aren could move.

And in front of him, filling half the hall, a wheel was forming out of thin air.

It was huge, taller than the crystal, taller than the windows, made of golden light and divided into dozens of narrow segments of every color. Every segment had a name written across it.

[All outcomes are valued at: Silver Moon Empress (S) x10,000.]

He read the names as the wheel settled.

[Sword Saint of the Last Dawn (SSS)][Draconic Blood Emperor (SSS)][Grand Necromancer of the Silent Kingdom (SSS)][Storm Titan (SSS)][Phoenix Archon (SSS)][Void Walker (SSS)][Heavenly Demon Monarch (EX)][Star-Devouring Mage (EX)][Lord of a Thousand Weapons (EX)]

There were more, many more. Some he didn’t understand, and some sounded like they’d walked straight out of legends. Every single one was better than anything else in this hall, better than Vivienne’s S-rank, better than anything the Duke of Ashgrave could buy for his daughter.

And somewhere between a red segment and a black one, so thin he nearly missed it, there was a sliver of gold with no name at all. Only three marks.

[???]

[Spin.]

He didn’t touch anything, and yet the wheel began to turn on its own.

It turned slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the names smeared into bright streaks and a deep humming filled the frozen hall, like a bell that never stopped ringing. Aren realized he was holding his breath.

Then, gradually, the wheel began to slow.

Phoenix Archon. Void Walker. Storm Titan. Any one of them would have made him one of the most powerful people in the kingdom, and every one of them slid past and kept going.

Draconic Blood Emperor. The pointer clicked over its edge. Lord of a Thousand Weapons, EX tier, a tier that not even legends were made of, and the wheel was barely crawling now, the pointer creeping across the segment toward its end.

’Stop. Stop there. That’s enough! I’ll take it!’

It didn’t stop. The pointer reached the edge of the EX segment, hung there for a long second, and slid one tiny step further.

Onto the gold.

[Result: ??? (EX, Unique).][Probability: 0.0001%.][The Genesis Spin cannot occur again.][Class awakened: Zero.]

The wheel burst into golden light and was gone.

[True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).][Passive Skill acquired: False Face.][No one may see what you truly are.]

The hall moved again.

The laughter came back in the middle of the same breath. The boy in the third row finished his snicker. The dust fell. Crane’s eyebrow came down. Nobody had seen the wheel, and nobody had felt the silence. As far as anyone in the Great Hall knew, Aren had touched the crystal and waited one awkward second.

Then the crystal finally lit up.

It didn’t fill with silver light, or with much light of any kind. It glowed a weak, dirty grey, like a candle seen through a filthy window, and the glow barely made it halfway up. Small, faint words appeared.

Class: Servant

Rarity: F

Combat Aptitude: 0

There was one moment of total disbelief, and then the hall completely lost its mind.

People laughed so hard they fell off the benches. The older students howled. Someone in the gallery dropped a cup. A boy near the front climbed onto his seat and shouted, "Combat Aptitude zero!" and the people around him took it up as a chant. Zero! Zero! Zero! Even some of the teachers were smiling behind their hands.

Crane studied the crystal, then wrote something on his scroll with what Aren could have sworn was the first real pleasure he’d ever seen on the man’s face.

"Servant," Crane announced. "F-rank."

Aren took his hand off the crystal. His legs felt oddly weak. His heart was still racing from the wheel, from the gold, from that number still floating in front of his eyes. 0.0001%. Keeping his face blank on the way down the steps was the hardest work he’d ever done.

When he reached the first row, he looked at Vivienne.

She was staring blankly at the crystal, at the faint grey word inside it, and her face was pale. For one second, he saw something there that made no sense at all. It looked almost like relief. Her shoulders dropped, just slightly, exactly as they had when she came down from her own awakening.

Then she turned her head and looked at him, and the relief was gone. What was left was pure, cold contempt.

"A servant," she said, too quietly for anyone else to hear. "That suits you."

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 96% -> 97%.]

He sat down beside her while the hall kept chanting. Zero. Zero. Zero.

He looked down at his hands, the same thin hands as yesterday, scarred from carrying crates. Nothing about them had changed, but a small window now hung above his palm that only he could see.

[Name: Aren.][True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).][Rank: F, Level 1.][Anchors: 1/1. Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary).]

The hall kept calling him Zero. They meant it as an insult, and he let them.

’Go on. Louder. You have no idea you’re saying my real name.’