The private office of the regional director sat tucked behind the heavy, reinforced oak doors at the very apex of the cathedral's northern wing. The space was dead silent, a striking contrast to the suffocating noise of the central plaza outside. High, narrow windows cut through the thick stone walls, casting long, sharp beams of dusty sunlight across a massive mahogany desk cluttered with intricate copper astrolabes and ancient parchment ledgers tracking the frontier's historical tallies.
I stood completely still in the center of the room, my arms crossed beneath my woollen cloak. My newly unsealed veins were still thrumming with a deep, steady warmth—the smooth, dense current of raw cosmic force flowing effortlessly through my muscles.
Sitting behind the desk was Regional Director Gregory Vane. His tailored dark robes were immaculate, but his hair was slightly dishevelled, and a thin line of nervous sweat glistened across his deeply furrowed brow. He held my bronze transit token between his ink-stained fingers, spinning it over and over with a frantic, metallic click.
"Sit, Astraeus," Director Gregory Vane said, his voice flat, carrying the rigid, clinical exhaustion of a high-ranking bureaucrat whose perfect sorting engine had just fractured on his watch.
I didn't hesitate. Ten years of surviving in the frontline trenches had etched a deep, unyielding respect for military rules and administrative command chains straight into my soul. I dropped into the wooden chair opposite his desk with flawless, calm military precision—my back straight, my shoulders squared, and my expression perfectly neutral.
The immediate display of professional discipline caught him completely off guard. He paused, his ink-stained fingers freezing over the token as his sharp eyes scanned my posture, trying to reconcile my steady, veteran composure with the profile of a rowdy frontier peasant.
"I am Regional Director Gregory Vane," he said, his voice lowering into a cold, measured baritone as he placed his palms flat against the mahogany wood. "And for thirty years, I have overseen the unsealing registries of the outer rim. I have watched thousands of commoners stand before the Awakening Crystal, place their tokens into the pedestal, and receive their automated public logs."
Gregory Vane tapped a heavy index finger against an open ledger, turning it slightly so I could see the fresh blue ink.
"When an ordinary commoner steps into the unsealing circle, the planetary engine parses their vessel and outputs nothing but the barest, absolute baseline metadata," Director Vane explained, pointing to a standard, clean entry on the parchment ledger. "The machine operates on a strict policy of absolute privacy. Because the system grid naturally protects a citizen's data, a public monolith or a standard scan is restricted from revealing anything sensitive. Asking another person to reveal their inner parameters is a profound insult across Aethelon. The public screen only outputs a basic, standard block formation.
"He gestured down to the entry on the parchment ledger.
[ UNSEALING COMPLETED ]
[ USER: REINALD ]
[ TALENT RANK: F ]
[ MAIN AFFINITY: EARTH CONSTITUTION ]
"That basic, unpolished text is all the public is ever permitted to witness," Vane continued, his voice tightening. "The individual alone is granted the private right to view their own raw stats, talent ranks, and passive affinities behind their eyelids. If you focus your sight on another person or a monster out in the world, the system grid will forcefully restrict your vision, displaying nothing more than the absolute bare minimum identity parameters."
He gestured into the empty air to emphasize the universal interface restrictions.
[ IDENTIFICATION COMPLETED ]
[ USER: REGIONAL DIRECTOR GREGORY VANE ]
[ LEVEL: 62 ]
[ RACE: HUMAN ]
"Nothing else is ever revealed," Vane muttered, shifting his gaze back to my file. "Unless someone uses an ultra-rare, high-tier scanning artifact capable of ripping past the system's encryption. But the moment your palms touched that star-stone monolith today, the entire registry grid experienced a severe mechanical delay. The unsealing circle beneath your boots violently flared with a white and pitch-black violet energy that has never been recorded in this sector. The monolith short-circuited completely. It outputted a fake, automated cover block to the cathedral hall to hide the system calculation lag."
Vane picked up a separate, unsealed parchment scroll, unrolling it with a sharp flick of his wrist to show the clean public illusion that had been broadcast to the crowd.
[ UNSEALING COMPLETED ]
[ USER: ASTRAEUS ]
[ TALENT RANK: A ]
[ MAIN AFFINITY: HIGH ENDURANCE AND STRENGTH ]
"To the peasants and Awakeners standing in the hall, you look like a highly valuable, standard A-Rank brawler who comfortably cleared the strict minimum entry threshold to enter the number-one elite academy in the world alongside Lysander," Gregory Vane whispered, his voice carrying a dangerous, razor-sharp edge. "But my private master console recorded the truth. The crystal didn't calculate a standard civilian profile. It experienced a massive internal spike of spiritual torque that nearly shattered the stage. Tell me, boy—what are you hiding beneath that cloak?"
"I don't know, Director," I lied cleanly, keeping my face completely expressionless. "I just stood in the circle. I felt a sudden, crushing heat behind my sternum, and then the text initialized privately behind my eyelids."
Vane stared at me for several long, suffocating seconds, trying to read any crack in my teenage mask. He couldn't. He had absolutely no idea that my mind was privately tracking the real parameters of my unranked EX-Rank Cosmic Sovereign status screen. He didn't know my baseline strength, agility, and endurance had initialized at an absolute flat twenty-five, or that my wisdom sat at thirty. The global system grid had deliberately locked those unprecedented metrics to my retinas alone, short-circuiting the public readout to keep the true Awakener anomaly hidden from human eyes.
Director Vane let out a low sigh, rubbing his temples as he stood up from his chair. "You are an absolute mystery, Astraeus. But before I decide what to do with your file, I need to know exactly what kind of Awakener I am dealing with. Tell me, what is the fundamental purpose of a Rift?"
"To harvest Starlight metal and Starlight plants for the government forces," I answered instantly, deliberately feeding him the standard, uneducated commoner responses that the military grunt camps drilled into the frontier populace. "We clear the rifts, hand all the stones to the guards, and protect the borders."
Vane stopped pacing, turning back to face me with a heavy, deeply cynical expression. "Starlight metal. Starlight plants. It is exactly the kind of uneducated nonsense I expected from an outer rim orphan. They keep you commoners completely blind, intentionally withholding high-tier common knowledge so you can be easily controlled. But since your core just melted my crystal, it is time you learned the actual engineering of the world you are about to fight in."