The decade mark was not just a birthday in the Empire of Aethelgard; it was the "Great Sorting." It was the day the heavens decided if a child was a lion or a lamb. Across the sprawling continent, thousands of ten-year-olds stood before the resonance crystals of the Church, praying for a rank that would lift their families from the mud.
To the world, the ceiling was absolute: SSS-Rank. A mythical tier whispered in legends of the First Emperor and the Great Calamity. To suggest anything existed beyond SSS was not just heresy—it was a mathematical impossibility in a world governed by the laws of mana.
The General's Final Lesson
General Kaelen sat in his garden, his massive frame dwarfing the stone bench. Beside him stood his son, Cian.
In the eyes of the world, Cian was a prodigy of the mind. At ten, he was taller than his peers, with a quiet grace that unsettled most visitors. He didn't play with wooden swords; he carried a leather satchel filled with surgical tools and vials of stabilized mana-salve.
"Today is the day, son," Kaelen said, his voice unusually soft. He looked at the horizon, where the Imperial Spire pierced the clouds like a needle of cold glass. "Once you touch that crystal, the Empire will claim you. If you are an S-rank, they will take you to the Academy. If you are an F-rank, they might let you stay here with us."
Kaelen turned to his son, his hand—scarred from a hundred battles—landing heavily on Cian's shoulder. "Cian... part of me hopes you are a failure. I have seen the 'blessings' of the S-ranks. It is a golden leash."
Cian looked at his father. For a moment, the mask of a ten-year-old boy slipped. He knew that the "golden leash" was the least of their worries. He had felt the eyes in the shadows for months.
"I just want to be a doctor, Father," Cian said, his voice steady.
Inside, however, Cian was wrestling with something terrifying. For years, he had felt a "hum" in the back of his mind—a power that felt like a predatory ocean trying to squeeze through a pinhole. In his past life, he had read the novel The Age of Ashen Crowns. He knew SSS-rank was the peak. But what he felt within himself felt... wrong. It was too vast. It wasn't a rank; it was an exception.
The Capital: The Saintess's Hidden Truth
In the High Cathedral, Evelina—now ten years old—was being prepared for the Resonance Ceremony. She was already recognized as the Saintess, but today her rank would be officially "measured" by the Pope himself.
She wore robes of woven starlight, but her face was a mask of cold fury.
'SSS... they all think SSS is the limit,' she thought, her heart hammering. In her first life, she had believed it too. But in her third regression, she had glimpsed the truth. There was a tier that sat outside the system. A tier that the world's mana couldn't even name. Ex-Rank. The "Ex" stood for Excluded.
She looked at the Pope—a man named Valerius, whose SS-rank aura felt like a suffocating shroud. He was smiling at her, blissfully unaware that the girl before him held a power that could potentially erase him from existence if her young body didn't shatter first.
"Evelina," the Pope murmured. "Today, you will be crowned. The first in countless generation."
Evelina lowered her head. 'Let them believe that. If they knew what Ex-rank really was—that it feeds on the reality of the user—they would kill me out of fear.'
The Resonance: The Moment of the Void
The ceremony began. One by one, the children of the elite stepped up to the Great Crystal of Aethelgard.
"Julian van Astra: SS-Rank [Sword of the Sun]!" The crowd roared. It was a historic moment; an SS-rank birth was a national holiday.
"Lyra van Astra: S-Rank [Absolute Zero]!" The applause was deafening.
Then, it was Cian's turn in the local district chapel. He placed his hand on the cold surface of the crystal.
'Suppress it,' he commanded his soul. 'Don't let it out.'
The crystal hummed. Suddenly, for a fraction of a second, the crystal didn't glow. It turned pitch black, as if the light in the room had been sucked into a vacuum. The air temperature dropped forty degrees. The priest gasped, clutching his chest as he felt his soul being pulled toward the boy.
Cian panicked. He reached deep into his mind and "slammed" a mental door on that yawning abyss, forcing his mana to mimic the pathetic vibration of a common utility spell.
The crystal snapped back to a pale, ghostly blue light. The priest leaning over the readout blinked, wiping frost from his spectacles.
"Cian Kaelen..." the priest announced, his voice shaky but relieved. "C-Rank [Physical Phasing]. Mana capacity: E-Rank. Physical potential: E-Rank."
A ripple of hushed laughter went through the minor nobles in the back. The son of the Great General was a "utility" extra.
Cian let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He looked at his father. Kaelen was smiling—a genuine, relieved smile.
But far away, in the High Cathedral, Evelina's head snapped toward the west. She felt it. That momentary "blip" in reality. The feeling of a fellow Ex-rank soul crying out in the dark.
'Cian?' she thought, her eyes widening. 'You too? Is that why you were erased in the other timelines? Because your power is too heavy for this world to hold?'
The Shadow Council: The Miscalculation
In the Imperial Spire, the readout of the Great Resonance was being analyzed.
"The Kaelen boy is a C-rank," the Duke reported to the Emperor. "The anomaly we felt for a second was likely just a mana-spike from the Astra children's resonance nearby. The boy is a non-factor."
The Emperor nodded, his eyes cold. "Good. If he were a threat, the crystal would have screamed. A C-rank cannot stop a massacre. Proceed with the purge."
They didn't know. No one knew. The Crystal was designed to measure the world's mana. It had no way to measure the Ex-rank—the "Toxin" that didn't use the world's mana at all, but rather consumed it.
Cian walked out of the chapel, his hand still tingling from the touch of the Void. He looked at his father's laughing face and felt a pang of guilt. He had successfully hidden his rank, but in doing so, he had confirmed to the predators that his family was "safe" to kill.
He looked at his hands. They looked normal. But in the space between his atoms, the Void was already whispering, hungry for the iron-scented air of the night to come.