A hundred and fifty.
I lay in that puddle of blood with most of my skin somewhere behind me in the flood and I looked at that number, and I laughed, and the sound was more of a wheeze, as my throat had been flayed too.
The world seemed to slow down around me, as something broke inside of me.
I do not know how to describe it. It was like I crossed a new threshold, but I could clearly see that I was still at the Sovereign level.
There was one unbreakable rule that every new Initiate who entered the academy was supposed to understand, because this was the rule that would guide us our entire life, and that rule was the difference between the tiers, and how our skills and rankings worked.
As mages, we grew from Initiates, all the way to Sovereign, and the same thing happened with whatever skills we had. Every Initiate technically starts with zero in a skill or spell, and when this number climbs to thirty, the Initiate would become an Acolyte of that Skill or Spell.
