Luca made it six blocks before his legs started to go.

  He caught himself against a rain barrel outside a boarded-up shop, one hand flat on the wood, the other pressed against his sternum where the skill sat like an ember burning low. The street was empty. That was the only reason he let himself lean.

  Spirit depletion at this depth felt like hunger turned inside out. The System showed you your Spirit stat as a flat number on your personal interface, but it never told you how much you'd spent or how much was left. You learned to read the symptoms instead. A dull ache meant you were getting low. Blurred vision and shaking hands meant you were close to empty. Right now his hands were trembling against the barrel, his vision kept swimming at the edges, and there was a slow warmth on his upper lip that he wiped away without looking at.

  He pushed off the barrel and kept walking.

  The warehouse district sat in the northeast quarter of Korrath, pressed between the inner wall and the old tannery row. Before the Fracture, these buildings had held cargo—salted fish, bolts of linen, crates of iron fittings bound for the mountain settlements. Now they held people.

  Luca's warehouse was the third one on Gull Street, a timber-and-stone building with a sagging roof and a door that someone had reinforced with planks from a broken wagon. A woman sat on a stool beside the entrance, wrapped in a blanket, her face lit by a stub of candle. She was one of the ground-floor families—a mother of three whose husband had gone into the sewer dungeon with a borrowed sword and a green shard two weeks ago and hadn't come back. But she watched the door, and in exchange the other families made sure her children ate.

  She nodded at Luca without speaking. He nodded back.

  Inside, the ground floor was a maze of hanging blankets and low partitions—sail canvas, bedsheets, a length of burlap someone had traded for. Each partition marked a family's claim on a square of floor with whatever they'd managed to hold onto. The air was thick with too many bodies and the smoke from cooking fires burning in the courtyard out back.

  Luca's spot was on the second floor, reached by a ladder that groaned under even his weight. The loft was better than the ground in exactly one way: it was marginally quieter. In every other respect—cold, drafty, the ceiling low enough that he couldn't stand fully upright near the eaves—it was worse.

  Eleven people shared the loft. Three families and two singles, Luca being one of the singles. His corner was the far end, against the eastern wall, where a gap in the planking let in a draft that smelled of salt and the harbor. His bedroll was a thin pad of stuffed canvas on bare wood. His possessions fit in a canvas sack: a spare shirt, a copper tin of rendered fat he used for his boots, a length of cord, and the small leather pouch where he kept his earnings. Tonight the pouch held eleven copper and one silver.

  He lowered himself onto the bedroll and the stiffness hit immediately. Twenty-four years old and he moved like a man twice that. The cold seeped up through the planking every night and left him locked up by morning. Before the Fracture, he'd had a room above the Salt Hook tavern on the northern docks. Small, drafty in its own right, but there had been a straw mattress and a door that closed and the simple luxury of sleeping alone.

  The child was crying now. Across the loft, behind a curtain of sailcloth, one of the Hassin family's younger ones—a girl, maybe four—was working through whatever nightmare the day had given her. Her mother's voice came low and steady, the words indistinct, the tone unmistakable. Comfort offered in a place that had very little of it.

  Luca pulled his coat tighter and stared at the rafters.

  The auction closed at sundown tomorrow, and he needed his Spirit recharged and his head clear. He'd learned during the first week that sleep was when the well refilled.

  But his mind wouldn't stop.

  The resonance he'd felt in the verification room—clean, unmistakable at close range. Perception. Spatial. Predictive. He staked everything on those domains. If Maren won the bid and the shard turned out to be what Iron Vow claimed, his stall and reputation were done. Every copper he'd scraped together through careful, invisible work—gone.

  But he wasn't wrong. He knew it the way a dockworker knew the weight of a crate by how the rope sang—not because someone told him, but because the information lived in his hands.

  That thought caught on something. A cargo clerk's life, twenty-four years of it, none of which existed anymore.

  He'd started on the northern docks at sixteen, hauling freight for a shipping outfit called Velan & Sons. Callus work—but he'd been good at the part that wasn't lifting. The tracking. The difference between what a crate was supposed to hold and what it actually held when you lifted it. He'd caught three instances of freight fraud in his first year just by noticing that the numbers on a docket didn't match the feel of the load. Velan promoted him to clerk. By twenty, he was managing inventory for the whole northern pier—cross-referencing shipments, flagging discrepancies, building a mental catalog of what every regular cargo looked like, smelled like, weighed like.

  He'd spent years learning to look at something and know what it was worth before anyone told him. He hadn't thought about it that way at the time. But now, with the skill sitting behind his sternum and the System's interface floating at the edge of his awareness, he wondered if there was a connection. If the System had looked at what he already was and given him a tool that fit the shape of his mind. The System didn't explain itself.

  He pulled up the interface—a thought, and the translucent overlay appeared. It always struck him how little was there, like a ledger someone had torn most of the pages from.

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  Level: 4 | Tier: 1

  Might: 6 Agility: 8 Vitality: 7 Spirit: 11

  Skill Slots: 1/1 [1] Appraise+ — Proficiency: Rank F

  His entire existence reduced to a handful of numbers and a single skill name.

  Level 4. He'd gained three levels since awakening, though it had taken him a while to understand how. The System didn't hand out instructions or assignments. But sometimes, when you did something it deemed worth noticing, a flicker of warmth would pass through your interface and your experience would tick upward. He'd felt it the first time while helping a porter haul a collapsed beam off the eastern road—a task he'd volunteered for because it needed doing. The System had rewarded him for it, though he hadn't asked and couldn't have predicted it would. Since then he'd learned to recognize the pattern: the System seemed to weigh what you were already doing against the difficulty and the circumstances, and if the scales tipped far enough, you earned something for it. There was no quest log, no listed objectives. Just the quiet acknowledgment of work done, measured against factors Luca couldn't fully see.

  Tier 1. Everyone who'd awakened had started here, and most hadn't left. But word had spread through the bazaar that some people had reached Tier 2—stronger, faster, operating on a level that made ordinary Awakened look sluggish. How they'd gotten there was the subject of fierce debate. Some claimed it happened at a certain level. Others said it required a trial of some kind, though the details changed with every telling. A self-appointed scholar near the fountain had declared last week that you needed to reach Level 10 and then the System would test you. A woman from one of the dungeon-running crews had shouted him down, insisting it was Level 20. The argument had drawn a crowd but settled nothing.

  What Luca knew for certain was this: the System had activated across Korrath—across all of Verath, presumably—roughly four weeks ago. Before that morning, the sky had been whole and the strangest thing in Luca's life had been miscounting a crate shipment by three and spending half a day tracking down the error. Then the light came through the crack in the sky, the crystals fell, and by noon the monsters were in the streets.

  He remembered the sound more than the sight. A tearing, like something vast being pulled apart at the seams. He'd been on the docks checking a grain shipment against a manifest, and he'd looked up because everyone looked up, and the sky was split open from one horizon to the other—a wound of prismatic light, widening as he watched, bleeding color that had no name. Through the gap, something was pouring down like luminous rain.

  Shards. Millions of them were falling.

  The first monsters had appeared within hours. Small things at first—rats with too many teeth, insects the size of dogs, things that crawled out of the harbor water and died twitching on the stones. Then bigger. The docks dissolved into chaos, and Luca had run—away from the crystals, away from the fighting, into the warehouse district where the buildings were thick and the doors were heavy. He'd barricaded himself inside Warehouse Seven with a timber brace and a cargo hook and waited.

  Three days. Eating dried fish from a ruptured crate and drinking rainwater that leaked through the roof while the city remade itself outside. He heard fighting, screaming, and then a strange hum that started on the second day—the pylon, though he didn't know it then.

  The System had found him on the third morning.

  He'd been sitting with his back against a grain crate, chewing the last of the dried fish and listening to something heavy drag itself along the outside wall, when it happened—a presence settling into his mind like pressure behind his temples. The interface had materialized in his vision without warning: numbers, labels, and a single empty slot. He'd sat there for a long time trying to make sense of it, afraid to move, afraid the thing outside would find a way in.

  He'd awakened three days late. Most people had felt the System's touch within hours of the Fracture, and Luca didn't know why he'd been delayed. Whatever the reason, by the time he finally emerged—starving, the interface now a familiar ghost at the edge of his awareness—the pylon had been standing in the central plaza for over a day. The monsters had retreated to the edges of its radius, and people were already organizing around the crystals that littered the ground—trading them, fighting over them. The early movers had grabbed the best shards, formed the first armed groups, and begun establishing the hierarchies that would become guilds.

  Luca had bought Appraise from a man at the bazaar for his last silver. The seller had laughed when he handed it over—a white crystal nobody wanted, a skill that told you a shard's name when the System already did that for free. He'd tossed it across the table like a rotten apple. Luca had caught it because it was the only shard he could afford.

  The absorption had taken less than a minute. The crystal pressed against his chest, warmth spreading inward, a brief disorientation—and then the slot was filled and the skill was part of him, sitting behind his sternum like a second heartbeat.

  He hadn't known it was different until he overheard two porters complaining about an appraiser near the west fountain. The man had charged them three copper to identify a shard, and all he'd given them was its name—the same name anyone could read by examining the crystal closely enough. That was all standard Appraise did, they said. Names and nothing else.

  Luca had been listening from the next stall over, and something cold had settled in his chest. Because his version had never given him just a name. From the very first use—a cracked white crystal he'd found in the gutter, Spark Touch—there had been more. An impression beneath the label. Utility. Ignition. Thermal. A sense of what the skill actually was, buried under what the System chose to call it.

  Luca saw through the names.

  And he'd been careful about it ever since.

  The child across the loft had stopped crying. The mother's voice had faded. Through the thin walls, Luca could hear the rest of the building settling into its uneasy version of night—coughing from the ground floor, the creak of someone rolling on a wooden pallet, a low murmured argument from the family nearest to the ladder about whether they could afford to buy a green shard that one of the Iron Vow runners was offering for twelve silver.

  That was the sound of Korrath after the Fracture. People lying in the dark, calculating what they could survive without.

  Luca closed his interface. The translucent overlay dissolved. He pulled the coat over his shoulders and turned onto his side, facing the wall where the draft came through, and closed his eyes.

  Tomorrow, Maren Tove would either win the auction or she wouldn't. If she won and the shard matched his read, he'd have a client. If she won and he was wrong, he'd have nothing left to build on.

  He lay still and listened to the warehouse breathe around him, and waited for sleep to come and fill the well back up.