Chương 31: Chapter Thirty-One: And an Even Poorer Way to Sell Doctrine

She read some of it while walking, and then the rest at a bench near the corner, resting her feet. The paper was cheap, and the information in it was worth even less. She had learned more about the Angel's workings through hearsay, let alone the bible.

Still, there was a part that was interesting: ON THE RANKS OF THE ANGEL'S FAVOUR As Set Down by the Third Testament and Approved for Distribution by the Eastern Compact An Introduction for the Newly Classed It struck her, reading it, that she had never once heard the Voice itself say the word "Ignota", not in the flat announcement that followed a level, not anywhere.

Her own screen carried the word, printed there the way it always had been, but the Voice, the part everyone else in this city could actually hear, never spoke rank names aloud at all. But someone had named these thresholds. Someone had drawn the lines between them, dressed raw numbers up in Latin and scripture until they seemed as fixed and God-given as anything else in the Third Testament.

The obvious answer was the Church, decades ago, claiming the naming rights the way it had claimed everything else about the Angel's Gifts. But that answer, sitting a moment longer in her mind, opened a second, stranger question underneath it: if the Church had invented "Ignota" out of nothing, why did her own screen use the word too?

Either someone in the Church, could see status screens much like hers and built doctrine around what they'd found there, or the system itself had simply adopted the name just as the rest of the world did. Neither answer sat comfortably with Alice. Both, she was beginning to suspect, might even be true at once. Whatever the Angel's Voice actually was, it did not sound like something that merely acted upon the world from somewhere untouched and above it, the longer she lived with it.

It sounded like something that could be shaped, slowly, but surely, by forces within this world. Hell, even the reactions she got from the system changed at times, from neutral to sarcastic with seemingly no rhyme or reason. It brought into question many things. But that was not something for which she could worry currently. Alice turned to the list of ordered ranks in the rest of the pamphlet. OF IGNOTA. Levels One unto Twenty.

This is the first degree, comprehending the common multitude, in whom the Gift lies newly kindled and as yet untried. Most souls of the Empire abide here, and there is no shame in it, for all ascension begins in ignorance. OF NOTA. Levels One-and-Twenty unto Forty. This is the second degree, comprehending those found skilled and diligent in their trade or calling, as is meet and proper, tradesmen, guild members, and professionals of standing, whose gifts have been proven before their betters. OF PROBATA.

Levels One-and-Forty unto Sixty. This is the third degree, comprehending members of appropriate peerage, guild veterans and senior clergy, whose standing hath withstood examination and trial. Be it known that any person confirmed of Probata degree or above shall, by the joint statute of Crown and Church, register the same with whichever body first extends the summons, and shall thereafter be bound by the terms thereof. OF ELECTA. Levels One-and-Sixty unto Eighty. This is the fourth degree, comprehending the chosen.

It is rare, and composed of the truly devout and noble, and rightly so. OF SACRA. Levels One-and-Eighty unto Ninety. This is the fifth degree, standing at the very edge of what hath been confirmed of human attainment, held at this time by only a few blessed ones across the whole Empire. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. OF ABSOLUTA. Level One-and-Ninety and beyond. This degree is hypothesized only.

No one person is confirmed to have attained it, and the Church and the Crown are not agreed whether it exists in truth or only in the imagining of scripture. First and foremost, what a pretentious piece of nonsense. As part of the 'common multitude', Alice took it for the offense it was, and having 'members of appropriate peerage' in the same sentence as those who 'withstood examination and trial' befuddled the rational mind. Nobility being of generally higher rank did not surprise her.

The rich and the powerful would use and abuse any system so long as there was a system to abuse and the conversation with the clerk about 'restricted information', certainly indicated the Angel's Gift was being abused openly and without shame. But them having the audacity to proclaim that their powers and abilities were earned above and beyond the common people as if they truly spend their days hunting in marshes alone and barely armed? This pamphlet was a piece of propaganda, obviously. And a horrid one at that.

But setting the flowery garbage aside, there was quite a bit to learn from this. What the level ranges for each rank were, for example. That was interesting information, even if not particularly useful for her at the moment. What it said about each rank, church-flavored though it was, held her attention for a bit longer. She had nothing special to say about Ignotas.

With the top-down control over the information about leveling and the system mechanics and the lack of education, it came as no surprise that most of the populace was stuck in this rank. Notas were likely a rather large group of people too. Even though the pamphlet explained it away as those 'whose gifts have been proven before their betters', it was simply the system rewarding someone for practicing their skills passively over a long period of time.

There was no reason why an excellent carpenter with twenty years of experience while under the system's purview couldn't reach this rank, even with no knowledge of the system's workings at all. The next rank, however… The registration requirement about Probatas was especially worrying. She had been aware that something like this was likely, but starting from the third rank? That was much earlier than she could have ever assumed.

Was the power difference between a level forty-something and a level thirty that significant? That did not bode well at all for the future. As for the ranks above that… she was going to take all information on it with a heap of salt. But since Absolutas were virtually unknown, something which she didn't trust to be true, it did mean that leveling got exponentially harder with time. She also assumed that the last level was one-hundred, although she was not quite sure why it wouldn't just say that.

Were there levels beyond one-hundred? Or did simply no one ever reach that level? So neither the Church, nor the Crown could be sure that it truly was the maximum possible. And that was everything. The other papers were even more worthless. They just regurgitated information from the Queen Anne's Bible and things she had learned by herself or heard from others on her day to day. They didn't explain anything truly important. Nothing about how a person crossed from one rank to the next.

Nothing about attributes at all. Nothing about what a Nota's skill level actually looked like, or a Probata's, or what being "conscripted" actually cost a person once the Crown or the Church came calling. She sat with the pamphlet in her lap for a long moment, thinking. Sixty years, she thought. The Angel's Voice arrived sixty years ago, by every account I've read. That is enough time for at least one memoir. One collection of letters.

One retired Nota's account of what the last twenty levels of his life actually felt like. She had gone looking, in the weeks after Rowe's visit, for exactly that kind of book, not out of idle curiosity, but because a woman who'd woken up with a status screen and no memory of how the world around it worked had every reason to want to understand her own situation from more than one angle. The public library had given her almost nothing. General doctrine.

Sermons reprinted from the Third Testament, all of it aimed at explaining why the Angel had come and what obedience it asked for, none of it explaining how anything actually functioned. She'd found no first-person accounts of levelling. No explanation, anywhere, of what an attribute like the mysterious Spirit was supposed to do, or even much about the other attributes she actually had! Nothing, in sixty years of a supposedly world-altering event, that read like ordinary people comparing notes.

And there was a word for people like her, she'd learned, casters. It was not spoken about much, but applied to anyone who was able to use a skill aloud. Alice thought that anyone was capable of doing that, but they probably weren't aware of the names of their skills, and even if they were, from what she had learned through practice, intent was also important. If the 'common multitudes' didn't truly believe they could actively use a skill and were instead often told otherwise, of course 'casters' would be rare.

She'd gathered, piecing it together from things half-said around her, a few older books on religious history, that before the Church had taken the Angel's Voice into doctrine and given it the shape of scripture, plenty of people had called the same thing witchcraft. Demonic influence. It was very much like proper magic, after all. She wondered how soon that had stopped being the common opinion, but even with religious propaganda, she still thought it had changed too soon.

The crowd's prejudice and centuries of hatred toward magic did not just disappear in mere decades. But she had no idea how it could have been achieved, for she was living in that reality now. A small voice in her head said that if natural means towards changing this opinion had not been used, then unnatural means were left, but… Unnatural means? To change millions of minds at once? That was too powerful to even comprehend.

For her own sanity, Alice would choose to think she simply didn't know the right answer, until proven otherwise.