Three days after the suppression field came down Nara leveled up.
Not from combat. Not from dungeon runs or passive Soul Harvest or any of the methods Kael had used to accumulate experience across sixty levels and eight weeks.
She leveled up from walking through the Ashrow.
He was with her when it happened — her first real time outside the Hall of Ascension's sublevels in twenty-two years, moving through the district at midmorning with the careful attention of someone relearning what outside meant. The Domain around them, the System architecture clean, the Ashrow doing its ordinary things.
She stopped at the street corner near the well.
He watched her face.
She was doing something — not visibly, the between-walkers' work happened in the architecture rather than in the air. But the Class was active, the Framework Memory ability emerging from twenty-two years of suppressed development and reaching toward the System nodes in the buildings around them.
Reading.
