Ultra Gene Evolution System Chapter 118 – City of Guild Flags

The registration hall opened at first light.

Kai was there before the doors did.

He stood in the empty street and watched the building while the city woke up around him. It was a wide, two-storey structure made of the sa pale stone as the outer wall, with the Guild seal carved large above the entrance and a row of flags along the roof line. Each flag was a different colour at the bottom and the sa deep grey at the top. He did not know what the colours ant yet. He intended to know before he left.

At first light, a man in a grey coat unlocked the front doors from the inside and pushed them open without looking at who was waiting.

Kai walked in.

The inside was one large room divided by a long counter across the middle. Behind the counter, a row of desks. In front of it, a row of chairs along the wall where three people were already seated, waiting. Guild notices covered the wall to the left—dense, formal, written in small text that Kai could mostly read now, the system having added enough language paraters over the past week that the common written form was manageable.

He read them while he waited.

The notices covered: mission board access by rank, Rift permit requirents by path and rank, permitted vault contents by registration class, restricted zones within the city, and the rules for rank challenge and promotion. He read all of them. He would not rember every detail, but he would rember the shape of the system, and the shape was what mattered.

A woman behind the counter called him forward after ten minutes.

She was around thirty, with a registration badge on her desk rather than her coat, and the manner of soone who found her work neither exciting nor unpleasant. She placed a blank form in front of him.

"Na. Origin. Path affiliation. Prior combat record, if any."

Kai filled in the form.

Na: Kai.

Origin: he wrote eastern highland and left it at that. She did not question it.

Path affiliation: Beast.

Prior combat record: extensive. Unrecorded.

She read the form, made a small note beside the path affiliation entry, and placed a second docunt on the counter.

"Vault carrier registration is already logged by the Artifact Division. That carries over." She looked at his coat. "The appraisal room is at the back. Door on the left. The assessor will call you when the current session finishes."

Kai took a seat and waited.

Three people went through the appraisal room before him.

He watched them go in and co out and paid attention to the differences.

The first was a young man, maybe eighteen, who ca out after six minutes with a bronze badge in his hand and an expression that mixed pride with disappointnt in roughly equal parts. Iron rank, probably. A start.

The second was a woman in her mid-thirties who went in and ca out after twelve minutes with a different badge—heavier, with a different mark. She pinned it to her coat imdiately and did not look at anyone else in the room. Bronze rank. She had co in with a specific expectation and t it exactly.

The third was a man about Kai’s age who ca out after four minutes with no badge and a tight, controlled face. He spoke quietly to the clerk at the counter, nodded once, and left. No registration today. Either the appraisal had found sothing that needed review, or his output had not reached even the minimum threshold.

Kai filed all of it.

Then the door opened and the assessor looked out.

"Next."

The room was smaller than he expected. Plain walls. A asuring platform in the centre—a flat raised circle of stone with a set of embedded sensors in the surface, the sa carved-line construction as the gate arch but smaller and more precise. Two chairs against the side wall. A desk at the far end where the assessor sat.

The assessor was a thin man in his fifties with a neat grey beard and the particular stillness of soone who spent most of his day in a small room watching people perform. He had a badge on his coat with two marks. His path pressure was present but not aggressive. Sothing disciplined and contained.

Kai pushed the system toward him as he walked to the platform.

Guild assessor — Official Rank: Silver

Path: Stone Path

Path Depth: Deepened

Stone Path. Not a high-sensitivity read. He would asure output accurately but he would not feel the shell’s history or the vault pair’s unusual architecture the way a Mind Path assessor would. That was useful.

"Step onto the platform," the assessor said. "Release your path output at whatever level feels natural. Don’t force it up and don’t suppress it. The sensors read accurately at natural output."

"Understood," Kai said.

He stepped onto the platform.

The sensors were already warm under his feet. He could feel them reading—not intrusively, just present, the way a room’s temperature was present. He let his body settle and released his path output the way the assessor had described. Natural. No suppression. No forced increase.

The carved lines in the platform surface lit in a slow pulse that spread outward from the centre.

The assessor watched the display on his desk and made a note.

Then he made another note.

Then he looked up at Kai with an expression that was not quite surprise but was sothing close to it.

"Path classification: Beast. Confird." He looked back at the display. "Output level..." He paused. "Step down, please."

Kai stepped off the platform.

The assessor studied the display for a mont longer. Then he looked up.

"Your path output reads at D-Rank."

Kai said nothing.

"That is the official asurent." The assessor said it carefully, in the way people said things they were not entirely comfortable with. "However, there are so unusual qualities in the reading that I want to note." He looked at the display again. "Your output is D-Rank in standard terms. But the signature is... dense. The concentration of your path force is higher than a standard D-Rank. It does not raise your official level, because the total output is within D-Rank paraters. But the way it’s built is not typical."

"aning?" Kai asked.

The assessor folded his hands. "aning I will note in your record that your path structure is non-standard. That is for your benefit, not mine. If you ever challenge for promotion, the review board will see it and it will affect how they assess the challenge." He paused. "It also ans that other hunters who have experience reading path output may find you harder to classify than your badge suggests."

He said that last part the way people said things that were worth paying attention to.

Kai paid attention to it.

"One more thing," the assessor said. "The vault pair." He looked at the coat. "The sensors picked it up. The architecture of the vault pair is not standard. The internal structure has adapted in a way that I have not seen before. I’m required to note it."

"I know," Kai said.

The assessor looked at him for a mont. Then he went back to his desk and wrote for a short ti. When he finished he removed a badge from the drawer and placed it on the counter between them.

It was plain. Flat tal. Small mark. One line.

D-Rank.

"Welco to the Guild," the assessor said. He did not make it sound like a celebration. He made it sound like a statent of fact. "Mission board access at D-Rank opens tomorrow morning. Rift permits at D-Rank allow E and D-Rank entries. C-Rank permits require a promotion review."

He paused.

"You will also be assigned to the monitoring register for vault carriers at Category Two. That is not a restriction on your movent. It simply ans the Division can request your attendance when they need to take readings. You are not required to comply, but non-compliance is noted."

Another pause.

"Any questions?"

Kai picked up the badge. "The flags on the roof of this building. The colours."

The assessor looked briefly surprised at the question. "Path colours. Each path has a registered colour in the lower half of the flag. The grey top is universal Guild rank structure." He looked at the badge. "Your flag, when you earn the right to file one, will have the Beast Path colour in the lower section. Dark red."

Dark red.

Kai closed his hand around the badge and left.

The street was fully awake now.

He stood outside the registration hall and looked at the badge in his hand. Small. Plain. One line. The mark of the lowest active rank in the Guild system.

He pushed the system.

Guild registration: complete

Official Rank: D-Rank

Actual Combat Output: C-Rank

Path classification: Beast — public record

Vault carrier status: Category Two monitoring

Mission board access: active from tomorrow

D-Rank official. C-Rank actual.

That gap was the most important thing in the city right now and the only people who knew it were him and an assessor who had noted a dense, non-standard path structure in a file that the review board would read soday and probably not before it mattered.

He pinned the badge to his coat.

The older man was waiting at the corner of the street, exactly where Kai had left him. He looked at the badge and said nothing. That was enough.

Liora looked at it and gave one small nod.

Neral looked at it with his mouth pressed flat. "D-Rank," he said.

"Yes."

"Of course." He said it without bitterness. Almost with satisfaction, as though the universe was at least being consistent. "At least they gave you a badge."

They walked back through the city toward the lodging house.

Kai watched the flags on the buildings as they passed. The colours in the lower sections. Dark red for Beast. Blue for Storm. Green for Life. Brown for Stone. Each one a path, a choice, a direction a hunter had committed to and built their entire life around.

One path.

That was the rule of this world. You picked one direction and went as deep as you could. That was how you beca strong. That was how you beca trusted. That was how you beca worth sothing in the ledgers that the Guild kept about everyone inside its walls.

One path.

He turned that over in his mind as he walked.

His dark red badge sat on his coat and told everyone who looked exactly what he was.

A Beast Path hunter. D-Rank. Non-standard structure. Not quite what the sensors expected. Worth watching, maybe, but not worth worrying about yet.

Not worth worrying about yet.

He had been back at the lodging house for less than an hour when Sael ca to the door.

She knocked twice, the sa as she had at the director’s office. When Kai opened the door she looked at the badge on his coat and then at his face with the sa checking expression she had used the day before.

"D-Rank," she said.

"Yes."

She did not look surprised. She looked like soone confirming a number they had already written down. "The director wants to see you again. Now, if possible."

"Why?"

"The appraisal result was logged to the system thirty minutes ago." She paused. "The Category Two monitoring flag on your file ans any new data about you goes to the Division automatically." Another pause. "The director saw the assessor’s notes on your path structure."

Kai looked at her.

"All of them?"

"Yes." She held his gaze. "The part about the output density. The part about the vault pair architecture." She stopped. Then, more carefully: "And the part the assessor added after you left."

Kai went still.

"What did he add after I left?"

Sael looked at the badge one more ti. Then at his face.

"He wrote that during the reading, for approximately four seconds, your path output signature stopped reading as Beast Path." She said it the way people said things they did not fully understand but knew were important. "And started reading as sothing the sensor array had no classification for."

The street behind her was full of hunters going about their day. Flags on the buildings. One path per hunter, all of it ordered and nad and filed in the Guild’s ledgers.

Kai looked at the D-Rank badge on his coat.

Four seconds.

He had not felt it. He had not pushed anything. He had simply stood on the platform and let his natural output go where it went.

Four seconds of sothing the sensor array had no na for.

"Let’s go," he said.