The wasps had been, by any reasonable standard, furious.

  This was not unusual for wasps. Wasps occupied a unique position in the animal kingdom, somewhere between "actively malicious" and "philosophically committed to ruining your afternoon," and the particular colony that had established itself in the rafters of Farmer Gretta's hay barn had elevated this commitment to something approaching an art form. They had built a nest the size of a human head — a papery, grey, gently pulsating structure that hung from the central beam like a chandelier designed by someone who hated dinner parties and everyone who attended them.

  Gretta had offered four silver for its removal.

  Levin had removed it.

  The removal had involved one precisely aimed Arcane Bolt, a brief and spectacular explosion of papery fragments, and approximately nine hundred wasps discovering simultaneously that their home no longer existed and expressing their feelings about this development in the only language wasps knew, which was stinging.

  They had not stung Levin.

  They had tried. They had tried with the unanimous, single-minded determination of a species that had been personally wronged and intended to file its complaint directly into human skin.

  But the bolts of mana that crackled along Levin's forearms — visible now, bright enough to cast shadows in the barn's dim interior — had created a field around him that the wasps found deeply objectionable.

  They approached, veered, circled, approached again, veered again, and eventually dispersed into the afternoon sky in a cloud of impotent rage, heading northeast toward whatever secondary accommodation the wasp real estate market had to offer.

  Twelve wasps had not dispersed.

  Twelve wasps had committed to the attack with the kind of blind, suicidal courage that poets would have celebrated if the poets in question had been very small, very angry, and equipped with venomous abdomens. The twelve wasps had struck the mana field and ceased to be wasps.

  Twelve kills. Twelve percentage points. Twelve tiny golden flickers.

  Levin had walked back to Thornwall with four silver coins in his pocket and a sensation in his chest that was new.

  The warmth was still there — the reservoir, the hum, the steady pressure that had been building for six weeks and showed no signs of architectural fatigue. But something had changed in its quality. The hum had acquired a harmonic. A secondary frequency, layered beneath the first, like a note played on a second instrument that you couldn't quite identify but that changed the character of the music entirely.

  It felt, if he concentrated, like something was trying to get his attention.

  He chose not to concentrate.

  He walked through the village gate. He crossed the main street. He entered the Leaky Sovereign, went behind the bar, and sat down on the stool that he had, through six weeks of consistent use, claimed as his own through the ancient and legally binding principle of "nobody else wanted it."

  He leaned his staff against the bar.

  The staff fell over.

  He picked it up. He leaned it again, adjusting the angle. It fell over again, in the opposite direction, because staves were, as previously established, fundamentally opposed to remaining where you put them, and this particular staff had elevated its opposition to a matter of personal identity.

  He picked it up a third time.

  He held it in both hands and examined it. The wood was scuffed. The grain had roughened along the lower third, where six weeks of tapping on stone paths and forest floors had worn the surface to a fibrous texture that caught on everything it touched. The "barely cursed" peddler's walking stick had, through sustained use, developed the kind of character that inanimate objects develop when they've been through things — a patina of experience that made it look less like a staff and more like a stick that had opinions about its career trajectory.

  It needed sharpening. Or sanding. Or some form of maintenance that fell into the broad category of "caring for your equipment," which was a category Levin had been neglecting with the consistency of someone who owned one piece of equipment and had been too busy killing things with magic to worry about the stick.

  He found a knife in the kitchen drawer — not one of the good knives, because there were no good knives, but a knife that was at least willing to participate in the concept of cutting — and sat back down at the bar.

  He began to whittle.

  The motion was simple.

  Blade against wood, angled slightly, removing thin curls of grain that fell to the bar top in pale spirals. He worked along the lower third of the staff, smoothing the roughened surface, evening the taper. The knife moved in steady, rhythmic strokes. The wood responded. Curl by curl, the staff's surface went from "neglected" to "maintained" to something approaching "cared for," which was a progression that Levin found quietly satisfying in the way that all simple, physical tasks are satisfying when your primary occupation involves turning living things into particulate matter.

  He had been whittling for approximately four minutes when the notification appeared.

  It materialised in his peripheral vision — upper right quadrant, approximately where a person's blind spot ends and their actual vision begins — with the visual subtlety of a firework at a funeral.

  It was teal.

  It was rectangular.

  It had rounded corners and a faint luminous border, and it contained text in a font that was clean and radiating the particular energy of a system message that believed its contents were important and expected you to agree.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Staff Maintenance]

  [Staff Maintenance: Level 1]

  Levin's knife stopped mid-stroke.

  He stared at the notification.

  The notification hung in his vision, patient and luminous, occupying a space that had previously been reserved for "the wall behind the bar" and was now being used for unsolicited career feedback.

  He blinked.

  The notification did not go away. Blinking, apparently, was not the dismissal mechanism. The notification remained, teal and serene, like a guest who had arrived without invitation and was now settling into the good chair.

  He blinked again, harder. He blinked with intent. He blinked the way a person blinks when they have something in their eye and are trying to dislodge it through sheer force of eyelid.

  The notification pulsed once — a gentle, rhythmic brightening that communicated, in visual terms, "I see that you've noticed me, and I'm delighted."

  Then it faded.

  It did not disappear. It faded — sliding from the foreground of his vision to the background, from "impossible to ignore" to "technically still there if you look for it," like a stain on a ceiling that you stop seeing after a while but that never actually leaves.

  Levin looked at the staff. He looked at the knife. He looked at the thin curl of wood on the bar top.

  He had acquired a skill.

  For whittling.

  For running a knife along a stick.

  For performing an action so mundane, so fundamentally unremarkable, so cosmically insignificant that the only living creature who could possibly have found it noteworthy was the stick itself, and the stick — whatever its other qualities — did not have opinions about skill acquisition.

  The warmth behind his sternum pulsed.

  The secondary harmonic — the new frequency, the one that had appeared after the wasp kills — thrummed once, and Levin understood, with the sudden and unwelcome clarity of a man who has just realised that the smoke alarm he's been ignoring is connected to an actual fire, that the threshold had been crossed.

  Five hundred and fifty-one percent.

  Five hundred and fifty was a milestone. A threshold.

  And thresholds, in this world, had consequences.

  The consequence, apparently, was that the universe had decided to start commenting on his activities.

  He picked up the knife. He resumed whittling and three strokes later:

  [Staff Maintenance: Level 2!]

  [Improved grip detection. Wood grain analysis +5%.]

  The notification appeared with a small chime — a bright, two-note sound, ascending, cheerful, the auditory equivalent of a golden retriever bringing you a ball. The chime existed entirely inside his head, which made it worse, because you could close your eyes against a visual notification but you could not close your ears against a sound that was being generated by your own skull.

  Levin set the knife down.

  He pressed both palms flat against the bar top.

  He breathed in through his nose.

  He breathed out through his mouth.

  "Wood grain analysis," he said, to nobody. "Five percent."

  The bar top offered no commentary.

  He picked up the knife. He finished the staff. He set the knife down. He set the staff against the bar, where it leaned at its usual angle and, for once, did not fall over, which was either a coincidence or the five percent wood grain analysis paying dividends in ways that defied rational explanation.

  [Staff Maintenance: Level 3!]

  [Bonus: Equipment durability sense. You can now detect micro-fractures in wooden implements.]

  "Micro-fractures?" Levin said.

  He looked at the staff. He concentrated. And — horribly and with the precision of a magnifying glass being held over text you didn't want to read — he could see them.

  Tiny lines in the wood grain, invisible to the naked eye, visible now through whatever lens the skill had installed in his perception. Hairline cracks. Stress points. The staff's structural autobiography, written in a language he had never asked to learn and could not now unlearn.

  The staff had seven micro-fractures.

  Two were in the upper third, near where he gripped it. One ran along the base, where the wood met the ground. The remaining four were distributed along the middle section in a pattern that suggested the staff had, at some point in its history, been used as a lever for something it was never designed to lever.

  This information was, in every practical sense, useless. Levin was a mage. He used the staff to walk and to lean against things. The structural integrity of his walking stick was approximately as relevant to his daily life as the migratory patterns of arctic geese — interesting in theory, irrelevant in practice, and likely to cause anxiety if examined too closely.

  He stood up from the stool.

  He walked to the back door of the tavern.

  Outside, the woodpile sat against the rear wall — a stack of split logs that Marda maintained with grim diligence of a woman. Winter did not care about your feelings, your firewood supply, or your opinions about the fairness of seasonal temperature distribution.

  The axe was embedded in the chopping block.

  Levin pulled it free. He set a log on the block. He swung.

  The log split cleanly down the centre, falling into two halves that tumbled off the block and landed in the dirt with a satisfying double thump.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Woodcutting]

  [Woodcutting: Level 1]

  The chime sounded. Ascending. Cheerful. Inescapable.

  Levin's jaw tightened.

  He set another log. He swung.

  [Woodcutting: Level 2!]

  [Improved swing arc. Splitting efficiency +3%.]

  Another log. Another swing.

  [Woodcutting: Level 3!]

  [Bonus: Grain reading. You can now identify optimal splitting lines in timber.]

  The log on the block was, he now realised, covered in faint luminous lines that only he could see — pale blue traceries running along the grain, marking the points where the wood would split most easily, like a diagram in a textbook written by someone who believed that chopping firewood required academic instruction.

  He swung along one of the lines.

  The log split so cleanly that the two halves separated without a sound, falling apart like a book opening to a well-read page.

  [Woodcutting: Level 4!]

  [Critical split! Bonus XP awarded.]

  [Note: Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  Levin read the last line twice.

  He read it a third time, then and fourth, and fifth.

  He set the axe down on the chopping block with a care that was, under the circumstances, remarkable, because the alternative was to throw it, and throwing axes was the kind of behaviour that generated its own notification, probably something like [SKILL ACQUIRED: Tantrum], and he was not prepared to find out.

  Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.

  The universe had, with this single line of teal text, confirmed what Levin had known for six weeks and what the blue status box had been silently communicating since the day he arrived: he could acquire skills.

  He could level those skills.

  He could become, according to the notification system, increasingly proficient at whittling, chopping, and presumably any other activity he turned his hand to now after reaching this threshold in his chest.

  His Class Level would remain 1.

  The skills went up. The number stayed down. The system tracked everything and rewarded nothing, like a teacher who marked every assignment with detailed feedback and then gave everyone the same grade regardless of performance.

  He picked up the axe. He split four more logs. Each split triggered a notification. He stopped reading them after the second one. They accumulated in his peripheral vision like unread messages, their teal glow forming a small, luminous queue in the upper right corner of his sight, patient and persistent and absolutely certain that their contents mattered.

  They did not matter.

  He stacked the split wood against the wall, went back inside, and washed his hands in the kitchen basin.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Hygiene]

  [Hygiene: Level 1]

  Levin closed his eyes. He gripped the edge of the basin. The ceramic was cool against his palms.

  "No," he said.

  The notification faded. Another took its place.

  [Hygiene: Level 2!]

  [Improved lather technique. Soap efficiency +4%.]

  He opened his eyes. He looked at his hands. His hands were wet and covered in soap and, according to the notification system, four percent more efficiently soaped than they had been thirty seconds ago.

  He dried his hands on a towel.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Towel Use]

  He stared at the towel.

  The towel hung from its hook, damp and innocent, unaware that it had just become a vector for skill acquisition. It was a plain towel — cotton, off-white, fraying at one corner — and it had no business being involved in Levin's character development, and yet here they were, the two of them, locked in a moment of mutual incomprehension that neither party had asked for.

  "Levin?"

  He turned.

  Ria was standing in the kitchen doorway, her satchel over one shoulder, the bronze medallion glinting on its strap. She had been out — market, probably, given the canvas bag in her hand and the smell of fresh herbs that preceded her into the room like an aromatic herald.

  "You're staring at a towel," she said.

  "The towel started it."

  Ria set the canvas bag on the counter. She began unpacking: rosemary (more rosemary; she had developed a relationship with rosemary that bordered on the evangelical), thyme, a bundle of spring onions, two potatoes, and a paper-wrapped parcel that smelled of fish.

  "I got trout," she said. "From the fishmonger. Well, from Tommas's nephew, who caught them this morning in the creek. He's not technically a fishmonger. He's a goatherd who fishes on Saturdays. But the trout are real."

  She held up the parcel.

  Inside, two trout lay side by side, silver-scaled, glassy-eyed, and thoroughly dead, which was the optimal condition for trout that were about to become dinner and the suboptimal condition for trout that had other plans.

  "I thought," Ria said, with the careful tone of someone who had been planning this sentence for the duration of her walk back from the market, "that you could cook them."

  Levin looked at the trout. He looked at Ria. He looked at the trout again.

  "I don't cook," he said.

  "You make tea."

  "Tea is not cooking. Tea is a philosophical practice that happens to involve hot water. Cooking requires ingredients, technique, timing, and a relationship with heat that I do not have and do not wish to develop."

  "You throw fireballs."

  "Fireballs and cooking are related in the same way that a flood and a bath are related. The underlying element is the same. The application is fundamentally different. One is controlled, precise, and produces a desirable outcome. The other destroys things. I am very good at the destroying-things one."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Ria set the trout on the counter.

  She crossed her arms.

  The medallion on her satchel strap caught the light and flashed, which gave her the appearance of someone who had been decorated for bravery and was now deploying that decoration as leverage in a domestic negotiation.

  "I'll talk you through it," she said. "Step by step. You do the cooking. I do the instructions. It's like the spider cave, except the spiders are fish and the cave is a kitchen and instead of a shield you have a pan."

  "The pan is unseasoned."

  "I seasoned it this morning. Four coats of lard. It's ready."

  Levin looked at the pan. It hung from its hook on the wall, gleaming with a dull, fatty sheen that suggested Ria had, indeed, subjected it to the four-coat treatment she had described on her first morning. The pan looked, for the first time in its long and neglected life, like a pan that was prepared to cooperate.

  "Fine," Levin said.

  He said "fine" the way he always said "fine" — with the resigned acceptance of a man who had learned that certain battles were unwinnable and that the energy spent fighting them was better redirected toward surviving the inevitable outcome.

  He rolled up his sleeves.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Sleeve Management]

  His left eye twitched.

  ---------

  The cooking lesson began with water.

  "Fill the pot," Ria said. "Halfway. We'll need it for the potatoes."

  Levin filled the pot. He set it on the stove. He lit the stove, which involved striking a flint against steel and coaxing a spark into the kindling, a process that took approximately fifteen seconds and produced:

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Fire Starting]

  [Fire Starting: Level 1]

  And then, three seconds later, as the kindling caught:

  [Fire Starting: Level 2!]

  [Improved spark accuracy. Ignition time -8%.]

  "You're making a face," Ria said.

  "I'm not making a face."

  "You are. Your left eye is doing something. It's been doing it since I walked in. Is something wrong with your eye?"

  "My eye is fine. My eye is having a normal day. My eye is not receiving unsolicited feedback from the universe about its performance in lighting a fire."

  Ria stared at him.

  Her head tilted approximately seven degrees to the right, which was the angle at which she processed statements that didn't immediately make sense, like a dog hearing a pitch that was technically within its range but that it hadn't been expecting.

  "What?" she said.

  Levin exhaled. He looked at the ceiling. The ceiling, mercifully, did not trigger a notification.

  "I'm getting notifications," he said. "Skill notifications. Every time I do something — anything — a small teal box appears in my vision and informs me that I've acquired or improved a skill. I sharpened my staff: Staff Maintenance. I chopped wood: Woodcutting. I washed my hands: Hygiene. I dried my hands: Towel Use. I rolled up my sleeves just now, and I received a notification for Sleeve Management. Sleeve Management, Ria. The universe is tracking how I manage my sleeves."

  Ria's mouth opened. It closed. It opened again. Her eyes went wide — the particular wideness that preceded either alarm or delight, and in Ria's case, the two were often indistinguishable.

  "You're getting skill popups?" she said.

  "Constantly."

  "Like the blue box? The level thing?"

  "Adjacent to the blue box. Same general aesthetic. Teal instead of blue. Rounded corners. A chime that sounds like a small bell being struck by someone who is very pleased with themselves."

  "Since when?"

  "Since approximately forty minutes ago. I believe it's connected to the mana threshold. Five hundred and fifty percent. Something... unlocked."

  Ria's face underwent a rapid transformation. It passed through surprise, arrived at fascination, detoured briefly through envy, and settled on a destination that Levin recognised with a sinking sensation: amusement.

  Her lips pressed together. Her cheeks bunched. Her shoulders began the small, rhythmic contractions that preceded laughter the way tremors precede an earthquake.

  "Don't," Levin said.

  "Sleeve Management?" Ria said.

  "Don't."

  "Sleeve Management."

  She laughed.

  It was the same full, bright laugh from the morning after the rat quest — the laugh that bounced off walls and scattered sparrows and caused nearby farmers to smile reflexively.

  It filled the kitchen.

  It filled the common room beyond the kitchen.

  It probably filled the attic, where the ceiling was listening with its three water stains and its expression of perpetual mild surprise.

  Levin waited.

  The laugh ran its course.

  It took approximately twenty seconds, during which Ria braced herself against the counter with one hand and held her stomach with the other and produced sounds that were technically laughter but that had, by the fifteen-second mark, transcended laughter and entered the territory of respiratory event.

  She wiped her eyes. She straightened. She took a breath.

  "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm done. Cook the fish."

  "The water's not boiling yet."

  "Then peel the potatoes while we wait."

  Levin picked up a potato. He picked up a knife. He began to peel.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Peeling]

  [Peeling: Level 1]

  His jaw clenched. A muscle in his cheek fired once, visibly.

  "Another one?" Ria asked.

  "Peeling."

  Ria's lips pressed together again. Her shoulders trembled. She turned away, facing the wall, and made a sound that she would later claim was a cough.

  Levin peeled the potato. He peeled it with the grim efficiency of a man who was being evaluated by an invisible bureaucracy and had decided that if the bureaucracy was going to track his performance, it was going to track excellent performance, because he refused to have a mediocre Peeling score on whatever cosmic transcript the universe was maintaining.

  The potato emerged from its skin smooth, white, and geometrically precise.

  [Peeling: Level 2!]

  [Improved peel continuity. Waste reduction +6%.]

  He peeled the second potato. It was, if anything, even more precisely peeled than the first. The skin came off in a single, unbroken spiral that hung from the knife like a ribbon.

  [Peeling: Level 3!]

  [CRITICAL PEEL! Bonus XP awarded.]

  [Note: Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  "Critical peel," Levin said, flatly.

  Ria, who had been watching the spiral with genuine admiration, looked at his face.

  "Critical peel?" she repeated.

  "The notification says I achieved a critical peel. It awarded bonus experience. The experience does not count toward my class level. I am, officially, a Level 1 Mage who has critically peeled a potato."

  Ria opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again. The laugh was building — he could see it, the way you can see a wave building offshore, gathering height and momentum, preparing to break.

  "If you laugh," Levin said, "I will put the potato down and walk out of this kitchen and never return."

  Ria did not laugh.

  She held it. She held it the way she had held the shield in the spider cave — through concentration, through will, and the absolute refusal to let the thing she was containing escape.

  Her face turned red. Her eyes watered. A vein in her temple became visible.

  She did not laugh.

  "Good," Levin said. "Now tell me what to do with the fish."

  -----------

  The fish preparation proceeded as follows:

  Ria instructed Levin to gut the trout.

  He gutted the trout. ([SKILL ACQUIRED: Fish Preparation. Level 1.])

  He gutted the second trout. ([Fish Preparation: Level 2! Improved fillet angle. Bone detection +7%.])

  He could now, apparently, detect bones in fish with seven percent greater accuracy than he could thirty seconds ago, which was information that his fingers had been providing for free since the beginning of the exercise and that the notification system had decided to quantify, catalogue, and celebrate as though it were a meaningful achievement.

  Ria instructed him to season the trout with salt, pepper, and thyme.

  He seasoned. ([SKILL ACQUIRED: Seasoning. Level 1.])

  He added rosemary, because Ria insisted, and because rosemary was, in Ria's cosmology, the solution to all problems, culinary and otherwise. ([Seasoning: Level 2! Herb distribution uniformity +4%.])

  His herb distribution was, according to the universe, four percent more uniform than it had been before the rosemary. He did not know what herb distribution uniformity meant. He suspected the universe didn't either.

  He also noticed there were a lot of four percents.

  Ria instructed him to heat the pan.

  He heated the pan.

  The pan, freshly seasoned with four coats of lard, accepted the heat with the cooperative warmth of an object that had been neglected for years and was now, finally, being treated with respect.

  "Oil," Ria said. "Just a splash in the pan. Let it shimmer."

  Levin added oil.

  The oil hit the hot pan and began to shimmer — a thin, iridescent film that rippled and danced across the iron surface.

  "Now the fish. Skin side down. Gently."

  Levin picked up the first trout. He held it above the pan. He lowered it.

  The trout touched the oil.

  The oil responded.

  What happened next was, in strictly physical terms, a simple matter of thermal dynamics: cold, wet fish meeting hot oil produces steam, and steam, when confined beneath a piece of fish in a hot pan, produces a reaction that is energetic, noisy, and spatially ambitious.

  In practical terms, the pan exploded.

  The oil leapt upward, outward, and in every direction that was not "calmly remaining in the pan," which was the one direction Levin had been counting on. Droplets of hot oil arced through the air like tiny, furious comets.

  The trout, rather than lying flat against the iron, curled upward at both ends, producing a shape that resembled a small, angry canoe, and the steam that erupted from beneath it hit Levin's forearm with a hiss that was audible from the common room.

  Levin flinched.

  The flinch was involuntary, small, and entirely reasonable given that his arm had just been scalded by fish steam. His hand jerked backward. The trout, released from the gentle grip that had been lowering it, dropped the remaining half-inch into the pan with a wet slap that sent a secondary wave of oil across the stovetop.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Cooking]

  [Cooking: Level 1]

  "Flip it!" Ria said, from a position approximately four feet further from the stove than she had been three seconds ago. "Use the spatula! Flip it before it—"

  Levin grabbed the spatula. He slid it under the trout. He flipped.

  The trout went up. The trout went too far up. The trout left the pan entirely, performed a single, graceful rotation in the air — skin side, flesh side, skin side — and landed on the stovetop beside the pan, where it sat on the hot iron surface and began to smoke with the quiet dignity of a fish that had accepted its fate.

  [Cooking: Level 2!]

  [Improved heat management. Flip accuracy +5%.]

  "Five percent," Levin said, staring at the smoking trout on the stovetop. "My flip accuracy has improved by five percent. The fish is on the stove. The fish is not in the pan. The five percent improvement has, in real terms, produced a result that is indistinguishable from zero percent improvement. The notification system is lying to me."

  "Get the fish back in the pan!" Ria shouted.

  Levin retrieved the fish. He placed it in the pan. The pan sizzled. The fish, having been on a brief and unscheduled excursion across the stovetop, had acquired a dark stripe along one side that would, in a restaurant, be described as "charred" and in Marda's kitchen was simply described as "how things are."

  "Now the second one," Ria said. "Same thing. Skin down. Gently."

  Levin picked up the second trout.

  He held it above the pan.

  He lowered it with a care and precision that the notification system would, he was certain, find commendable and that the fish would, he was equally certain, find irrelevant.

  The trout touched the oil.

  The oil, having learned nothing from the previous encounter, responded identically.

  This time, Levin held on.

  He pressed the fish flat against the pan with the spatula, pinning it there with the firm, unyielding pressure of a man who had been personally insulted by a piece of cookware and was not going to let it win.

  The fish sizzled. The oil popped. Steam rose in a column that hit the ceiling and spread outward, filling the kitchen with a warm, fishy fog.

  "Good," Ria said. "Hold it there. Thirty seconds. Then flip."

  Levin held it. He counted. At thirty, he flipped.

  The trout turned over in the pan with a clean, satisfying motion that produced a sound — a crisp, decisive tsssk — that was, he had to admit, deeply satisfying.

  [Cooking: Level 3!]

  [Perfect flip! Bonus XP awarded.]

  [Note: Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  "Perfect flip," he said. "Bonus experience. Does not count."

  "Stop reading the popups and watch the fish."

  He watched the fish. The fish cooked. The skin crisped. The flesh turned from translucent pink to opaque white, and the smell shifted from "raw fish in a hot pan" to "something that a person might actually want to eat," which was a transition that Levin found both encouraging and faintly miraculous, given his involvement in the process.

  "Now," Ria said, "the potatoes need to go in the water. The water should be boiling by now."

  Levin turned to the pot.

  The pot was on the stove. The water in the pot was boiling. The potatoes were on the counter, peeled and critically peeled and waiting.

  He picked up the potatoes. He dropped them into the pot.

  The pot accepted them with a bubbling enthusiasm.

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Boiling]

  [Boiling: Level 1]

  Levin's left eye twitched. His right hand, still holding the spatula, tightened until the knuckles went pale.

  "Boiling," he said. "I have acquired the skill of boiling. The act of placing an object into water that is already hot. The water did the work. The stove did the work. Gravity did the work. The potatoes did work too. I contributed nothing to this process beyond the lateral transportation of two potatoes across a distance of eighteen inches, and the universe has decided that this constitutes a skill."

  Ria was leaning against the doorframe. Her arms were crossed. The medallion glinted. Her face was doing the thing again — the pressed lips, the bunched cheeks, the trembling shoulders.

  "Don't," Levin said.

  "I'm not."

  "You are."

  "I'm holding it."

  "Hold it harder."

  Ria held it. Her face turned a shade of red that Levin had previously seen only on certain varieties of autumn apple and on the faces of people who were trying very hard not to breathe.

  He turned back to the fish.

  The first trout — the one with the char stripe — was done. He lifted it from the pan with the spatula and placed it on a plate.

  [Cooking: Level 4!]

  [Plating technique detected. Presentation score: 3/10.]

  "Three out of ten," Levin said. "For plating. The fish is on the plate. The plate is on the counter. The fish is facing the correct direction, which is to say, it is facing a direction, because fish do not have a correct direction, because they are dead. Three out of ten."

  From the doorframe, a sound. High-pitched. Strangled. The sound of a laugh being physically restrained by a person whose restraining muscles were failing.

  Levin did not turn around.

  He lifted the second trout.

  He placed it on the plate beside the first, adjusting its angle by approximately fifteen degrees, because if the universe was going to score his plating, he was going to give it something to think about.

  [Plating technique improved! Presentation score: 4/10.]

  "Four," he said. "Progress."

  He turned to the potatoes. The potatoes were boiling. He checked them with a fork — soft, yielding, and done.

  He reached for the pot.

  He gripped the handle.

  The handle was iron. The iron was hot. The iron had been sitting on a lit stove for fifteen minutes, absorbing heat with the patient, silent accumulation of an object that existed primarily to transfer thermal energy into the hands of people who forgot to use a cloth.

  Levin did not forget to use a cloth…

  …

  …

  Levin forgot to use a cloth.

  His hand closed on the iron handle. The heat registered. His fingers opened. The pot tilted. The water — boiling, bubbling, containing two potatoes and approximately a litre of starchy liquid — sloshed toward the edge.

  Levin's other hand came up. Instinct. Reflex.

  The motion was identical to the motion he used when casting — palm forward, fingers spread, a gesture so deeply embedded in his muscle memory that it activated before his conscious mind had finished processing the words "the pot is falling."

  A pulse of force left his palm.

  The pulse was small. Tiny. The magical equivalent of a nudge, a tap, a gentle suggestion to the air molecules in the immediate vicinity that they might like to push the pot back upright.

  The air molecules obliged.

  The pot righted itself.

  The water sloshed back to centre.

  The potatoes bobbed, unperturbed.

  The pulse continued past the pot.

  It continued past the pot because magical force, once released, does not stop at the first object it encounters unless specifically instructed to, and Levin had not specifically instructed it to, because he had not specifically instructed it to do anything, because the entire cast had been involuntary, a spasm of power triggered by a hot handle and a falling pot and six weeks of conditioning that had taught his body to respond to surprise by emitting arcane energy.

  The pulse hit the stovetop.

  The stovetop was iron. The iron was hot. The pulse, meeting the hot iron, did what pulses of compressed magical force do when they encounter a heated ferrous surface, which is to say: it discharged.

  The discharge was small and by the standards of Levin's usual output, negligible — a spark, a flicker, a brief and localised release of energy that would, in an open field, have been invisible and harmless.

  In a kitchen, beside a stove, next to a pot of boiling water, above a floor that had been splashed with cooking oil during the Great Trout Incident of four minutes ago, the discharge was not negligible.

  The oil on the floor ignited in a thin, blue-white line that traced the path of the earlier oil splatter — a line approximately three feet long, running from the base of the stove to a point roughly eighteen inches from Ria's left boot.

  The flame was brief, bright, and startlingly pretty, in the way that all fires are startlingly pretty for the first half-second before the brain catches up and replaces "pretty" with "problem."

  Ria jumped backward.

  Her boot cleared the flame by approximately four inches.

  She hit the doorframe with her shoulder, bounced off it, and ended up in the common room, staring at the kitchen floor with eyes that had gone very wide and a mouth that had gone very round.

  Levin looked at the flame.

  The flame looked back, flickering cheerfully, pleased with itself.

  He raised his hand — the same hand and the same gesture — and pulled.

  The heat left the flame.

  The flame left the floor.

  The fire went out, drawn back into his palm like thread being wound onto a spool, absorbed into the mana field that crackled along his forearm and dissipated into the reservoir behind his sternum.

  The floor was scorched.

  A thin, dark line marked where the oil had burned — a signature, written in carbon, that read: "A mage was here, and the mage should not have been cooking."

  [SKILL ACQUIRED: Fire Suppression]

  [Fire Suppression: Level 1]

  [Cooking: Level 5!]

  [New technique unlocked: Flame Sear.]

  [Note: Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  Levin stared at the notifications.

  He stared at them for a long time.

  "Flame Sear," he said. "I have unlocked a cooking technique called Flame Sear, by setting the kitchen floor on fire. The universe has interpreted arson as a culinary innovation."

  From the common room, Ria made a sound.

  It was not a laugh.

  It was beyond laughing.

  It was the sound that occurs when laughter has been held in for too long and finally breaks free, not through the mouth but through the entire body — a full-system event that involved her sliding down the doorframe until she was sitting on the floor, her legs straight out in front of her, her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking, and a noise emerging from behind her fingers that was part wheeze, part sob, part the helpless, hiccupping surrender of a person who has lost the battle against their own amusement and is now simply riding the wave to wherever it takes them.

  Levin looked at the scorched floor.

  He looked at the pot of potatoes, still boiling and containing two potatoes that had survived the entire ordeal with the calm indifference of root vegetables.

  He looked at the trout on the plate. The trout looked back with their glassy eyes, offering no judgement, because they were dead and dead fish are, if nothing else, diplomatic.

  He looked at the notifications, queued in his peripheral vision — a stack of teal rectangles, each one representing a skill he had never asked for, tracking progress he had never sought, measuring improvement in activities he had never intended to pursue, and all of it — every level, every bonus, every percentage point of herb distribution uniformity and flip accuracy and peel continuity — contributing absolutely nothing to the single number that the world used to define him.

  Level 1.

  The number sat in its blue box, serene and immovable, unchanged by the woodcutting and the peeling and the boiling and the cooking and the fire and the fire suppression and the sleeve management and the towel use and every other microscopic increment of competence that the universe had seen fit to catalogue and celebrate and then, in the same breath, declare irrelevant.

  He was a Level 1 Mage who could critically peel a potato.

  He was a Level 1 Mage with a four-out-of-ten plating score.

  He was a Level 1 Mage who had unlocked Flame Sear by accidentally committing arson in an inn kitchen, and whose flip accuracy had improved by five percent, and whose soap efficiency had improved by four percent, and whose wood grain analysis had improved by five percent, and whose bone detection had improved by seven percent, and none of it — none of it — moved the number.

  The number did not move.

  The number would never move.

  He picked up a cloth. He gripped the pot handle through the cloth. He drained the potatoes. He placed them on the plate beside the trout. He carried the plate to the bar.

  [Plating technique improved! Presentation score: 5/10.]

  "Five out of ten," he said, setting the plate down. "We're improving. At this rate, I'll achieve acceptable plating by Thursday. My class level will remain one. But the potatoes will be well-presented. And that, apparently, is what the universe considers progress."

  Ria appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her face was red and eyes were streaming. Her braid had come undone on one side. She was holding her stomach with both hands, and her breathing had the ragged, post-event quality of someone who had just survived something intense and was now in the recovery phase.

  She looked at the plate.

  Two trout — one charred, one perfect. Two potatoes — critically peeled, adequately boiled. A sprig of rosemary that Levin had placed on top as a garnish, partly because Ria would have insisted and partly because, at this point, he wanted to see what the notification system made of it.

  [Garnishing: Level 1!]

  [Aesthetic placement detected. Presentation score: 6/10.]

  "Six," Levin said. "The rosemary was worth a point."

  Ria sat down at the bar. She picked up a fork and looked at the plate. She looked at Levin. Her mouth trembled.

  "If you laugh again. I am going to Flame Sear this entire building."

  Ria did not laugh.

  She ate.

  The trout was, against all odds and despite the involvement of accidental fire, floor oil, a falling pot, involuntary magic, and a notification system that had opinions about everything, good.

  It was more than good.

  The skin was crisp. The flesh was flaky and moist. The seasoning — salt, pepper, thyme, and the inevitable rosemary — had penetrated the meat during cooking and produced a flavour that was clean and herbal, the kind of flavour that made you close your eyes and forget, briefly, that the person who had cooked it had also set the floor on fire.

  "This is really good," Ria said, through a mouthful of trout.

  "The universe gives it a six out of ten."

  "The universe is wrong. This is at least an eight."

  Levin ate.

  The trout was, he had to admit, acceptable.

  Which was the highest compliment he had ever paid to anything, and which he was now, apparently, capable of producing through a combination of Ria's instruction, his own reluctant effort, and a cooking skill that the universe had decided to track whether he wanted it tracked or not.

  [Cooking: Level 6!]

  [Meal completion bonus. Flavour profile: Herbal-Savory. Diner satisfaction detected.]

  He set his fork down.

  He looked at the notification.

  Diner satisfaction detected.

  The universe was tracking whether Ria enjoyed her food.

  The universe was, at this point, essentially running a restaurant review service inside his skull, and the reviewer was a sixteen-year-old turnip farmer who was eating trout that had been cooked by a Level 1 Mage on a stove that had recently been on fire, and the review was positive, and the experience points were flowing, and none of it — absolutely none of it — would ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, move the number in the blue box by so much as a fraction of a single digit.

  Levin picked up his tea.

  He took a sip.

  Acceptable.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed. Five hundred and fifty-one percent. The secondary harmonic pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Sleeve management still in his mind.

  He set the cup down.

  He looked at the scorched line on the kitchen floor, visible through the doorway. He would need to clean that before Marda saw it. Marda's reaction to a scorch mark on her kitchen floor would make the wasp colony look like a welcoming committee.

  He picked up the broom.

  [Sweeping: Level 1!]

  The broom pulled left.

  He corrected.

  [Sweeping: Level 2!]

  [Directional compensation detected. Sweep efficiency +3%.]

  Levin swept. The broom pulled left. He corrected. The notifications accumulated in his peripheral vision like a queue of polite, insistent strangers, each one waiting its turn to inform him that he had improved at something that did not matter, in a way that did not count, toward a goal that did not exist.

  He swept.

  From the bar, Ria watched him.

  Her fork was still in her hand and plate was empty. The medallion glinted on her satchel strap. Her face had settled into an expression that contained, beneath the residual redness and the tear tracks and the lingering tremors of the longest laugh of her life, something quieter.

  She was looking at him the way she had looked at the shield spell when it came back in the cave — with recognition, understanding, and the particular clarity of someone who had just seen something important and was filing it away in a place where it would keep.

  "Levin?" she said.

  "Hm."

  "The notifications. The skill levels. They really don't count toward your class level?"

  "They really don't."

  "So you can get better at everything — cooking, fighting, chopping wood, everything — and you'll still be Level 1?"

  "Forever and always. The universe's most decorated dishwasher."

  Ria was quiet for a moment.

  She set her fork down and turned the medallion over in her fingers — the bronze commendation, the one that said OPERATIONAL MERIT, the one she'd earned for sleeping beside a door.

  "That's stupid," she said.

  "Yes."

  "The system is stupid."

  "Profoundly."

  "You deserve better."

  Levin stopped sweeping.

  He looked at her.

  She was looking back at him with her chin up and her jaw set and her eyes bright, and the expression on her face was the one he'd seen on the south road — the granite certainty, the immovable decision, the look of someone who had weighed the evidence and reached a verdict and was not interested in appeals.

  "Maybe," he said.

  He resumed sweeping.

  [Sweeping: Level 4!]

  He ignored it.

  Outside, the sun was setting over Thornwall, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink and the particular deep purple that arrives at the boundary between day and night, when the world is neither one thing nor the other and everything looks, briefly, like it might be about to become something else entirely.

  The bell-ringer struck the evening bell.

  The goats settled on their hillside.

  The cat by the well curled into a circle and closed its eyes.

  The clouds floated in odd shapes.

  And in the warm, quiet place behind Levin's sternum, the reservoir hummed — five hundred and fifty-one percent, and growing, and patient, and now accompanied by a secondary frequency that tracked his every action and measured his every improvement and celebrated his every achievement and counted none of it, none of it, toward the single number that refused to change.

  Level 1.

  Skills: numerous.

  Presentation score: six out of ten.

  Sweep efficiency: plus three percent.

  … and Sleeve Management.

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