The first time Lio saw a man die for experience points, the crowd applauded.
Not because they liked death. People didn't, not really. They just liked order more.
The gallows stood in the middle of Quarry Square like it had grown there—black wood sunk into pale stone, a frame of beams and rope silhouetted against the morning haze. Above it hung the banner of the Ranking Gods, stitched with gold thread that glittered when the sun hit it. Nine rings, each nested inside the next.
Nine levels of divinity.
Nine tiers of society.
Lio kept his head down and his hands visible.
A Null didn't get to look too long at anything important.
He was squeezed among other quarry-workers, backs bent from hauling stone, clothes powdered white. The overseers had herded them into place at dawn with the blunt efficiency of people moving livestock. Around the square, the better-ranked citizens gathered behind rope lines, their boots clean, their collars bright.
They brought children.
A lesson, the priests called it.
Lio swallowed and tasted grit. His throat was always dry in the city. Dust lived everywhere—between teeth, under nails, in the folds of skin. It lived in the lungs of the Null and the low-ranked and made their coughs sound older than their years.
The condemned man stood on the platform. His wrists were bound with polished iron instead of rope. That meant he'd been someone once. Someone with rights.
He didn't look old. Not even thirty. His hair had been cut short, his jaw bruised purple. A placard hung from his neck, white board with black ink.
XP THIEF.
A priest in a white mantle raised both arms. Silence rippled outward. Even the children stopped whispering.
"The System is merciful," the priest declared, voice amplified by a small rune floating at his throat. "It rewards those who labor within their station. It lifts the worthy. It crowns the devoted."
Murmurs of agreement.
Lio's station, if you could call it that, was printed on a copper tag bolted to his collarbone when he was born.
NULL — LEVEL CAP: 10
He didn't remember the pain, but he remembered his mother crying the day the tag went in. He remembered the sound more than the sight: a thin, broken noise like cloth tearing.
Null children didn't inherit anything except the cap.
The priest continued. "But there are always those who would claw at what is not theirs. Those who seek to steal experience—steal divinity—from the righteous."
The condemned man lifted his head. His eyes swept the crowd like he was searching for a face he recognized.
Lio's chest tightened. He'd seen that look before on people about to be swallowed by the city. The look of someone realizing too late that it didn't matter how loud you screamed if the walls were built to keep your voice from traveling.
A second priest stepped forward carrying a crystal basin. Inside it swirled pale light, like fog trapped in glass.
Experience.
The priests handled it like holy water.
"This is the Tithe," the first priest said, turning so the basin caught the sun. The foggy light brightened. "A portion of all earned experience, returned to the gods who gifted the System. Returned so the world remains stable. Returned so the great barriers hold and the monsters beyond do not swallow us."
A chant began—soft at first, then stronger. Tithe. Tithe. Tithe.
Lio didn't chant. He moved his lips and made no sound. That was safer.
Behind him, Jessa—one of the older quarry women—pinched his sleeve. Her nails were cracked, dark with stone dust. "Don't stare," she whispered. "They'll mark you."
"I'm not," Lio lied.
He stared anyway, because the condemned man was watching them all like he might take someone with him.
A guard in bronze armor climbed the platform. His chest bore a silver insignia: a triangle within a ring.
Ranked.
The guard didn't look at the man as a person. He looked at him as a problem already solved.
"State your final confession," the priest commanded.
The man's throat worked. "I didn't steal," he rasped. "I mined. I cleared. I bled for it like everyone else."
The crowd made a disapproving sound, as though he'd refused to thank them for a gift.
"You took experience beyond your Rank allowance," the priest said. "You subverted the System."
"I leveled," the man said, and the desperation in his voice scraped across the square. "That's all. I leveled."
The priest smiled sadly, like a father disappointed in a child. "And what is leveling but climbing? And what is climbing without permission but theft?"
A few people laughed.
Lio's hands curled into fists inside his sleeves.
He thought of last winter, when his friend Mara had cut her hand open on a jagged stone and kept working because the overseer said the wound didn't qualify as a stoppage injury. She'd fainted from blood loss and woken up with a scar and a debt for the bandages.
Nulls didn't get healing skills unless they were loaned out by a higher Rank, and higher Ranks charged for everything.
The man on the platform inhaled, steadying himself. "You don't understand," he said, voice gaining strength. "The experience… it didn't go where it was supposed to. I watched it. I felt it. I earned it and—"
The guard tightened the noose.
The priest raised a hand again. "Enough."
Then, to the crowd, he proclaimed: "Let this be a reminder. Experience is not yours alone. It belongs to the world. It belongs to the gods. Those who hoard it endanger us all."
It belongs to the gods, Lio thought bitterly.
He'd never met a god. He'd never even met someone ranked high enough to stand near the temples without being chased off.
But he'd watched the city's towers grow taller every year. He'd watched the temples drink up stone and labor and coin while the Null districts sagged and rotted at the edges.
If the gods were so hungry, why did the people who served them always look so well-fed?
The priest nodded to the guard.
The trapdoor dropped.
The condemned man fell.
For a heartbeat, there was only rope snapping taut and the ugly sound of a body deciding it didn't belong to itself anymore.
Then the crystal basin in the second priest's hands flared.
Light spilled from the dead man—thin threads of pale silver that unraveled from his skin like smoke being pulled by a wind no one else could feel.
The experience drifted upward.
Not into the basin.
Not into the guard.
Up.
It rose past the platform, past the priests, past the golden banner, past the rooftops visible beyond the square.
It rose like it had a destination.
The crowd cheered.
Lio's stomach turned.
He'd seen people die in the quarry. Cave-ins happened. Rock dust clogged lungs. Overseers beat workers for slowing down. Death was common enough that grief had become a private thing, tucked away like contraband.
But this was different.
This was… organized.
Holy.
The silver threads continued their climb until the sun caught them and for an instant they looked like spider silk stretching to the sky.
Lio blinked hard, thinking it might be a trick of light.
It wasn't.
A cold prickle ran down his spine.
He'd felt experience before—tiny surges after a hard day, a faint warmth when he'd hit Level 2 by accident at thirteen, the System's hollow voice announcing it with no joy at all.
LEVEL UP!
NULL — LEVEL 2
REMAINING RIGHTS: NONE
He remembered the way the warmth had vanished almost immediately, leaving him emptier than before.
He'd assumed that was normal. That leveling was brief, that power was a spark that needed time to become fire.
Now, watching the dead man's experience peel away and float upward like an offering, Lio wondered if the emptiness hadn't been normal at all.
Jessa's nails dug into his sleeve again. "Stop," she hissed. "Stop looking."
Lio forced his gaze down, but the silver threads had already burned themselves into his mind.
The priest's voice rang across the square. "The Tithe is paid!"
The rune at his throat shimmered.
And for a fraction of a second—so fast Lio wasn't sure he'd truly seen it—another shimmer passed over the priest's eyes, like a thin film of light.
Like an interface.
Like a System window no one else could see.
Lio's heart kicked hard.
He'd never seen a System window outside of his own internal notifications.
His hands went clammy.
The crowd began to disperse, satisfied. The overseers started pushing the quarry-workers back toward the labor lanes.
As Lio stumbled with them, his copper tag itched against his skin, the edges of it sharp where it had been hammered in. A Null's collarbone was sacred ground to the state.
He pressed two fingers against the metal like he could stop it from claiming him.
A thought, dangerous and bright, rose in him.
If experience goes up…
Then where does it come from?
The System stayed silent as he walked.
But when Lio passed beneath the shadow of the banner, something inside him twitched—like a gear slipping out of place.
A faint whisper brushed his mind, too quiet to be a System announcement.
Not a voice.
A sensation.
A wrongness.
And then, without warning, a line of text flickered at the edge of his vision.
So quick it almost didn't exist.
…DESYNC DETECTED…
Lio's breath hitched.
He blinked.
The text was gone.
The copper tag on his collarbone burned like it had been heated.
And far above the square, beyond sight, the sky rumbled—low and distant—as if something enormous had shifted in its sleep.