Celestine Academy was exactly how he remembered it.
It was grand and intimidating. The kind of architecture that was clearly designed to make students feel small on purpose.
Tall spires of pale stone caught the morning light, banners bearing the academy crest hung between towers, and somewhere beyond the main gate he could already hear the ambient noise of a few hundred students moving between buildings.
Ethan walked through the gate with his hands in his pockets.
He had spent the better part of last night sitting against one of the silver-barked trees outside the gate, thinking. Not panicking. Just thinking.
The facts were simple enough.
He was inside Ethereal Covenant. The game was real, or at least real enough that the grass had been cold and the ground had been hard and he had woken up with a stiff neck. His system panel worked. His stats were those of a fresh Level 1 with no class assigned yet.
And the Awakening Ceremony was today.
That last part he was certain of. In the game, new students arrived, settled in, and attended the ceremony on the first morning. The Covenant Stone read your affinity and assigned your class. No exceptions.
Which meant whatever he was going to become, he had find out in the next few hours.
He joined the stream of students filtering toward the main hall, keeping pace without drawing attention. Around him, conversations floated past in fragments — someone nervous about getting a low-tier class, someone else loudly confident they would awaken as a Blade Saint. A pair of girls near the front were quietly placing bets on each other's results.
Ethan said nothing. He was good at that.
The main hall was enormous, lit by floating mana crystals that cast everything in a pale blue-white glow. At the far end stood the Covenant Stone which was a slab of dark granite about chest height, etched with inscriptions so old the language wasn't used anymore.
A professor in formal academy robes stood beside it with a register, calling names in alphabetical order.
Students approached one by one, pressed their palm flat against the stone, and waited. The stone would glow, the system would chime, and a class notification would appear above their head for the entire hall to see.
Most results were predictable. [Warrior]. [Mage]. [Scout]. [Healer]. The occasional Elementalist got a murmur of approval from the crowd.
Ethan watched and waited.
By the time they reached the C's he had counted three Warriors, four Mages, two Scouts, a Healer, and one Elementalist who looked like he was about to cry from relief. Solid spread. Nothing unusual.
"Ethan Croft."
He stepped forward.
The hall was big enough that his footsteps didn't echo but it felt like they did. He approached the Covenant Stone, looked at it for a moment and pressed his palm flat against the surface.
It was cold.
Then it wasn't.
A warmth spread from the stone into his palm, up his arm, across his chest. It was not unpleasant. More like the feeling of a system loading, if a system could have a physical sensation. The inscriptions on the surface flickered with faint light.
Then the stone went dark.
A beat of silence passed.
Then another.
The professor frowned at his register.
Above Ethan's head, a notification finally appeared.
[Class Assigned: Summoner]
[Subclass: Doll Maker]
The hall was quiet for exactly one second.
Then someone laughed.
It wasn't cruel exactly it was more involuntary, the kind of laugh that escapes before manners can catch it. But once one person started, the dam broke. Scattered laughter rippled through the crowd, a few poorly concealed smiles, a handful of whispered exchanges behind hands.
[Doll Maker.]
Ethan lowered his hand from the stone. His expression was completely neutral.
"Rough luck," the boy behind him muttered, not unkindly.
Ethan didn't respond. He stepped aside and let the next student approach the stone, and opened his system panel with a quiet thought.
```
ETHEREAL COVENANT
─────────────────
Name : Ethan Croft
Age : 18
Level : 1
Class : Summoner
Subclass : Doll Maker
─────────────────
Status : ENROLLED
Location : Celestine Academy
```
He scrolled to the subclass description.
[Doll Maker — A rare subclass under the Summoner tree. Rather than contracting with existing entities, the Doll Maker possesses the ability to construct summoned beings from base materials. Current abilities: LOCKED. Unlock conditions: ???]
[Locked.]
Again.
He closed the panel and found a spot along the wall to lean against while the rest of the ceremony continued.
Across the hall a few students still glanced his way, they gave him the brief, secondhand embarrassment kind of glance people gave when someone got a bad result.
He ignored them.
[Doll Maker.] In three hundred hours of playing Ethereal Covenant he had never once seen this class appear. Not in any playthrough, any guide, any tier list discussion on the forums. It wasn't that it was ranked low, it simply didn't exist in any record he had ever come across.
Which meant one of two things.
Either it was so rare and so buried that no player had ever triggered it before.
Or it had been deliberately hidden.
He looked across the hall at the Covenant Stone, still glowing faintly from the last student's reading.
(Internal: Abilities locked. Unlock conditions unknown. Which means the game isn't going to tell me anything yet — I have to find out myself.)
His expression didn't change.
Around him the laughter had already moved on to the next result, and the next. Nobody was looking at him anymore.
That was fine.
They would eventually.