Chapter 23: Appraisal
Jin went still.
’Now? The reward from yesterday?’
The familiar translucent panel materialized before him.
[ Delivering reward. ]
For a split second, nothing happened. Then another notification appeared.
[ You have acquired a new skill: Appraisal ]
The moment the words settled, warmth spread behind his eyes. It wasn’t painful, only strange - unlike anything he had felt before.
His vision blurred for an instant, then sharpened with startling clarity.
Colors seemed subtly richer, outlines crisper. It was like stepping from a pitch-black room into full daylight, his eyes straining to adjust to a world that had always been there but had never been fully visible.
The sensation vanished almost as quickly as it came, leaving only a faint tingle behind his eyelids.
Without hesitation, Jin opened the skill description.
« Appraisal »
[ Grants the bearer the ability to perceive the essential information of a target by focused observation. ]
[ Skill Grade: ★★★★★ ]
[ Skill Proficiency: F (0%) ]
[ Condition: Corrupted ]
Jin’s eyes stopped at the final line.
’...Corrupted.’
He read it again.
Of the entire panel, that was the one word that stood out - like a stain on clean cloth.
Everything else was straightforward. It was a five-star skill. The sort of ability entire kingdoms would bleed for, that nobles would spend fortunes chasing on nothing more than a rumor. Even the novel’s protagonist had possessed nothing remotely like it in the early volumes.
And from the description alone, Jin could already guess what it did.
Something priceless - carrying a flaw the system either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain.
Jin frowned.
’Either it’s damaged... or it’s dangerous.
’There was only one way to find out.
’Well. Let’s see what it does.’
He looked at Gus, focused, and thought, ’Appraise.’
The translucent panel unfolded before his eyes instantly.
[ Name: Gus ]
[ Age: 15 ]
[ Realm: None ]
[ Star Level: Unopened ]
[ Talent: ▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ ERROR: Value exceeds display parameters. ]
Jin’s breath caught.
’Exceeds display parameters?’
He tried again. The same black bars, sitting there and refusing to disclose a single thing.
’The reward yesterday failed because it couldn’t resolve his relevance value. And now this.’
Jin looked at Gus - the boy the novel had never once mentioned - dragging his wooden sword through a fourth repetition while Sir Gareth watched.
Something cold and thrilling walked up Jin’s spine.
’I have found a gem.’
The thought arrived with a rush of excitement he couldn’t quite keep down.
’Gus, what exactly are you?’
But there was a question he needed to answer before he let himself get carried away.
’Is the skill broken - or is it really Gus?’
He turned the skill on something else.
The knights were still at their drills. Jin fixed his eyes on Sir Gareth’s back and thought, ’Appraise.’
[ Name: Gareth Varus]
[ Age: ?? ]
[ Realm: ?? ]
[ Star Level: ?? ]
[ Talent: ?? ]
Jin blinked.
’Question marks.’
Not black bars, the way it had shown for Gus, but a wall of plain refusal.
He tried Harun.
[ Name: Harun Dunmar ]
[ Age: ?? ]
[ Realm: ?? ]
[ Star Level: ?? ]
[ Talent: ?? ]
He tried the other two knights who had accompanied him.
[ Name: Berrick ]
[ Age: ?? ]
[ Realm: ?? ]
[ Star Level: ?? ]
[ Talent: ?? ]
[ Name: Yohan ]
[ Age: ?? ]
[ Realm: ?? ]
[ Star Level: ?? ]
[ Talent: ?? ]
It was the same result every time.
So the skill wasn’t blindly broken. It had shown Gus’s fields and hidden the knights’, which meant there was a clear line somewhere between what he was allowed to see and what he wasn’t. A clear limit.
Jin wanted to know exactly where that line sat - so he did the obvious thing.
He began appraising everyone in reach. Knights going through forms, servants crossing the yard, Stablehand and cook and errand boy of House Cavel who wandered into view.
Most came back as walls of question marks.
But not all of them.
[ Name: Pell ]
[ Age: 34 ]
[ Realm: None ]
[ Star Level: Unopened ]
[ Talent: Common ]
It was a groom, crossing the yard with a feed bucket. Every field filled in, plain and complete. The skill worked on him perfectly.
’So the skill isn’t broken,’ Jin thought.
’The wall is something else.’
The likeliest answer was some restriction on whose information he was permitted to read - and that restriction was almost certainly tied to the one number the panel kept showing him.
His eyes went back to the skill description.
[ Skill Proficiency: F (0%) ]
Zero percent. Of course the keyhole was narrow, he had only just been handed the key.
And from every game he had ever played and every novel he had ever read, the way you widened a keyhole like this was no mystery at all.
You use it. Over and over, until the number climbs.
’And I already have the novel in my head.’ A slow smile started at the corner of his mouth. ’Pair that with a skill that reads people on sight... ’
Excited now, he swept his gaze across the yard and appraised every single person his eyes could land on - grooms, guards, a passing maid, a boy hauling water, the same knights all over again for good measure.
And, as he’d hoped, the notification came.
[ Skill Proficiency: F (0%) → F (1%) ]
’That’s the spirit.’
One percent. It was almost nothing. But it was also proof that the ceiling above the knights’ profiles was a door, not a wall - and doors could be walked through, given enough time.
Only one thing still nagged at him.
He didn’t understand why a skill this monstrous had come as the reward for something as small as freeing one servant boy. For what seemed like a minor quest.
He thought about the system glitches. The errors. The stutters and the corrupted lines and the strange, wrong ways the system had behaved since the day he’d arrived.
There were two conclusions he could come to.
’Either Gus’s talent is so heaven-defying that the system genuinely rates this fair payment for saving it...’
He remembered black bars. *Value exceeds display parameters.* A reward that had failed to be calculated at all.
’...or the system itself is broken.’
And, quietly, his instinct was leaning toward the second.
He turned the idea over once more, then set it down where it couldn’t trip him.
’But whichever it is - as long as I’m the one benefiting, I don’t care.’
Glitch or divine design, corrupted or perfectly intended, the distinction changed nothing that mattered today. What mattered was simpler, and Jin held onto it as he closed the panels and looked back at the boy in the frostbitten yard.
Right now, in a world stranger and colder than anything he’d been born to, the system was tilting the odds of his survival - and it was tilting them his way.
✦ ✦ ✦