"Your schedule said what I told it to say. The question is whether you know *why* I arranged it." Venn picked up a data crystal from his desk, turned it in his fingers - a habitual motion, the crystal worn smooth from repetition. "Every sophomore is assigned an independent study advisor. It's meant to supplement combat practicum with theoretical development - a recognition that fighting is only one dimension of what the System asks of us. Most students are assigned advisors within their class family. [Skirmishers] go to the Light Combat faculty. [Evokers] go to the Elemental Theory department. [Wardens] go to the Defensive Doctrine group. Logical. Efficient. The right expert for the right student."

  "And I got you."

  "You got me." Venn set the crystal down. "Because there is no [Nomad] faculty. There is no Nomadic Studies department. There is no expert, Mr. Miller, because there is no one at this institution - or, to my knowledge, at any institution on this continent - who currently holds your class or has held it within living memory. You are, in the academic sense, uncategorizable."

  The word landed harder than it should have. Jace kept his face still.

  "So the coordinator's office sent your file to general advisory, and general advisory sent it to the Dean's office, and the Dean's office sent it to me." Venn's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes - a glint, a warmth, a private amusement - shifted. "Because I am where uncategorizable things go. I have been teaching at Ironhold for thirty-one years, and in that time, I have been the advisor of last resort for every student whose class didn't fit the taxonomy. [Tinkerers]. [Drifters]. [Gleaner]. A young woman who Awakened as a [Fool], which is a real class and not, as she feared, the System's editorial commentary."

  "What happened to her?"

  "She's a Rare-tier [Jester] now, serving in Queen Isolde's court in Silverhaven. Does quite well. Unnerves diplomats, which is the point." Venn folded his hands on the desk. "My role, Mr. Miller, is not to teach you how to be a [Nomad]. I cannot teach you that because I don't know what a [Nomad] becomes. What I can do is help you ask the right questions. In my experience, the right question is worth considerably more than the wrong answer."

  Jace studied the old man. There was something in the way Venn carried himself - the stillness, the precision of his words, the way his eyes moved - that didn't quite match "elderly academic buried in a basement." It reminded Jace of something he'd noticed on the mana-tram, watching high-tier adventurers. Not the same weight. Not that predatory gravity. But an adjacent quality - the sense of a person who knew exactly how much space they occupied in the world and had chosen to occupy less.

  "What's your class?" Jace asked.

  Venn smiled. It was a small smile - the kind that acknowledged the question without answering it. "Let's begin with yours. Tell me what you know about [Nomad]."

  "Normal-tier generalist class. No role assignment. [Wayfaring] trait allows cross-class skill acquisition at plus two hundred percent resource cost and minus fifty percent proficiency." Jace recited it flatly, the way you'd read a medical diagnosis. "Common assessment: lowest-tier drifter class, suited for non-combat roles. Travel, message running, odd jobs. Not viable for dungeon work, party composition, or professional advancement."

  "That's the registry entry," Venn said. "I asked what you know."

  "That's... all I know."

  "No, it isn't." Venn leaned forward. The reading spectacles caught the amber lamplight, the enchantment lenses flickering with subtle data. "You know something else. Something the registry doesn't say. You've felt it. In the two days since your Awakening, you've felt something about your class that doesn't match what you've been told. I can see it in the way you're sitting - you're angry, yes, and frightened, but you're also *curious*. Angry, frightened people who aren't curious have already quit. You haven't. Which means you've noticed something."

  Jace was quiet for a moment. The room's ambient mana was low - the sub-level sat beneath the academy's primary conduit grid - and in that relative stillness, his own internal channels felt more distinct. The open, branching, directionless network he'd explored in his dorm room last night.

  "It's not empty," he said slowly. "The class. Everyone talks about it like it's a blank space - like the System gave me nothing. But it's not nothing. It's..." He searched for the word. "Unstructured. There's no blueprint. No rails. The mana moves through me and it doesn't know where to go, so it goes everywhere. That's why everything costs more. It's not that the energy isn't there - it's that none of it is channeled."

  Venn said nothing. He watched Jace with the particular attention of a man hearing exactly what he expected to hear.

  "It's like - other classes have plumbing," Jace continued, the metaphor building as he spoke. "Pipes. The mana goes from here to there, defined path, clean delivery. I don't have pipes. I have... open ground. And water flows differently on open ground."

  "It does," Venn agreed. "Less efficiently. More wastefully. Slower to arrive." He paused. "And?"

  "And... it goes places pipes can't reach."

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  Silence. Venn leaned back. The chair creaked its familiar protest.

  "Tell me, Mr. Miller. When a plumber builds a house, what is the first thing he installs?"

  Jace blinked at the shift. "The... pipes?"

  "Before that."

  "The foundation?"

  "Before that."

  Jace thought. "I don't know. The plans? The blueprint?"

  "The blueprint." Venn nodded. "And what is a blueprint?"

  "A design. A map of what goes where."

  "A set of *constraints*." Venn held up one finger. "A blueprint says: the pipe goes here. Not there. Here. This diameter. This material. This route. Every decision in the blueprint is a limitation - a deliberate narrowing of possibility in service of efficiency. The plumber *chooses* to send water to the kitchen and not the attic because the kitchen is where water is useful. The attic gets nothing. That is the trade."

  "Okay..."

  "Now." Venn's finger moved, tracing a slow line through the dusty air. "What happens if you need water in the attic?"

  "You... add a pipe. Renovate. Run a new line."

  "Can you?"

  "If you have the resources. If the blueprint allows for modification. If the original design left room for-" Jace stopped.

  Venn waited.

  "If the blueprint didn't account for it," Jace said, "you'd have to tear into the walls. Reroute the entire system. Major work. Expensive. Maybe impossible, depending on the original construction."

  "Hmm." Venn picked up the data crystal again, turning it so the light caught its faceted surface. "And if there were no walls? No original construction? No blueprint at all? Just... open ground, as you put it. And you needed water in the attic?"

  "Then you'd just... send it there. No renovation needed. No walls to tear through."

  "At what cost?"

  "More water. More time. More waste on the way." Jace's pulse was picking up. "But you could *do* it. Because nothing is blocking the path."

  Venn set the crystal down with a soft click. "You asked me what I know about [Nomad]. Here is what I know: I know that the class registry describes it in terms of what it lacks. No specialization. No role. No efficiency. And every word of that description is accurate. It is also, in my professional opinion, the least interesting thing about the class."

  He stood. He was taller than Jace expected - the seated posture had compressed him, made him seem smaller, but standing, Venn had the long-limbed frame of someone who'd been physically capable before age had refined him. He moved to one of the bookshelves and ran his finger along the spines until he found what he was looking for - a thin, battered journal, water-stained and held together with twine.

  "The more interesting question," Venn continued, "is why the System creates it at all."

  He set the journal on the desk in front of Jace.

  "The System is not random. You know this - everyone knows this, even if they don't think about what it implies. When the System assigns a class, it does so based on the individual's attributes, aptitudes, and - this is the part the registry doesn't discuss - *potential trajectory*. A [Skirmisher] gets [Skirmisher] because their attributes align with light, fast, precise combat. The class isn't arbitrary. It's a *prediction*. The System looks at what you are and tells you what you could become."

  Jace looked at the journal. The cover was blank - no title, no author. Just aged leather and the faint residual hum of a preservation enchantment that had mostly failed.

  "So what does [Nomad] predict?"

  Venn's eyes met his. Quick and dark and very, very old. "That is the question, isn't it?"

  He didn't answer it. Jace waited, and Venn simply returned to his chair and sat down and let the silence hold.

  "You're not going to tell me," Jace said.

  "I'm not going to tell you something I don't know." Venn adjusted his spectacles. "What I will tell you is this: the System has been part of Earth for over three centuries. In that time, [Nomad] has appeared in the registry exactly two hundred and nine times. I've compiled every reference I could find. Most are footnotes - brief mentions in census records, adventurer logs, guild registries. Of those two hundred and nine, fewer than thirty progressed past Level 3. Fewer than ten reached a class evolution."

  "What happened to the ones who evolved?"

  "Some became [Vagabonds]. A few became [Wanderers]. One, in a journal from the early second century Post-Unveiling -" he tapped the battered book on the desk "- claimed to have evolved into something she called [Wayfinder], though the account is unverified and the individual disappeared from the record shortly after."

  "Disappeared how?"

  "Thoroughly." Venn's expression was neutral, but his voice carried a careful weight. "The pattern I've observed - and I want to be precise here, Mr. Miller, this is *pattern*, not proof - is that [Nomads] who evolve tend to become difficult to track. Whether by choice, by circumstance, or by something inherent to the class's progression, they move beyond the systems that would categorize them. Registries lose them. Guilds can't place them. They become, in the bureaucratic sense, invisible."

  The thought arrived with a cold edge, the way uncomfortable truths do - fully formed and refusing to leave. The System categorized everything. It was what the System *did*: sort, measure, assign, file. Every class was a category. Every role was a label. Every tier was a shelf. The entire architecture of post-Unveiling civilization was built on the assumption that the System could read a person and tell you what box they belonged in.

  *What happens when it finds something it can't categorize?*

  "You said the System predicts what someone could become," Jace said slowly. "If [Nomad] predicts someone who can't be categorized-"

  "Then perhaps the prediction is not a failure." Venn interlaced his fingers on the desk. "Perhaps it is very specific."