The stillness in his room after the announcement of Iron Rank was not the same. Previously, silence had been an absence, full of the clanging of defeat and the hollow gnawing at the belly for the next meal. Now, it was the rich earth of potential. The applause from the forum had faded, the dazed faces of his enemies were just memories. Everything he had left was the new hard reality of his life and the System screen, its background now a residual, faintly churning matrix of wrought iron.
He sat on his back, the unadorned wood top of the desk looking like the control board of a spaceship. The early, desperate searches for survival—{Acknowledge Your Truth}, {The Foundation of Dignity}—now rested in his log as relics of the past, the keystone pieces of the fortress he was constructing. He ha
