He woke to a system notification.
The window was pale blue, the standard interface, but something about it flickered at the edges. The text was steady, but the border wavered, shifting between the familiar pale glow and a deeper, darker colour. The colour of the Record's older architecture. The two systems bleeding into each other, the way they had during his class conferral, during the formation field, during every significant moment when the old framework recognised what he was doing.
> **SKILL ACQUIRED: SHELL CREATION**
> Type: Active
> Rank: Unranked
> Source: Synthesis (Residual Hunger + Dimensional Residue Absorption)
> Effect: Upon the death of an Awakened by the bearer's hand, the bearer may extract and preserve the deceased's dimensional signature. The extract
