The change in the System wasn't announced with fanfare. There were no glitching notifications, no error messages. It was subtler. More insidious.
It began on a Thursday morning, during the most mundane of routines: the CYAP morning health check. Teacher Milly went down the line of children, asking each one how they'd slept, if they'd eaten breakfast, if they were feeling "sparkly and bright."
When she reached Astraea, the System gave its usual, useless prompt.
[Daily quest available: 'Morning check-in!']
[Objective: Share one positive thing about your morning!]
[Reward: 'Bright starter' buff, +2 to Social skills]
[World-green connection: 0.5%]
Astraea froze, her practiced answer ("I had toast with honey") dying on her lips. Her eyes scanned the notification again. There, appended at the bottom like an afterthought, in the same cheerful font but utterly alien in content:
World-green connection: 0.5%
She blinked. The words meant nothing in the context of Luminous Child development, sparkle safety, or inner glow metrics. World-green connection. It sounded like an environmental slogan, a corporate sustainability initiative. Not a System parameter.
Her blood ran cold, then hot. The System was accessing something. Not its human databases. Something deeper, older, or… broader. A connection was being measured, and it was being measured in draconic concepts.
"Astraea? Honey?" Milly's voice cut through her shock. "One positive thing?"
"The… the sunlight through my window was warm," Astraea managed, her ancient mind reeling even as her child-voice functioned on autopilot. "It made patterns on the floor."
"Lovely! See, class? Astraea finds beauty in everyday things!"
The notification faded. But the new line didn't vanish from her awareness. It lingered in her mind, a cryptic percentage, a silent alarm.
She watched for it all day, a new layer of tension added to the existing strains of glamour and growth.
During lunch, as she ate the carrot sticks Mrs. Evans had packed (human nutrition, dragon indifference), another prompt appeared.
[Remember to eat your veggies for growing power!]
[World-green connection: 0.5%]
It was there. Attached to a nutrition reminder. Persistent.
When Leo, during free study, correctly explained to Mia why her water orbs evaporated faster in direct sunlight ("It's about surface area and energy transfer, not magic!"), Astraea received a social achievement.
[Passive learning observed! You're learning from your peers!]
[Reward: +2 to Intelligence]
[World-green connection: 0.5%]
The percentage didn't change. Didn't increase. It was a baseline. A new axis on her status that the System was now tracking, silently, for reasons it did not explain. A tether to something it shouldn't know how to measure.
That evening, as she prepared for bed, a new kind of notification appeared. It wasn't a quest or achievement. It was formatted differently—plainer text, no sparkle icons, no exuberant punctuation. It looked like an internal memo that had slipped into her user interface.
[Diagnostic update:]
[User development pathways demonstrate… atypical harmony with ambient environmental mana. Mana absorption efficiency: 99.8%. Waste production: 0.02%. Biological integration: Seamless.]
[Comparative analysis: Standard human Awakened integration: 12-45% efficiency. Waste production: 55-88%. Biological integration: Forced, with side effects (headaches, fatigue, mana burn).]
[Discrepancy noted.]
[World-green connection: 0.5%]
[Hypothesis: User may possess latent affinity for environmental symbiosis. Further observation required.]
[Note: This is a good thing! Harmony with the world helps everyone sparkle!]
The message was an earthquake wrapped in cheerful packaging. The System had finally, truly noticed the fundamental difference in her nature. Not the growth rate, not the memories, not the scales. But the very way she interacted with magic. Humans forced mana, fighting their own biology to wield it, creating waste and friction. Dragons were mana, in harmony with it, absorbing it with the effortless perfection of a leaf absorbing sunlight.
The System had the data—99.8% efficiency was so far beyond human possibility it was laughable—but its conclusion was still couched in harmless, New Age terminology. "Environmental symbiosis." Not "cosmic entity." Not "dragon."
But the label… World-green connection. That was the crack. That was the System, in its vast, shallow ocean of human-centric data, brushing against a database it wasn't meant to access for a Tier 0 Luminous Child. A database that contained words for what she was. Concepts from a civilization that had watched stars die.
This was evolution. Not a glitch, not an error. An adaptation. The System was learning. Slowly, incompletely, and through a lens of overwhelming positivity and human bias, but it was learning something. It was sensing the shape of her truth, even as it tried to fit that shape into a box labeled "special child."
She checked her status screen, mentally calling for it as she lay in bed. The usual list appeared in her mind's eye: Name, Age (~10), Classification (Luminous Child, Tier 0), Stats (Vitality, Intelligence, etc.). But at the very bottom, in small, faint gray text as if unsure of its own right to be there, was the new line.
World-green connection: 0.5%
A seed. A single, quiet data point of truth in a field of cheerful, catastrophic lies. The first hint of the System's potential to see her—not as it wanted her to be, but as she was.
What would happen at 1%? 5%? 50%? Would the "Environmental Symbiosis" hypothesis shatter against the accumulating data of scales, of wings, of memories older than nations? Would the cheerful notifications give way to confused alerts, then to urgent errors?
Astraea felt a strange, complex emotion unfurl in her chest. Not fear, though that was present—a low, steady hum. Not excitement, exactly. It was… anticipation. The kind of deep, patient anticipation you feel when, after a very long journey through trackless wastes, you see the first, faint, undeniable landmark of home on the horizon. It was still far away. The path was uncertain. But the landmark was real. It existed. The System contained, within itself, the concept of what she was.
She rose and measured her height, the physical ritual now paired with checking this new, mysterious metric.
0.52 cm cumulative.
Her body grew, millimeter by hard-won millimeter. The System evolved, percentage point by cryptic percentage point. The connection deepened, though she didn't yet know to what.
She looked at her reflection in the dark window—a small silhouette with ancient eyes, with wings forming beneath a shell of illusion, with a star-scale hidden on her arm, and now, with a System that had begun, ever so slightly, to whisper a truer name in the only language it knew.
World-green.
It wasn't "Void Dragon." It wasn't "Chronologically Ancient." It wasn't even "Star-Sired."
But it wasn't "Luminous Child" either.
It was a beginning. A recognition. A single, faint line of text in the vast scroll of her long, long wait.
Tomorrow: more data. The day after: perhaps a higher percentage. The great misunderstanding, the foundation of her current existence, had just taken its first, tiny, measurable step toward becoming a great recognition.