The world was a fun place or a dreadful place depending on how you looked at it.
Sun had concluded that both descriptions were accurate and that the tension between them was not a contradiction but a feature, the world was designed to be experienced differently by different people so that the same system could extract different things from each of them, and calling it fun or dreadful was just a way of describing which end of the extraction you were on.
He was thinking about this while sitting across from Frank at dinner.
Frank was eating with the specific focus of a man who had worked with his hands all day and was now having a conversation with his hands and his fork simultaneously. Sun watched him and thought about the experiment he had been running on his authority.
He had discovered something interesting.
The path to D rank for him was not what it was for other climbers.
Other climbers strengthened their authority through training and will shards and the slow accumulation of controlled practice. His authority ran on dark emotions. Which meant his most efficient path to advancement was producing dark emotions in the people around him. Fear. Anxiety. Jealousy. The specific despair of people who wanted something and could not reach it.
He could generate those things without anyone knowing he was generating them.
This would look bad to most people, he acknowledged internally, if they knew about it. But most people's objection to it would be a feeling rather than an argument. Feeling that something was wrong was not the same as it being wrong. The feeling was just the God of Desire's curse and the God of Shadows' curse operating simultaneously, the desire for things to be a certain way combined with the inability to acknowledge that the desire was doing the reasoning rather than any actual moral logic.
He decided to test this on Frank.
"Frank," he said.
Frank looked up. "What."
"I have a question."
"You always have a question."
"This one is hypothetical."
Frank set his fork down with the expression of a man who had learned that Sun's hypothetical questions were never actually hypothetical. "Go on."
Sun folded his hands on the table. "Suppose you were a criminal. A serious one. Someone who had done terrible things."
"Okay."
"But no one knew. Everyone treated you as a good person. You were respected. Trusted. You had everything you currently have plus the additional benefit of people thinking well of you."
Frank was quiet for a moment. "Where is this going."
"Now suppose the alternative," Sun continued. "You are innocent. You have done nothing wrong. But everyone believes you are that same criminal. You lose your work. Your reputation. Everyone you know treats you as though you are what they believe you to be."
Frank looked at him steadily. "You're asking which I would choose."
"Yes."
Frank picked up his fork again, considered it, put it back down. "That's a horrible question."
"It is a clarifying one."
"It's designed to make me say I'd rather be secretly terrible than publicly innocent."
Sun tilted his head. "Is it designed to make you say that, or does it reveal that you would say that."
Frank opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Sun continued, "The question isolates what humans actually value from what they say they value. Most people will choose the version where they are secretly guilty but publicly good. Which means what they are protecting is not their goodness. It is the social recognition of their goodness. The feeling of being seen as good. Which means the morality was never about the act. It was about the feeling the act produced."
Frank was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "That's a very dark way to think about people."
"It is an accurate way."
"Accurate and dark aren't mutually exclusive."
Sun considered this. "No. They are not."
Frank leaned back in his chair. "You know, most five year olds ask questions like why is the sky that color. Not which version of moral compromise would you prefer."
"The sky question has a straightforward answer. This one is more instructive."
Frank picked up his fork again and ate for a moment in silence. Then, "You're not wrong about the question. I don't love that you're not wrong."
"The discomfort is informative," Sun said.
"I know that's supposed to make me feel better but it doesn't."
Sun nodded once. "It is not supposed to make you feel better. It is supposed to make you think more clearly."
Frank looked at him with the specific expression he reserved for moments when Sun said something that landed correctly and uncomfortably simultaneously. "You have the warmth of a tax collector, you know that."
"I do not know what that means but I will file it."
Frank snorted quietly and returned to his food.
Sun watched him for a moment.
He had been thinking about the academy again. He would have to wait until he was fifteen before he could enroll, which was a significant span of time measured in mortal years, though considerably less significant measured in the framework of his previous existence. During that time he intended to continue the mental training, continue accumulating will shards where possible, continue the investigation into the Order through whatever information channels were available to him on this floor.
And continue observing Frank.
Not because Frank was strategically useful, though he was, but because Frank was one of the few people Sun had encountered whose behavior consistently produced data that did not fit the models Sun had built. Frank did things that the desire curse and the shadows curse and the knowledge curse could not fully account for. He made choices that cost him something without the guarantee of social recognition that usually drove costly choices. He refilled cups without being asked. He said but you are when Sun said his parents were no longer here. He made terrible jokes about enhanced digestion and felt genuinely accomplished when Sun's expression shifted by a fraction.
That was not the desire curse.
That was something else.
Sun had not yet determined what to call it.
He was working on it.
Frank glanced up. "You're staring again."
"I am observing."
"Same thing."
"Functionally different."
Frank shook his head but there was something around his eyes that was not quite a smile and not quite something else but lived in the space between them.
Sun filed it.
He had a great deal to observe.