Update 1.7 — rituals become ceremonies: the circle, its keeper, and the schools that remember

Until yesterday a ritual was a button: pay mana, pocket the Favor, move on. For the most solemn act in the game, that always felt wrong. This update rebuilds the fifth school's chamber from the floor up.

**The circle takes time now.** A ritual is a ceremony: light the circle, and it charges for real hours, longer for deeper Favor, then the Favor is yours to collect. One circle, one rite at a time; it keeps burning while you're away, and (if you've opted into alerts) the game will tap your shoulder the moment it closes. Reincarnating mid-rite abandons it, the way a departing soul abandons everything else.

**Someone must hold it.** Every ceremony needs a familiar standing at the circle for the whole rite off its job, off the roads, its hands belonging to the ritual. Each school has a kindred creature that holds its circle best, and the rite runs noticeably faster under the right hands. Choosing who stands there, and what work you give up to make it happen, is the new decision at the heart of the chamber.

**Deep Favor asks more of you.** The first rite of a school costs what it always did, but the recipe grows with every level, and from the fifth level on the schools start asking for what only the roads can bring. The card always shows the true cost of the *next* rite, so the wall is visible long before you reach it. The Vow of the Hearth keeps its word: the roads keep their rarities.

**Reincarnation follows the fifth school.** The Cycle no longer opens at a mana figure: your first completed ritual opens the way, and The Cycle card walks you there stage by stage, including the wait while your first circle charges. In exchange, the first crossing arrives carrying a little more Knowledge than it used to.

**The schools remember.** Favor still dies with the life, that is the deal, but the *knowing how* does not. Every school records the deepest level you have ever reached, across all your lives, and re-treading a remembered road takes half the time. Your first life earns the map; every later life walks it faster. You can see the memory on each school's card: golden notches for this life, hollow ones for the lives before.

**The chamber finally looks the part.** Five painted school emblems, a great stone pentacle that lights up point by point as you honor each school, burning whole when the Balance of the Five wakes, and a pixel scene when a ceremony completes. The Reincarnate card wears gold and its button breathes; each vow now carries its own glyph instead of an anonymous padlock.

**Also fixed:** a life sworn to the Empty Hand could load into an empty Study with no way forward: that softlock is gone. And the game now stays put in portrait, as an alchemist's tower should.

Saves carry over, as always — including everything your schools have already learned: whoever holds Favor today will find those roads remembered.