Examination confirms what the operator himself reported at intake: the crystalline signs of Oripathy are externally evident, and blood work finds Originium granules in circulation. The operator is confirmed infected with Oripathy.
Crystallized areas are present across the upper back, concentrated where the wing musculature anchors to the frame, with a secondary patch along the left inner forearm surrounding the investiture scar. The distribution follows the paths his arts travel hardest.
The infection is long-standing, on the order of decades. Progression has been unusually slow relative to its duration, and the current readings have held stable since intake under a Rhodes Island treatment plan, which is the first course of actual treatment this patient has ever received.
Germain has carried Oripathy for the greater part of his service, and he has always known it. Infection at this density does not hide. The crystalline signs are present and were present long before Rhodes Island ever examined him.
The Order that raised him refused to name it. Where a medical file would record a density reading, his records carried only a line of doctrine. He was never treated for the disease he carried, only told what he carried could not touch one of his standing.
His reinforcement arts run through infected tissue; there is no route around it, because the tissue is the instrument. Ordinary use shows low impact on the infection. The exception is sustained overdraw of the kind described in his operations file, the outnumbered state and the collapse that ends it: assimilation markers run elevated for days after each collapse. Medical's position is on record. Every collapse is paid for twice, once on the field and once in these readings.
The same interaction cuts the other way. The holy charge of his arts is dissolved in his tissues at all times and is quietly hostile to crystallization; assimilation in this patient runs slower than his history would predict. Compounding it, the regimen his former order imposed on him, blood drawn in fixed measure, consecrated, and returned to circulation on a fixed calendar for decades, amounts to a crude cycling therapy that no one ever called by its name. The institution that refused to log his infection was, unknowingly, treating it. The current treatment plan is the first this patient has received on purpose.