Ranks

Ranks are the mage power scale from one to six. The gap between adjacent ranks is absolute: a higher-ranked mage utterly outclasses a lower one. Mages rise in rank by eating magic stones—the cores of slain monsters.

But the stones carry poisonous miasma, so no more than one a day is safe. Rank six is nearly unreachable: in-game only one player besides Souji attained it, and in the real world Syril was long the sole rank-six mage.