Chapter 1009: Chapter 1009 - Taming Crystals - 2

Today was the day...

The Mantis reached Silver with the same quiet reliability that Ren’s secondary beasts tended to show when they weren’t in the middle of a crisis: no fanfare, just the solidity of something that had been accumulating what it needed for exactly as long as it needed to.

It was that easy.

Cultivating any of the three secondary beasts was nothing compared to the daily cost, pain and complexity of the process his mushroom required, a price he had long since built into his routine without treating it as a burden.

He was perfectly used to it so any other process even felt like a massage.

For today’s first massage last requirement he absorbed a costly speed rune toward that end.

The 50% speed and attack increases were the Mantis’s primary yields and they installed into the system with the naturalness of something that had been waiting there already, latent in the bond, needing only the node to give them a channel.

The Wolverine reached Gold 1 fifteen minutes later.

The neutral elemental rune, more expensive and rare, acquired at considerable cost, integrated even easier, with a cleanness Ren hadn’t expected. As though the material had been waiting for Ren’s elemental system to reach exactly this level of maturity to demonstrate what it was capable of.

His elemental control was too big.

The channels responded without the resistance they had carried for the last week, the small damage that had been present in most of his external system finally gone.

Only the nodes around his arms were still a bit painful to use.

But he was, again, very used to pain, and that 75% extra control was a great help now that he would need to treat Selphira.

Fifty percent additional elemental control from the Wolverine.

Twenty-five percent from the Mantis.

These numbers were good on their own. But the more significant consequence wasn’t the raw percentage increase.

The Wolverine and the Hydra now shared the same rank.

The synergy available when two beasts of equal rank fused was categorically different from the synergy possible across a gap, more stable, the resonance between them deeper, the combined output multiplying the full amounts.

He was ready.

Or as ready as he was going to be for something he had never done before... at least for the next hundred days, a little over three months, until the mushroom reached Gold 2 and what came after that became available.

The work he was about to begin would have to be enough until then.

He intended it to be enough.

♢♢♢♢

Ren exhaled.

Before this day arrived, he had needed to survive the week.

Specifically, he had needed to survive each morning since Luna opened her eyes, the morning being the point at which he consistently rediscovered that he still hadn’t figured out how to begin the conversation he had wanted to have for several days now.

It wasn’t a technical problem.

It was the kind of problem that turned out to be harder than most of the technical problems he had faced over the last several months, which was a category of difficulty he had not expected to find himself in and which he found more frustrating precisely because there was no reference information he could study to resolve it.

There had been a promise... A date.

An intimate thing that had been said and acknowledged, and Luna knew it, and he knew it, and the perceptive people in the building probably knew it too, which was its own extra layer of complication on top of everything else.

Liora had tried to help first, because Liora noticed things with emotional temperature before anyone had finished organizing them into words, that was simply how she was wired, and she had been that way since before Ren had known her well enough to recognize it. But she had also noticed the way Ren looked toward Selphira’s room every time he passed the corridor, with the particular tension of someone who wanted to do something and had too many things already in motion to do it well.

So she had reached the correct conclusion: Ren was not going to be present the way he needed to be present in a conversation with Luna while Selphira and Victor were in their current state and he felt the pull of the obligation he had assigned himself every time he passed their doors.

Larissa had arrived at the same conclusion through a different route, a little later, and they had ended up in the same place.

Together they had made a decision that, if they had consulted Ren about it, he probably would have appreciated it in the abstract and then worried and argued about in the specifics. Which was why they didn’t consult him.

The right day for Luna wasn’t now. It was the day after Ren made the first real practical advance in the reversal process, after he had demonstrated to himself that the theory worked outside of his own head, when the weight of his self-assigned obligation was one degree lighter than it was in this moment.

For that day he would be less focused on what he owed and more focused on what he wanted to say, which was a distinction that mattered more than he had probably understood himself.

Luna had been entirely in agreement when they proposed it, and had been noticeably more relaxed for the rest of the week. Which said everything that needed to be said about how worried she was about the situation.

Liora and Larissa were not less nervous for what the day implied, both the procedure itself and what would follow between Ren and Luna. There were things neither of them was going to be able to feel nothing about when the moment came, things with their own weights and their own unanswered questions still pending. That was true and they both knew it.

But that was how much they cared about Luna. How much they cared about Selphira and Victor. Enough to make room for things to be difficult for them individually, if that was what the things needed in order to go well for the people they loved.