Chapter 1010: Chapter 1010 - Taming Crystals - 3

Ren knew nothing of these early conversations between the girls.

What he knew later was that when he finally gathered himself to say something to Luna about the promised date, the thing they had both been circling around with increasing obvious awareness... Larissa and Liora had interrupted and asked him to wait until the day after treating Selphira and Victor. He had been confused...

But Luna had exhaled with visible relief and nodded.

Ren had looked at all three of them.

All three of them had produced exactly the same exaggerated smile.

Ren had decided it was better not to press the matter and that the moment would arrive when it arrived.

Maybe it was better... Let future Ren take care of it, as always with this ’too complex’ line of business.

♢♢♢♢

Victor had insisted that Selphira be treated first.

There had been no significant debate about this. Victor had simply stated it with the same flat certainty he used when he had decided something and would wait indefinitely for everyone else to catch up, and nobody in the room had found a counter-argument they believed could change his stubborn mind.

Selphira’s room was large, not by preference but by operational necessity. The dozen healers maintaining her stability needed room to work. The mana system and vitality monitoring artifacts installed in the days immediately after the battle required specific positions relative to each other and to the bed.

The protocol developed for managing the pain of a person whose internal organs were functioning at approximately half capacity while the rest of her body remained partially crystallized needed margin to respond to changes that were constant and required the same constant adjustment. The room had been organized around all of these requirements simultaneously, and the result was functional rather than comfortable.

Despite all of it, Selphira looked calm.

Not the calm of someone who didn’t understand what was happening to them. The calm of someone who had processed it, reached an understanding with it, and decided that the understanding was sufficient and that the situation wasn’t worth putting a difficult face on.

The Selphira who had waited this week was recognizably the same Selphira who had stood in the ruins with the crystallization advancing up her arm and declined to stop pushing because Victor was behind her and that was simply how it was.

This wasn’t Ren’s first visit since waking. They had spoken three times in the last week, at different points in the day and with different levels of clarity depending on where Selphira was in the treatment cycle, but the constant had been the same across all three: when Ren explained what he had observed and what he intended to attempt, she listened with the attention of someone evaluating a technical analysis, and at the end she said, with the calm of someone who didn’t have much to lose by betting on something that wasn’t guaranteed:

"When you’re ready."

Today Ren was the first visit of the morning.

Behind him, and now arranged in the margins of the room just like the slightly ashamed people they were, many arranged themselves since they were determined to be present and were, at least, trying to take up the minimum space necessary.

They were his parents, who had been keeping themselves extra quiet because they still couldn’t quite process where they were or the scale of what their son had become in a span of time that should not have been sufficient for it.

Larissa, Liora and Luna too. Julius and Arturo, who had recovered thanks to Ren using an ’easier’ procedure like the one for Zhao, were there too.

They had been exposed for much less time so the crystals were small and not that wide spread to the point of rendering their system useless.

It was hard to get fitting materials since at Gold rank there weren’t many options but Ren had gotten creative making the silver tentacles stronger with rune control and some enhancing materials.

After the procedure and many healers helping they went back to work with the efficiency of people who had things to do and bodies that complained but understood the urgency.

Min, Taro and Liu too. Wei with the notebook where he recorded observations about Ren that he could access the moment he needed them, present the way he was always present at moments that might produce something worth noting.

Several more people beyond them, forming a procession that was not efficient and was definitely obstructive even in the wider corridors of the castle’s recovery wing, and that was going to remain exactly that way because the people in it had no intention of being elsewhere.

The usual group, and several healers.

Ren approached the bed.

Selphira looked at him with the expression of someone who had already made the decision that needed to be made and was simply waiting for the process to begin.

"Ready?"

Ren nodded.

There was nothing more useful to say than the nod, so he didn’t say anything. He closed his eyes for a moment to check the state of his own system, the bonds, the channels, the new capacity the combined advancement had given him, the way his elemental perception had shifted in the week of practice since the nodes opened.

Then he opened his eyes with the focused quality of attention he had when something required exactly that.

He extended his hands toward the point of connection with the skin near the collarbone with the crystallized arm.

Not to affect it yet. To read first, with the sensitivity the new advancements had given him, a range and clarity of mana perception that the week of practice had continued to develop in ways he was still mapping.

The theoretical understanding was one thing. The felt sense of what the patterns actually looked like from inside a real system, in a real person, was something he had needed the time to develop.

The pattern in the crystal was exactly what he had seen in the ceremony hall.

Geometric. Forms that held information, the shape of what the mana had been in its fluid state, preserved in the molecular structure the way a mold preserved the shape of what had been poured into it.

The system order of Selphira’s two Gold-tier beasts was visible in the structure if you knew how to read it, and Ren had spent enough time with his main beast memorizing beasts systems, including Selphira’s.

Now was the moment to use that knowledge of the beasts to decode what was encoded in the crystal. To read the map that the crystallization had been preserving without knowing it was a map. Deducing work.

The room was completely silent.

Ren began.