Understanding Selphira's system was like reading a language you knew but in a handwriting you had never seen.

The forms through which mana circulated in the turtle and serpent systems were there, recognizable once you knew what to look for, present in the structure the way words were present in an unfamiliar script if you already understood the grammar. But the way the crystallization had incorporated them wasn't superposition. It wasn't a layer on top... It was intimate integration, the crystallization having preserved the mana patterns of Selphira's beasts the way a cast preserved the shape of what had been poured into it. Yet it was translated using those ancient geometries, the same patterns of the runes Ren had been studying, but having translated the routing into the solid state by rotating each vector fractionally, just the precise amount needed for each piece to lock into the structure it now formed.

Like using vectors as letters, then freezing each letter and rotating it a fraction of a degree in the direction that made the whole thing click together.

Simple in description. Exponentially complex in execution.

Ren spent considerable time just reading enough to understand a small percentage of the complete 3D map, not because he didn't understand how the rest of it worked in principle, but because grasping the actual scale of the connections, the way each section related to every adjacent section and to every non-adjacent section it happened to be geometrically linked to, required more than knowing the principle. It required holding the whole thing in attention simultaneously, which was a different kind of problem.

What he had in front of him was a three-dimensional puzzle assembled organically, following what appeared to be a law of mana that resembled relative parsimony.

Like if at a certain density, the magical energy rotated the components of a system until they fit, each piece affecting adjacent pieces in ways that depended on the specific position of the pieces further out. So the order of disassembly mattered the same way order always mattered when undoing a knot: moving the wrong thing at the wrong moment didn't loosen it. It pulled it tighter.

The mechanism sounded straightforward. Rotate the runes back. Reverse the lock in the order it had been locked.

The difficult part was knowing where to begin and how to continue from there without the accumulated state of everything already moved affecting the next move in ways that couldn't be calculated… Not without reading what was there first.

Ren chose the first entry point with the same methodology he and Wei would now have used for any process requiring precision: finding the place where the margin for error was largest and the cost of being wrong was smallest. The surface of the skin away from the neck, closer to the chest. The outermost layers where the crystal was thinnest and the connections to the surrounding tissue hadn't had time to fuse as deeply as they had further in.

He began rotating the first pieces.

The first micro-rune gave with the ease of something that had been waiting for the correct movement to be free again, its energy returning to the ethereal without resistance, the mana system and the tissue and the nerves beneath it came back to live just as they had been before, unchanged, the reversal clean.

The second, the same.

The third found a little more resistance but resolved. A small section of crystallized tissue on the surface of the shoulder began to give, the geometry shifting from solid crystal back toward tissue, blood and systems moving the ethereal energy.

The crystal freed its captive parts, losing the perfect translucency that had characterized it.

Almost half a square centimeter recovered in a few minutes and getting faster, easier.

Everyone in the room held their breath at what they were watching. Those with enough mana sensitivity to perceive at that scale watched without speaking, they were looking at dozens of micrometric rotations and rune-adjustments moving in the sequence the young tamer directed them, the kind of work that shouldn't have been possible to hold in a single mind at once and that he was holding.

The crystal was giving. The molecules returning to living material, from rigid geometry toward something more fluid, the crystal at that point dissolving back into what it had been before the process claimed it.

Then Ren moved to the adjacent section.

The adjacent section wasn't as thin, and it was part of a more complex network than the surface he had been working on.

The 'sparks of mana', so to speak, arrived before he could anticipate them.

The wrong movement at a connected point in the crystal had released tension that the surrounding system had been holding in equilibrium, and that tension sought the only redistribution available when the system no longer contained it the same way. Mana energy got liberated in chaotic states of transition, without the structure that had been organizing it, acting on the organic tissue, surrounding it.

The skin and muscle in the area around Ren's error was destroyed.

Ground and burned and altered… a result of mana in transition meeting organic material that hadn't been built to receive it.

A small irregular sound in her breathing.

Very small. Almost inaudible.

The sound a person made from pain, but not just any pain, and not just any person. The sound had came from someone who had spent days deciding not to make any sound at all and had been managing it successfully until the specific terrible sensation that followed that mana in chaotic transition that affected not only the tissue but the system underneath it.

The crystallization didn't cause pain. But errors in reversing it apparently did, and they came with the level of something that had been held back and returned with interest. With vengeance.

Selphira tried to cover it. It was already too late.

Ren had heard it.

He lowered his hands with a worried look.

This was going to be harder than expected.