Chapter 1012: Chapter 1012 - Taming Extreme Puzzles

The healers moved immediately to the affected area with the coordination of people who had been positioned for exactly this contingency, and Min slipped between them before anyone directed him there, that particular ability he had to be where things were happening before anyone specified that he should be there.

But this time he was genuinely useful.

The damage was small, superficial, and quickly treated.

Ren looked at the work he had done and the small spots of damage he had produced alongside it.

The tissue affected by the transitional mana sparks was what it was: destroyed in the most concrete sense, the combination of mana in unstable transition and organic material producing something that was neither one thing nor the other and functioned as neither.

A darkened, acrid mass that resembled something... not quite corruption, not identical to it, but close enough in the superficial appearance to make the comparison unavoidable. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

More accurately, it was the result of a mana process applied to material not designed to receive it: dark and lifeless, but at least without the additional components that made corrupted damage different in the way it interacted with organic tissue.

It was still deeply concerning.

But the skin around it could regenerate.

The healers could clear the damaged material and the living tissue surrounding it would fill the space over time with proper care.

The muscle too.

But not the organs... Nor the deeper nerve systems and mana pathways.

No, those systems didn’t have the capacity to reconstruct themselves from nothing once they were lost.

Each error deeper in the tissue was a loss of something Selphira wasn’t going to recover.

Every layer further from the surface was a layer where the margin of error was narrower and the cost of exhausting it was permanent. And the map extended inward through Selphira’s entire body, from the surface of her arm down through every system the crystallization had reached, all the way to the places where the processes she needed to stay alive were running at half capacity inside a structure that was holding them in stasis.

A puzzle where every wrong move made the remaining moves harder, and where some of the pieces couldn’t be replaced once broken.

Ren understood the scale of what he was looking at.

He looked at his own hands.

He hadn’t practiced on anything except theory. There was no functional equivalent of Selphira or Victor that he could have worked on before this moment, no version of this problem scaled down to something that would have given him the experience he needed without also being the real thing.

What he had in front of him wasn’t an academic exercise. It was a person who had stepped in front of a beam to protect people, and who had been running her body at half capacity for weeks because the crystallization that heroic decision had cost her was still there, holding her internal systems in compromised stasis while the rest of her waited...

Selphira’s hand landed on his shoulder.

Ren looked up.

"Relax," said Selphira. The voice had the additional effort of someone for whom speaking now required a process it hadn’t required before, but it was firm in the way Selphira was firm about the things she decided to be firm about.

"What you’re doing looks extremely complicated. It was before you started and it still is." A warm acknowledging smile. "But you’ve already produced miracles for all of us before." She held his gaze. "I trust you."

Ren took a moment.

Then he nodded.

"Thank you." Very quiet. Then, in the same register, with the tone of someone who knows what comes next is going to require something unpleasant for everyone in the room: "And I’m sorry for what’s coming..."

Selphira withdrew her hand from his shoulder and rested it on the bed.

"Ready." And then added with a daring smile. "And don’t be pulling your punches. I have a very high pain threshold from doing idiotic things like you."

♢♢♢♢

What followed were hours of intense focus and pressure.

Ren had understood the mechanism. What he hadn’t fully understood was the scale of the tangle beyond the surface, and the only way to understand that was to keep going and encounter it.

There was no shortcut through that understanding. You couldn’t see the entrance of a maze and navigate it perfectly, you had to walk it, feel where the turns were, learn which ways were dead ends.

He went slower. Much slower than at the beginning, because the speed he had used at the surface was no longer the correct speed here and the errors that incorrect speed produced were the kind that didn’t get repaired.

The margin that had existed at the outermost layer, the wider gap between what was recoverable and what wasn’t, had narrowed with every centimeter of depth, and narrow margins required slow, careful hands.

He tried different approaches to the same problem.

Some didn’t work and left the small patches of damage he now expected as the cost of learning, the price of practical knowledge that theoretical knowledge couldn’t fully replace.

Others worked better than expected and taught him something about the pattern that the failing approach hadn’t. Each error was information. He processed it and kept moving.

The shoulder recovered ground.

Not completely, and not with the cleanness Ren would have wanted. But the crystal in that zone gave way at enough points that when the healers evaluated the area at the end of that section, they had muscle and skin to work with as anchors where before there had been only translucent stone.

After three hours Ren was sweating.

He had the expression of someone who has found the correct rhythm of something and doesn’t want to break it even though the body is sending multiple notices simultaneously about the cost of maintaining that rhythm.

More than eighty-five percent of the work remained. But he could move faster now than in the first hour and he had no intention of stopping, he looked toward the fully crystallized arm and began to redirect his attention...

"The arm can wait," said Selphira, with the calm of someone who has run a calculation and arrived at a conclusion they want to present before the situation advances on its own. "Before you exhaust yourself on something less important." She paused. "What you need to learn isn’t in the arm."

Ren looked at her.

"Further in." Selphira held his gaze with the patience of someone who has made a decision for herself and doesn’t need to be convinced that it’s correct. "Minor damage in a non-critical zone won’t finish me. I’ve already been living with some of it for weeks and I’m still here." Another pause. "Try a little further in."