Chapter 1013: Chapter 1013 - Taming Insanely Extreme Puzzles

Ren looked at Selphira’s crystallized arm...

Then he observed toward her torso, using the enhanced perception his beasts now gave him at their current rank, and assessed what was in the lower zone Selphira was indicating.

It was a big chunk of crystal covering part of the ribs and organs on her left side, the work place asked would be around the final section of the descending intestine. The part closest to the hips, a section the doctors present could suture and regenerate with small-roots techniques if something went wrong. Not a zone where errors had no consequences, but the non-regenerable zone where errors were most manageable relative to any other part of the interior.

The best available option for the next step of learning.

He saw the determination in her eyes and made the decision.

But first...

The fusion arrived with the solidity of two beasts that had reached the same rank, the kind of resonance that wasn’t available across a gap and that changed the quality of what was possible, not just the quantity of power.

The diamond scales of the Hydra extended across most of his body, but now with a prismatic iridescence that shifted depending on the angle, the multicolored light of the Wolverine’s full elemental spectrum refracting through the Hydra’s crystalline surface, the two systems expressing their union visibly.

The doctors looked at the fusion.

His friends and family looked at it too.

He had roughly thirty minutes in that state before the mana cost of keeping the huge boost became unsustainable, assuming he didn’t push the output to extremes...

But even then... Now he was going to end up unconscious regardless, and Luna was going to have to wait longer.

Yet the worry seemed exaggerated since when he looked at her she only nodded, that expression she had when something had her complete agreement and she didn’t need to say anything because the decision was visible without words.

Everyone understood that if he was going to make real progress, he needed to do it seriously. The window was open. He wasn’t going to waste it.

He went back to work with the time limit of his now tripled capabilities that he couldn’t afford to squander.

♢♢♢♢

Despite the enhanced capacity, the first two minutes deeper in were like the first ten of several hours ago: slow, meticulous, the progress measured in small recovered patches of tissue and small patches of damage produced alongside them.

Manageable... Ugly, but manageable.

Then Ren finally reached the center of the thoracic region, a deeper and more interconnected zone in the crystal.

Not the geometric center, nor the absolute midpoint, but a location where the connections were still exponentially more, from the peripheral threads he had been working with to now the cables that held together a larger section, where each node he touched had twelve neighbors instead of two or three, and those neighbors had their own dozen of networks reaching outward in every direction.

A new level of place where the effect of moving anything propagated into directions that ordinary perception couldn’t have anticipated in advance, no matter how well you understood the principle.

The first chain reaction was larger than Ren had calculated.

Not devastating , but enough to worry, since it affected much more than the small parts from before.

Selphira made a sound that was noticeably different from the earlier ones, closer to what pain produced in a normal person when it reached a region that had been compromised for a long time and had less protective buffer built up around it, a region where the body’s usual defenses against sensation had been worn thinner by weeks of sustained damage and regeneration.

Ren absorbed what had just happened and reorganized.

The thinking speed the fusion gave him was enormous, matching with his new physical speed. Both of them became hyper active simultaneously, the two working in the same direction, letting him use the combined capacity several times what he had at baseline.

Because he was going to need all of it.

The chaotic mana from the disrupted sections was moving in every direction at once, threads of unstable energy tracing paths through the crystal toward every adjacent structure, following the geometry of a system whose equilibrium had been disrupted, seeking redistribution in every channel available.

Ren tracked the paths as they formed and corrected them at the same insane speed they were born, his perception following one thread and adjusting it before the next one had finished forming, then the next, then the one after that.

The mana in his eyes burned bright with the sustained effort.

His body concentrated every available capacity into a single point of focus, the kind of mental intensity that made time feel like it was crawling, the thinking taking up all the space and the body simply continuing to breathe slowly alongside it.

The pieces moved at the highest speed he could sustain, the crystallization giving way ahead of him while he corrected the chaos behind him, most of the tissue returning to its original form section by section. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

At this intensity the fusion had maybe five minutes left.

Yet he didn’t stop. He kept moving the pieces at even higher speed as he got more used to the motions, the tissue recovering as he went, the progress real and visible and extraordinarily costly.

Selphira was gripping the sheets and her own teeth with everything she had, using the full force of her will to produce no more sounds, because more sounds would break his concentration, and his concentration was the only thing standing between what was happening and something much worse.

He was moving faster with every moment.

Ren’s eyes changed yet again.

The mana concentrated there with an intensity that the people watching registered before they understood what they were registering, the sense that something had shifted in the quality of the air around him, in the way the mana in the room was behaving.

But then blood began coming from his nose and from the corners of his eyes.