Chapter 740: Honeybun’s Transformation

As much as the opportunity tempted him, he wouldn’t risk anything happening to Honeybun. The little turtle meant far too much to him to use as an experiment, no matter how valuable the knowledge might be.

He let the idea go, for now.

"Still," he murmured, filing it away carefully, "I need to find a way to try this someday. Maybe with a beast I can afford to test on first, to see how the link behaves before I ever consider risking Honeybun. Or maybe once I understand the River better from other angles."

He tapped his fingers against his knee, the possibilities turning over in his mind. "Being able to observe the River of Paths of others, even indirectly, would be one of the most valuable things I could learn. Understanding the paths, the difference between what humans walk and what Supreme creatures walk... knowledge could change everything about how I grow."

It was a thread worth pulling, eventually, when the conditions were right and the risk was his to take rather than Honeybun’s.

For now, he set it aside and settled back in to wait, watching over his beast-taming space where the little turtle journeyed somewhere he couldn’t yet follow, carrying the inheritance of its ancestor deeper into the mystery of the River.

With even more time on his hands, Moon decided to put it toward his assimilation technique.

For the next two hours, he dedicated his full focus to threading lightning into his sword, drawing on everything he’d learned mastering ice assimilation to make the leap he needed. His understanding had sat at sixty percent, and the climb from there had been brutal.

The problem was the element’s nature.

Lightning was like an energetic child that constantly wanted to move around. To leap, to discharge, to escape the instant it was contained. Every time Moon threaded the current into the blade’s structure, it fought against the integration, wanting to burst free rather than coincide with the metal.

Holding it in place felt like trying to pin down water with his bare hands, and the harder he pressed, the more it slipped.

He kept at it, adjusting, experimenting, failing and trying again. The assimilation would take hold for a fraction of an instant, then shatter as the lightning tore itself loose. Over and over.

But slowly, his understanding improved. His control over the volatile element sharpened with each attempt, and he began to feel the shape of the problem, if not yet the solution.

Then, in the middle of his hundredth attempt, something clicked.

I’ve been trying to hold lightning still. Forcing it to sit inside the blade. But that’s not what lightning is. Lightning is motion. Containing it means killing what makes it lightning in the first place.

His mind raced ahead, the insight unfolding faster than he could fully process.

" To make it work, I should form some sort of circuit or loop thag I can thread it through, helping it flow in a continuous current rather than trying to let it jump around aimlessly."

The new plan made Moon grin shamelessly.

"As long as I can create a path that allows it to be itself, I will turn the sword into something that the lightning wants to stay within."

It was the exact opposite of how ice worked, and yet it came from the same core principle. Complete control over the element, deep enough to shape not just where it went but how it behaved.

Moon’s eyes lit up, the string he’d been grasping for finally in his hands.

He channeled the lightning again, and this time he didn’t try to hold it still.

He gave it a circuit, threading it through the blade in a continuous flowing loop, letting it race through the metal’s structure rather than forcing it to stop.

The current surged into the sword, found the path he’d laid for it, and instead of tearing loose, it followed it.

"It’s working!" Moon said in excitement, still focusing on the spell.

On his side, Mirage watched everything with curious eyes.

The lightning integrated into the blade, and purple lightning crackled across its structure, coursing through the metal in a stable, flowing current, not simply coating the surface.

Unfortunately the assimilated lightning held for three seconds before it stopped.

Then, as his control wavered and the circuit faltered, the assimilation finally dissipated, the lightning discharging back into sparks.

But Moon was grinning from ear to ear.

"That’s it!" He stared at the blade, exhilarated. "That’s the key! I just had to stop thinking about ice and start thinking about it like... like what it actually is."

A few seconds of stable lightning assimilation. After two hours of beating his head against a wall, he’d finally caught the thread, finally understood the volatile element at the level the technique demanded.

The hard part was behind him. Now it was just practice, refinement, extending those few seconds into a sustained, reliable technique. And once he mastered it, he’d have both advanced elements assimilated, ice and lightning both, and the possibility he’d been hoping for would open up.

Maybe they really will merge. Two advanced-element assimilations combining into something greater.

He reset his stance, channeled the lightning again, and chased the circuit, his excitement carrying him forward into the next attempt, and the next, each one holding a little longer than the last.

Moon chased the circuit again and again, and each attempt taught him something new about how the lightning wanted to flow.

He learned the rhythm of it, the way the current pulsed through the blade’s structure, the points where it wanted to leap free and the angles that kept it looping instead.

Three seconds became five. Five became eight. The assimilation grew more stable with every repetition, his control over the volatile element deepening as the circuit held longer and longer.

But a second plateau loomed, the same way it always did. Practice could only carry him so far. He could feel it flattening out, the gains shrinking, the thread slipping just out of reach again.