Novel Full Chapter 1027 - Taming Chronology
Day 2000 since Ren had begun his cultivation journey…
A few months after the Orion situation, Ren had advanced his primary beast to Gold 2.
Thanks to that, he finally finished repairing Luna’s mother’s crystal.
The crystal had taken several dozen sessions to recover the brightness it had possessed before, and it hadn’t been able to surpass ninety percent. Not perfect brightness. Not until Ren had accumulated a little more knowledge and a little more power.
Then he was finally able to hit that 100% restoration.
He had wanted to know whether at that point he could reinsert the crystal into the statue that had lost it, but that would require opening the last door of the Starweaver ruins and finding out whether said statue was among what lay behind it, and the door also required three enormous platinum cores of which two were still missing.
But at least the brightness it had possessed before Orion… that, it had back.
The expression on Luna’s face when she held it that afternoon was not one Ren described out loud.
It was the kind that didn’t need words, and Ren had thoroughly enjoyed the ‘gratitude’ that followed in several different ways.
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Shortly after, the opportunist nobles and the Night faction, both now significantly weakened, had handed over the platinum core they held as part of the post-war agreements, along with free access to the ruins that had produced the water and fire crystals.
Only the nucleus that was almost certainly in the ruins guarded by Sirius’s statue and the corrupted beasts remained.
But first, there was a significant benefit to the newly free access to those ruins.
It placed the two crystallized figures within those ruins, one person apparently from Yino and one with Goldcrest features, within Ren’s operational reach for the first time since the Sirius problem had existed. He had read their systems over the weeks prior. He knew the maps. He had brought every tool available.
The ruins had the specific silence of places where something large had happened long enough ago that the echo had become atmosphere. The two crystallized figures in their positions inside the main chamber were invaluable to anyone who could use them, and the only person who understood the full context of that, what they implied, was Ren.
He managed to repair and reinsert the water and fire hearts. That part worked with little to no trouble.
But the regression was a different conversation.
He focused the first experiment on the right-hand little finger of one of the statues. The smallest available target, the lowest relative complexity, the smallest cost of error. With Mooshito at Gold 2, with all the accumulated practice from Selphira and Victor, with the complete map of the statue’s system read and reread over the preceding weeks.
He used his double Gold fusion and nearly passed out.
The result: a fraction of a fingernail. With its respective small piece of little finger were transformed back.
Living tissue for a few minutes before the disconnection from the rest of the statue cut the circulation and what he had recovered died in his hands.
Not pleasant… A terrible result.
It was, however, a piece of the information he needed.
At his current level he could reverse this process in small fragments. What he couldn’t do was keep those fragments alive without unlocking the entire circulatory network that sustained them, and that network required reversing the process at a scale his system couldn’t yet reach. The whole thing at once, as he had suspected, not section by section, not piece by piece, but simultaneously across every system that needed the others to function.
The difference between Selphira and Victor, who had their central system free and their most important organs functional, and a statue that had no active system at all, was the difference between reading a thousand-step code against knowing all the steps from memory and being able to recite them forward and backward at high speed, or like having to write code for the first time from nothing while keeping the first line running.
He needed to grow considerably more. A faster and more expansive mental capacity. More power, more precision, more everything.
He had to be much more than he was to get anything better than small pieces of the people he wanted to save.
At least that conclusion wasn’t as devastating as it might have been… the hope remained alive because the result had been alive, even if only briefly, and the girls made that clear to him with an attitude that grew progressively more affectionate.
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The girls had been losing their embarrassment at a rate that was inversely proportional to the time passing and to the embarrassment Ren continued having at full intensity.
The day Ren had attempted the tactical retreat from the castle garden and found three pairs of feet following his shadow steps closely with a determination that he would have genuinely admired in another context, he had announced screaming that he would speak with each of them one at a time. That he accepted the responsibility of making them happy, as his mother had said. But that he needed time for this not to produce the emotional equivalent of attempting a three-way fusion without having the beasts at the correct rank.
After that the girls grew progressively braver, watching him go red gave them somewhere to put their own nervousness, and they discovered that the condition suited them better than they had expected.
Bothering him as a team, they found, was significantly more enjoyable than facing him individually. Ren did not find this particularly fair. But the solution (revenge) he had found to balance the situation was not one they found particularly bad either, and it was the only arrangement that let all four of them keep growing without anyone accumulating too much advantage over the others.
Because Ren was also learning and maturing in that area, thanks to this.
So his retaliation consisted of: every time he had time alone with one of the three, or every time he completed something significant… he became more assertive than his current level of facial redness would have suggested was possible. The day he repaired Luna’s crystal, Ren had made her regret having teased him together with Larissa and Liora, though the end of the altercation was pleasant for both parties.