Just before Ren started bleeding, Wei was the one who could understand the change in the mana…
And he didn't delay in saying so, because Wei had his own mushroom at Silver rank, and the sensitivity that bond gave him for reading the surrounding mana network was sharper in certain ways than what a common sensitivity beast provided, a different angle of perception, attuned to the particular language of what was moving through the space.
It was fortunate, because almost everyone in the room would be moving toward Ren as soon as the blood ca out. The blood from his nose and the intensity of the mana concentration at his eyes would have every person present arriving at the sa conclusion in the sa mont: this had to be stopped before Ren's connections tore again.
"Don't move," said Wei, quietly but with enough urgency that the people who had been about to move didn't move. "Wait a mont."
Everyone gazed at him.
Wei gazed at the space around Ren with the eyes that were perceiving sothing that had no existing scientific frawork for it but was too symtrical to dismiss.
"The surrounding mana network is changing." He said it slowly, processing as he spoke, the words following his understanding rather than preceding it. "Forming right angles. It's not a spiral or a vortex like normal, not the kind of local mana response you get when soone uses a technique and the ambient mana reacts. It's…" he searched for the word, "... too nurous. Extrely nurous and made of small changes but growing more complex. It's starting from where Ren is working and propagating outward in all directions, following very small 'rune-like' forms or patterns."
But then blood began coming from his nose and from the corners of his eyes.
That was the mont Selphira raised her hand toward Ren, a signal to pause, a request to stop for a second, and Ren, without breaking the primary work, used a secondary ntal process of elental control to paralyze her from her arm with a precise electrical impulse. Not enough to hurt just enough to hold. Because the gesture, however well-intentioned, would have disrupted the most delicate mont of a process where disruption could have produced more unwanted chain reactions.
Most of the others registered what had just happened and ca a step closer anyway.
Ren also sent a gust of wind. Not too violent, just enough to push everyone back from the work radius and communicate that proximity was not sothing the next few minutes should accommodate.
The girls understood within seconds that fighting through it would only make things harder for soone who had clearly decided what he was going to do. Larissa understood first, she had assessed Ren and reached a conclusion she didn't like but wasn't going to argue with.
She looked at Wei.
Wei understood quickly. "We have no choice… He's using perhaps a hundredth of his total concentration to keep everyone still with his elental control." He arrived directly at the question the look was asking. "What he's doing in the crystal is at least a hundred tis more complex than everything else he's doing simultaneously. Trying to stop him now doesn't make sense, and I'm almost certain that within his imdiate area right now, he's capable of preventing any of us from fusing."
Nobody moved after hearing that.
Selphira had stopped feeling pain, and not only because the electrical stun had ended. The pace at which Ren was reordering the pieces had outrun the pace at which the chain reactions could produce damage before being intercepted, and what was now reaching the viable tissue was the correct form of energy returning to its place rather than the chaotic form of transition mana arriving without a channel to receive it. The crystal throughout the descending intestine zone gave way.
Enough that when the doctors could finally evaluate, what they found was organs where stone had been, tissue with blood moving through it where there had been translucency, the internal mana system in that specific section finally able to access the channels that the crystallization had been blocking. A body working as a body rather than as partial statue.
Ren was bleeding more from his nose. Then from the corners of his eyes, then from his ears, the physical expression of a cognitive system running over the absolute limit of what it could sustain, the vessels in the areas of highest neural load finding the seams where extre pressure expressed itself. His huge Vitality was the thing that held him standing, and his tenacity, the sa deep resilience that had gotten him through the ceremony hall and the years before it and every fight before that, and he used every bit of it.
Liora pulled Luna into an embrace, not because she accepted the situation but because she understood there was nothing to be done, and that Luna needed to be held. Larissa communicated the sa conclusion to Luna through the hand she placed on her arm, not grasping her back but asking her to wait and believe in him despite the harrowing feeling they all shared.
They waited.
The fusion had been active for just under four minutes when the concentration reached the limit of what the system could sustain simultaneously. The mont Ren felt it he stopped. Stopped every process he could stop at once, letting the fusion break rather than stopping it slowly.
The high-speed process he had been running lost the velocity that had been keeping it clean, and the chain reactions he had been intercepting in real ti reached the tissue as big sparks.
But he was already working in a recoverable place.
Those small mana sparks affected just superficial tissue along the hip and leg, not the organs that had already been freed and were now in a good situation with the healers checking them the mont the wind and the electrical pulses ceased. Only the surface that had been connected to what he was working on received the tail end of the abrupt transition. Surface damage… The kind that healed.
Ren dropped to his knees.
He said sothing. Not a complete sentence, fragnts of a conclusion his brain had reached in the last mont before his brain decided it needed a rest. Sothing about not having it now.
About having comprehended the complete pattern for just a mont. About perhaps being too fast to try with the small power he had right now. Larissa, Luna, and Liora caught him before the floor did, the three of them jumping at the sa mont.
Reed and Fern Patinder reached Ren just after with the expressions of people experiencing exactly two simultaneous feelings at maximum intensity, neither of which was the appropriate feeling for the present mont and both of which they were managing with considerable difficulty.
Min was already moving toward Selphira alongside the healers.
Ren lost consciousness in the girls' arms with the face of soone who was still processing sothing even in his sleep, the small contractions in his hands, the expression of a person who hasn't finished solving the problem even though the body has decided that today is finished.
Selphira looked at what had been done.
A section of her body where there had been crystal for weeks was now damaged muscle and skin that the healers could work with. New parts of several organs that could now function without stone pressing against them. Mana systems that could begin recovering what they had been trying to recover without success for the entire ti she had been in this room.
The procedure hurt considerably more than being caught in the crystal since that didn't hurt.
Which maybe was, in its own way, exactly the right sign.
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