Chapter 1084 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Link-up - 2
Chapter 1084: Chapter 1084 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Link-up - 2
Ren felt it the exact moment the clone crystal locked into the circuit.
It wasn’t a physical sensation, but a profound, metaphysical click. It was the deep, resonant satisfaction of the last desperately needed puzzle piece sliding effortlessly into the exact space it was always meant to occupy.
The entire map of Sirius’s petrified body suddenly bloomed in his mind’s eye. It was completely illuminated now, down to the microscopic cellular structures. Every vital organ, every hidden artery, every inch of the complex mana network was present and mapped with micrometric, terrifying precision.
Ren didn’t hesitate. At the top of the stairs, Lin was giving her all to buy him these minutes. He couldn’t afford to waste a single second.
He unleashed the mana. He flooded the entire system simultaneously from the very first spark.
His nervous system screamed under the crushing data load. But the mapped fixed architecture held. His own massive capacity, bolstered by the borrowed processing power of the seven girls, plus the autonomous physical relief granted by his Mantis, plus the direct extension of the clone crystal, the sum of it all was exactly enough.
He held the impossible three-dimensional map steady in his mind.
The brain operates in microseconds, and although Ren couldn’t know this in a 100% scientific sense, he could sense that he needed to do everything fast if he didn’t want to damage the most sensitive tissues. If he wanted to save the man and not just create a fresh corpse, the entire process had to be almost instantaneous.
Consciousness is a fragile, relentless cascade of chemical signals and electrical impulses. They fire anywhere from a sluggish 1 meter per second in slow fibers to a blistering 120 meters per second in fast-twitch pathways. And those signals do not wait.
If the crystal yielded sequentially, if the transmutation crept slowly up the neck, or if the heart turned to flesh a millisecond before the brain, the delicate electrical storm of Sirius’s mind would likely hit a dead end and be damaged.
The brain would recognize that the physical medium it required to exist was not there, replaced by transitioning matter.
That tiny interval, practically invisible to the normal human perception, could be fatal. The continuity of self could short-circuit. The memories could be damaged with no solution in the only place where memory was stored, and there could also be no solution if the three-dimensional form was affected even if just a little.
Everything had to change at the exact same time.
And even as he pushed the mana to its absolute limit, a cold dread gnawed at the back of Ren’s mind.
Would the tissue still function after years locked in stone?
What about the twenty-five percent corruption still lurking in the core he had just slammed into the chest cavity? Would it trigger a catastrophic mutation the second the blood started flowing?
Perhaps what would remain after the instant would simply be flesh instead of crystal, without the continuity that made the mind belong to the same person.
In the best case...
Would the man who woke up still be Sirius Starweaver? Or would he just be a flawless meat-puppet mimicking a ghost? Just a perfect clone that wasn’t the original anymore?
There was no way of knowing before he achieved it.
Ren let it all go.
He detonated the accumulated energy in a perfectly controlled, simultaneous explosion. The raw mana flooded every single coordinate of the internal map at the exact same time. The translucent crystal didn’t shatter; it simply yielded. It rewrote its own atomic structure in a single, blinding flash, obeying a physical logic that had violently overwritten the magic holding it in stasis.
The sound was barely a whisper.
The transformation was complete.
♢♢♢♢
It took Sirius Starweaver a long, disjointed moment to realize he was staring at a face he knew.
It wasn’t that his consciousness was slow to return... Basically a miracle, his brain was firing perfectly.
His very last memory, the final, searing image burned into his retinas before appearing here, was standing before the massive door of the ruin. He had been reaching out, opening his hand to someone he desperately wanted to touch, before a blinding, consuming light swallowed everything behind her and finally his own full view.
Now, he was staring at the luminous rune packed, heavy stone walls of a dark chamber.
The contrast was big. It was enough to make his newly reformed nervous system demand a frantic, staggering heartbeat just to recalibrate his equilibrium.
A young man was kneeling directly in front of him.
Around eighteen years old, maybe slightly older. The kid was panting, his face pale and dripping with sweat, but his expression was illuminated by a profound, exhausted relief. It was the unmistakable, radiant look of someone who had just pulled off an impossible miracle and was entirely too happy about it to hide it.
Sirius blinked... He didn’t recognize him.
His elite Tamer instincts kicked in instantly, brutally overriding his confusion. His mind snapped to a tactical assessment before a social one: Who is this? What is his threat level? Does this situation require an immediate, offensive response?
The young man remained perfectly still. He was still kneeling, his arms extended toward Sirius’s chest. His hands were still hovering in the air, glowing with the faint, residual crackle of highly concentrated mana.
Sirius narrowed his eyes, studying the intention in the mana and the face more closely.
The features... The sharp structure of the jawline, that highly specific, intensely stubborn quality burning in his jade eyes. It wasn’t an exact match, but it was horrifyingly familiar.
Did he have a brother?
It looked exactly like an older version of the face he had seen just hours ago, a face that had been simultaneously exasperating and impossible to ignore.
Sirius’s brow furrowed into a deep, confused scowl.
The arrogant, hard-headed thirteen-year-old kid he had beaten into the dirt on his way to the ruins hadn’t been eighteen. Not even close. But the foundational traits were undeniable. The core architecture of a person’s face doesn’t change too much, even as a child stretches into an adult.
But for Sirius, only a few hours had passed.
A few hours was nowhere near enough time for an obnoxious little boy to transform into the battle-hardened young man kneeling in front of him.