Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Any mana crystal was accumulated energy that had transitioned into behaving as a solid, and affected the surrounding mana system by fusing with the tissue as well.

That was all it was.

And what became solid after being fluid, given the right conditions of density and frequency, could, in theory, have those conditions reversed. If someone knew precisely which conditions to modify and in which order.

In theory.

The practical side was where the actual problems lived.

The first order of work was analyzing whether the solidification process caused damage to the transformed tissue, and whether reversing it would cause additional damage. Two different questions, and no one knew if the answer to the second one didn’t follow automatically from the answer to the first.

Beyond that, the available tools were also limited. Beasts with mana absorption capacity were the most direct instrument, but that absorption came packaged with a complication, because a tamer’s mana system and their physical vitality were intertwined in ways that weren’t easily separated. The mana and the body were two systems mostly occupying the same space. One system expressing itself in two registers… and pulling one without disturbing the other required understanding and precision that just parts of beasts with absorption capacity simply didn’t have. Evolutionarily didn’t even need. Why take just one if taking more is easier? Maximum parsimony.

Then there was the scarcity problem.

The ranks where absorption existed in the form Ren needed were specific to a narrow set of beasts, and in certain ecosystems those beasts lost the ability in intermediate ranges before recovering it at higher ones, or didn’t recover it at all. Several Silver-tier beasts had it. From Gold upward the situation became significantly more complicated and rare. Certain ranges of high Gold and Platinum lost the capacity before recovering it at high Platinum or Diamond, and at those levels the force involved was too great for the precision this kind of work would require. The window was narrow and the beasts inside it were not common.

Zhao had been a Gold rank crystalisation problem, Julius and Arturo around high Gold and low Platinum, Selphira and Victor were maybe a mid Platinum rank problem, Sirius high Platinum and maybe Dragarion was somewhere in Diamond.

All different so some of them didn’t have any option in their rank…

But the most fundamental problem was that absorbing crystallization wasn’t the same thing as reversing it. Not remotely.

What Zhao who had accumulated small crystal fragments in his system needed, was one thing, essentially extracting what had become a foreign object, repairing the damage it left behind, and allowing the tissue to recover over time with healer support and careful management. Tedious. Potentially dangerous if any crystal was too big or positioned badly. But the kind of problem that had a ‘normal’ surgical path through it.

Arturo and Julius had been the intermediate cases, closer to Zhao’s situation in principle even if more severe in degree. So as a warmup they were good for Ren.

But when the damage was at Selphira’s level, or Victor’s, or beyond…

Impossible. A waste of time to try any resemblance of surgical techniques.

Absorbing a fully crystallized arm was the same as removing the arm.

There was no softer way to describe it. More developed bodily crystallization wasn’t a foreign object inside a tamer’s body. In the case of Selphira, Victor or more it was the tamer’s body in a different state, the organs compromised, the internal systems functioning partially at best in the cases where they were still functioning. Extracting that and waiting for regeneration would have required, at the absolute best, high-level recovery potions that no longer existed, potions capable of regrowing limbs or organs from essentially nothing. In the case of complete statues, it was simply a path that didn’t lead anywhere useful.

To reverse the process there, you had to go to the origin.

Modify the molecular geometry of the crystal back toward what it had been. Return the flow structure and the tissue from their solid state to the state they had come from, and to do that, you had to know the patterns. The bond signatures of the affected tamer’s specific beasts, because every person’s crystallization carried the fingerprint of their own mana system, their own specific combination of bonds, in the language of the runes that structured everything underneath the surface of cultivation.

Not impossible in the sense that Ren had spent the last week convincing himself it wasn’t impossible, the week before that, and the time during his recovery, all of it feeding an understanding that had grown significantly.

What had given him the most hope was seeing Selphira the movement in the crystallization process, the way the mana arranged itself in patterns so close to runic structure that the resemblance stopped being coincidence. The rune was trying to preserve something, a perfect map of the original form, encoded in the crystal’s geometry, written in the same language that underpinned all mana cultivation but rarely read this way. If the original structure was preserved in the crystal’s code, and if he could read it, then he didn’t have to reconstruct what never had been lost.

He just had to translate it back.

His understanding of the runes wasn’t perfect yet, even if he was possibly the person who understood them best in the world right now. But it was sufficient to know that if he could read the pattern encoded in the crystallized mana, he could extract the map without damaging it.

What he was on the edge of discovering, if it proved possible, was something with implications far beyond the immediate situation. Essentially a form of mana-based cryopreservation, the crystallization process understood not as damage but as a state that could be maintained, read, and reversed under the right conditions. Crystallogenics, if you wanted to name it, with consequences for the science of mana that he hadn’t finished thinking through yet.

He was going to think them through. After the practical part.

♢♢♢♢

Ren was eager to test the theory in practice, but he wanted more control first, and more control was close, because today his Wolverine and his Mantis were going to advance to the next node together, the combined progression giving bonuses of fifty and thirty percent respectively that in some categories stacked up to one hundred percent and in the minimum cases still reached sixty.

A substantial help for what he was trying to do.