Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1007 - Taming Adulthood - 3

The crystal was on the bedside table.

She had felt it the moment Ren approached and his gallant and manly energy woke her up, that perception she always had of what was inside it, present even when she wasnʼt holding it, present even when she was horizontal and pretending to be asleep. The energy inside was so small and so fragile it barely registered. The contrast between what it had been and what it was now landed somewhere she wasnʼt going to examine closely right now because she couldnʼt afford to in this particular moment with her face already doing things she had limited control over.

She wanted to have it in her hands and hug it to apologize for using it so harshly, taking its warm energy so heartlessly .

ʼIʼm sorry… Iʼm sorry. Iʼm sorry Iʼm sorry Iʼm sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry Iʼm so sorry!!!ʼ

The apology came fast and constant and entirely internal, directed at the crystal and at what was inside the crystal with the full worried focus of someone who understood that an apology didnʼt undo anything… But she still needed to say it.

ʼI promised. I promised no one would spend another breath of what was left inside you and I was the first one to break it.ʼ

Iʼm sorry... But… But out of a hundred times I would do it again a hundred!! SORRY!! There is no version of that moment in which I donʼt. None… IʼM SO SORRY!!!ʼ

ʼNo… Iʼm sorry and Iʼm not sorry and both of those things are true at the same time and I donʼt know what to do with that…ʼ

The silence of the crystal was the only thing a crystal could provide.

Then it weirdly wasnʼt.

Something arrived in Lunaʼs mind that was closer to a warmth coming from inside, not necessarily from the small mana amount remaining but from something that didnʼt have a physical place. Like an ethereal rune made of two words, or the impression of two words, or what her mind did with something that wasnʼt exactly language but arrived in that form because that form was the one her mind could process. A sensation that was halfway between dreaming and being inside Renʼs internal space.

ʼLoveʼs good.ʼ

Luna didnʼt move a single muscle at the message worthy of Lykeaʼs motto.

ʼNo… Itʼs my imagination, she told herself. Iʼm half asleep and hallucinating what I want to hear because thatʼs what minds do when they need something ridiculous they couldnʼt ask for.ʼ

Probably…

It was almost like her mother had answered to not mind it, that it was alright.

Ridiculous.

Almost certainly…

But if she was allowed to have an imagination. If she was allowed to hear hope when it presented itself even if she couldnʼt verify it. If she was allowed to believe in something, even only to the extent that believing in it wouldnʼt destroy her if it turned out to be only imagination…

Then she believed in Ren.

In the fact that he was going to find a way as he had just said to her ”sleeping” body, Liora and Larissa. Because he was Ren, and because he had done things that had no way of being done often enough that the pattern maybe already had his name on it, the pattern that said impossible was a description of the current state of information rather than a limit on what was available.

She believed in the crystal recovering something of what it had lost. In the people trapped inside being able to stop being trapped one day.

In her father, wherever he was trapped as Selphira told her, coming back with that quiet stubbornness that Luna had inherited without asking for it and recognized in herself with that mix of pride and irritation that she only felt toward things she loved.

She had been pretending to be fine without him. But she wanted him back.

The crystal… Her mother. Her father.

She still ʼhatedʼ him too, for breaking the promise, for disappearing the way he had disappeared, for leaving the shape of a reason without the full explanation that should have accompanied it. She hated him and loved him in the way you only hated and loved the people you came from, which was completely and without being able to do anything about it.

Like her mother.

Like...

Lioraʼs warm breath arrived at her ear with the bad timing of someone who had been waiting for exactly the right moment and had decided this was it.

”How much longer are you going to keep pretending?”

Luna kept her eyes closed.

Kept her face still.

What she couldnʼt keep still was the color of her face, which climbed from somewhere below her collar to reach her ears with the speed of something that wasnʼt going to wait for permission.

Renʼs voice came from the direction of the bedside table. Small... Not directed at anyone in particular, but directed at something specific that wasnʼt a person in the room.

”Thank you.”

It was aimed at the crystal. At the faint warmth still inside it. At the small presence that had remained through everything and was still there now, smaller than before but present.

Luna heard it.

She kept her eyes closed.

Completely red.

In silence.

Thinking that she had woken up at the worst possible moment, and that out of a hundred times this would happen to her exactly a hundred would be extremely embarrassing.

Some things were consistent like that.

♢♢♢♢

Ren was entirely focused on understanding crystallization.

The last time he had looked at it differently was on the floor of the ceremony hall, his body in the state it was in, his consciousness fraying at the edges, watching the process move through Selphiraʼs body in real time with the kind of attention that only existed when something mattered deeply enough to cut through everything else. That moment of seeing it clearly, combined with the additional understanding the mushroom had briefly opened to him during the reconnection before going back to sleep, had given him an insight he hadnʼt had before.

The mana flow in crystallization was not chaotic.

What he had seen in that moment was the opposite. Order, a very specific, geometric order, the mana units solidifying not at random but following frequency patterns that organized the molecules into structures which repeated at very small scales, small forms echoing larger ones at every level of magnification if you knew what you were looking at. If you knew the runes… The geometry was consistent. If you knew the runes… The geometry was readable.