Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 1034

Chapter 1034: Chapter 1034 - Taming Contentment - 2

He was wrong...

The complexity scaled such that the first phase, mapping, consumed a relatively manageable amount because perception was his strongest point. The second phase, activation, the actual modification of the three-dimensional runes to reverse the process, consumed double what the mapping had cost.

In an area the size he had mapped, the total consumption came to triple, not double as he had calculated by treating the mapping as half the total, because the activation cost multiplied at each node, and nodes were where intricacy concentrated.

He understood this late. At the moment when the initiation began and the system started demanding a quantity he didn’t have available to sustain the complete process. Not gradually, immediately, with the reality of something that didn’t warn you but simply arrived.

And what had been started couldn’t be stopped without completing.

Only redirected...

He regretted it. He had let the subconsciousness and the foggy mind decide. He had factored in, at some level he hadn’t consciously examined, that these statues had come from groups that had done harm to people he knew and cared about.

But Klein had been from Goldcrest and he wasn’t Ren’s enemy now. Han had come from Yino and wasn’t either. The lines between faction and person were more porous than the simplicity of the facts had made them appear.

He had been using that blurring as unconscious permission, and it wasn’t permission he had the right to take.

He couldn’t treat people who were unknown to him as acceptable collateral damage. That was the line, and he had been close to crossing it, and he wasn’t going to cross it.

He had to save what he could now.

Ren made the decision in the time it took to draw the first breath after forgetting to breathe for a moment. Less time than it would have required if he’d had to calculate it from scratch.

The activation he had concentrated in the torso was redirected. Concentrated into the initial mapped area and forced to complete there rather than continuing into the rest of the system.

As a result, the complete left arm of the figure stopped being crystal.

The rest remained crystal.

The junction between the arm and the shoulder, which was now the boundary between living tissue and the unchanged crystallization, couldn’t sustain the discontinuity of tissue that required circulation from a side that was still fundamentally different. The living cells would begin failing at the seam almost immediately without intervention.

Ren saw it before it happened and applied what he could when they separated: a rapid-freeze ice containment field that would cause some small internal damage but would pause the deterioration of the newly freed tissue long enough that it could be healed and reintegrated later.

He took the arm.

He held it for a moment with a feeling that wasn’t only guilt, because he had tried to do something for the person even if the reason hadn’t been entirely the right one, but that wasn’t the absence of guilt either, because the arm he was holding was someone’s arm and that person had not asked him to try.

He stored the arm in the steadily expanding space of the Wolverine.

The figure’s organs remained intact inside the crystallization, which was exactly what he had intended to protect at the end. The preservation was real and it mattered in practical terms.

Wasn’t it?

It didn’t particularly help with the guilt.

Ren sat on the floor of the chamber with the complete inventory of what he had just learned.