The exams began with Ren fully confident despite everything changing, and there was a good reason for his extra confidence.

Throughout the entire semester, Ren had remained focused on understanding crystallization.

At first, Min, Taro, and Liu worried seeing him so distant. They'd find him at his desk at odd hours, surrounded by papers filled with symbols none of them recognized. He'd stop responding to questions mid-way as if his mind had gone somewhere else completely, lost in thoughts and theories they couldn't understand.

"Think he's okay?" Min had asked one night, looking toward where Ren was hunched over his desk with an intensity that bordered on unsettling.

"He's just very concentrated," Taro had responded after a moment, recognizing something familiar in Ren's posture. "I've seen him like this before when he's working on something important, like the first time he prepared my crystals."

And he was right.

Soon they realized Ren wasn't lost or depressed, wasn't spiraling into something dark or destructive.

He was just hyper-focused, working on something that consumed his attention completely.

So they learned to let him work and give him space was the right answer this time again, understanding they'd always have training sessions with Lin and classes to talk to him if they needed. Respecting the boundaries of someone pursuing something with single-minded determination.

Everything had gone relatively well.

Despite the situation with Luna, who continued avoiding him with consistency that hurt more each day that passed.

Despite Klein, who'd completely changed his morning bath schedule to avoid encountering Ren there either.

Ren had decided to keep focusing on crystallization…

Also because he saw no point in talking to Luna when he'd feel uncomfortable not telling her what he knew about her father. If he was going to tell her something, it would be better to do it when he had at least good progress or already a solution, right?

That's what he told himself.

Every day.

While writing runes he remembered from the caves and experimenting with their results, trying to decode secrets buried for centuries.

♢♢♢♢

The first weeks were frustrating.

The runes he'd memorized seemed simple when he saw them on ancient walls. But reproducing them and understanding what they really did, that was something else completely. Theory versus practice, observation versus comprehension.

The only way he could think of making those mana runes was gathering the smallest mana crystals together.

But joining them in the correct form proved more difficult than expected. The precision required was extraordinary, each placement critical to maintaining coherence.

After some attempts similar to when he'd repaired the simple artifact, trial and error teaching what theory couldn't...

He succeeded.

The runes only made mana move. Slow in some cases, fast in others. Some made it spin, others directed it upward or downward. There were runes that slightly reduced flow and others that increased it.

The variables were quite numerous.

Too numerous.

There didn't seem to be a language there. Yes a coherent system but not a simple intention Ren could decipher. There were only apparently random symbols that affected mana in specific but disconnected ways.

They seemed disconnected… just until he began combining them.

Then something changed.

When he put two plus two runes together, 2 that accelerated flow followed by 2 that made it spin, the result wasn't simply the sum of their individual effects. It was something more complex, more elegant. The mana didn't just accelerate and spin, it interwove with itself in a way that created a stable pattern.

Like steps in a sequence.

He continued creating more runes and testing larger combinations, until he found a sequence of ten steps that seemed to have some good utility. But he also realized then that some of the mana's turns in this sequence were similar to something he knew.

Like...

Ren stood in the middle of the room, looking at his notes with very wide eyes as understanding crashed over him.

Like a dance he knew.

♢♢♢♢

The revelation was game changing.

The mana language wasn't like words in a book... It was like movement in space. Each rune wasn't a letter but a step, a position, a gesture that directed energy in a specific way.

And some of the steps and forms in which Larissa had taught him to dance were suspiciously similar to the forms that some of the runes represented. If he translated it only as the movement the mana performed, without thinking about the symbol representing it, without thinking about arms or legs but pure flow...

There it was.

The first useful pattern.

Understanding clicking into place like a key turning in a lock that had been waiting centuries to open.

Ren began experimenting with those flows like "Larissa's steps", with those mana movements in his body.

He performed the 10 'useful runes' as if they were some of the dance steps he'd learned, but this time with mana in his system, paying attention to the mana flow in his body while moving. Adding conscious intention to movement, directing energy from his core to follow patterns that his limbs would figuratively trace in the air.

And he felt with surprise how his body became lighter.

The internal flow became faster, smoother. When he tried using elements from among his skills, activating fire or wind or even the lightning he'd been practicing, he felt it was easier.

Faster.

Before he had to extract mana from his core and bring it to his hands, then make it spin the correct way from scratch to form the desired element. Each activation began from a static state, building momentum from zero.

But now...

Now there was already mana flow in each of his fingers. In his arms, in his legs, throughout his entire body. And if he wanted to start a spin or some specific flow, the mana already carried previous velocity.

The difference was minimal in common terms. Only some tenths of a second faster.

Because even static, mana accelerated very quickly once 'asked' to move. It wasn't like this technique made him twice as fast or anything dramatic like that.

However, for someone with Ren's perception speed, that small increase in reaction speed was very noticeable.

It was the difference between thinking about throwing fire and throwing it... and having fire already forming upon thinking it.

Between deciding to move and being moving.

Tenths of seconds that in real combat could mean the difference between life and death, between blocking an attack and being hit, between victory and defeat.

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