The dwindling number of guards and students came to him as an opportunity.
All the more so when he would have to explore deeper to obtain additional materials. For now, though, everything had to be focused on tonight.
‘Almost there now.’
Ren whispered as he rose from his bed.
The last training session with Assistant Instructor Lin had been as brutal as ever, but tonight was far too important to rest. This was the moment he had been waiting for.
“I'm coming with you.”
Taro was already prepared, holding the crystal bag.
“No, you two sleep. I can do it on my own.......”
“Not a chance.”
Liu raised himself in the darkness as well.
“You've been going on about that ‘special method’ for a whole month, haven't you? I'm not missing the chance to see whether you really know something or not.”
Min rolled over in his bed.
“Me too.......”
A yawn cut off his words.
“I want to see it.......”
A few seconds later, his even snoring filled the silence of the room.
“That one's a complete child. Past ten o'clock and he's out cold.”
Liu muttered as they slipped out of the dormitory, hiding themselves in the veil of night.
The night air on the way to the Academy's outskirts was cool and full of the sound of grass insects.
Ren guided them to a clearing where no trees blocked the sky.
“Here.” he said after checking their surroundings.
“The moonlight will pour down whole, with nothing in the way.”
A little over half of the moons were set in the sky like jewels.
Ren knew that exactly eight strands of moonlight were needed, and that the arrangement of those heavenly bodies would soon shift as well.
“Give me a hand with this.”
He spread a long board out on the ground.
He began inspecting Taro's crystals as systematically as a surgeon.
After studying each piece of crystal carefully, he either set it aside or discarded it without mercy.
“This one is too small. This one has an irregular flaw on the surface....... We need the highest quality possible.”
“Does that really matter so much?”
Taro asked.
“If we're compressing a 150-day process into 100 days, it has to be at least this good, doesn't it?”
Ren kept sorting until exactly one hundred crystals lay in ten perfect rows. He covered them with a black cloth, protecting them from premature exposure.
Next he took out a Bronze crystal cut flat and round.
“Is that......?”
“A neutral crystal lens. It cost me 500 crystals.”
Ren adjusted the lens until it gathered the moonlight into a bright point the size of a silver coin.
Satisfied with the test, he began scrutinizing the sky.
“How long will this take......?”
Liu asked impatiently.
“As long as it needs to.”
Ren cut in without taking his eyes off the sky.
“The arrangement has to be exact.”
Minutes passed like an eternity. At last something changed in Ren's expression.
“It's time.” he murmured, drawing back the black cloth. The hundred crystals glowed faintly, like ghosts, beneath the moonlight of the night.
The condensed moonlight flowed down like liquid and formed an intense pillar of light.
He picked up the first crystal and exposed it to the beam.
A moment later, the crystal began spewing light fiercely enough to horrify Liu.
“Stop!”
Liu stepped forward on instinct.
“That light...... the crystal can't take it! It's going to burst!”
Ren had already put the glowing crystal into the black bag and picked up the next one.
“Ren, this is insane! Mana poisoning is no joke!”
“It's exactly at the limit, Senior.”
Ren did not stop working, counting the exposure time in his head.
“And I need to concentrate. This particular arrangement of the moons only holds for thirty minutes.”
“Is that why you bought the lens?”
Taro asked, watching as though entranced.
“If I don't concentrate the light, we'd have to wait two more months. And then there'd be no time to finish your training before the term ends.”
Liu opened his mouth to protest again, but Taro calmed him with a gesture.
“Thanks to you I collected more than 600 crystals in the mine this month. Most of them I found by following your directions. If something goes wrong, we just give up on the method tomorrow and lose 100 crystals, that's all.”
Ren went on working systematically. The first crystals received exactly 36 seconds of exposure, but he gradually shortened the time.
“A resonance has already formed inside the moon halo.” he explained.
“The next ones need less time.”
The last ones needed only six or seven seconds of exposure.
“How on earth do you know when it's enough?”
Liu asked, looking at the crystals that still glowed unsettlingly.
“Once you know what to look for, the absorption pattern is visible.”
At last the final crystal went into the bag.
“Done.” he said as he took up the bag.
“Let's get back before someone notices we're gone.”
On the way back through the Academy's dark grounds, Liu could not help eyeing the bag with open suspicion.
To him, each crystal inside it was a time bomb. Taro, on the other hand, held a strange anticipation rather than unease.
The first of the hundred days that would decide whether Ren's method succeeded or failed was dawning.
And with it, the first chance to prove that his knowledge was not mere delusion.
***
As the light of dawn began pushing back the darkness, Ren carefully drew a small bundle from his bag.
In the stillness of the early morning there was nothing but the even breathing of his roommates. He measured out the exact amount of the ‘deep earth’ he had secretly collected at the boundary of the permitted zone.
In his hand the powder seemed to drink in even the faint light around it, feeling less like matter than like a small fragment of the void.
Deep earth was the perfect sealing agent for Taro's Beetle. But a detail like that appeared in none of the books his friend had pored over all night.
Ren recalled Taro in the library, struggling to find information that scholars had been misreading for generations.
Liu had once mentioned that some earth-attribute Beasts required deep earth, but he had it wrong, taking it for a processing material rather than a sealing one.
At this stage, the fewer questions about his method, the better.
***
Beneath the blanket, he worked with a surgeon's precision, measuring the black powder down to the last grain. The crystal he had processed with moonlight the night before reacted the instant it touched the powder.
The light gradually shifted, staining into an earthy brown.
The way the light inside the crystal pulsed as it absorbed the powder's properties was like watching soil dissolve into clear water in reverse.
Subtle interactions like this were precisely the truth the old books missed entirely.
By the time Taro showed signs of waking, Ren had already finished every preparation. The timing was perfect.
“Good morning.”
He smiled, holding up the completed crystal.
“Your first crystal is ready.”
“Ah, mm.......”
Taro mumbled, still half asleep.
“Here.”
Ren held out the glowing crystal, and Taro took it with a sleep-heavy hand.
He had decided to trust his friend. With a yawn, he activated the absorption process.
The room was quiet.
Then the mana began running wild inside him.
Taro's eyes flew open as the first wave of power drove through his whole body. It felt like being plunged into ice water. Shocking, overwhelming, and at the same time it made him feel alive.
Another wave struck him, stronger than the first. And then another. And another.
“This is.......”
Taro gasped as the power kept surging in.
“too...... much.......”
Liu leapt out of bed the instant he saw Taro's veins giving off a vivid blue light.
Mana poisoning. The unmistakable sign of it. Blue lines writhed beneath his skin like rivers of light.
“Do you know what you've done?!”
Liu grabbed Ren by the collar, his voice panicked.
“I told you it was overcharged! Look at those veins!”
The blue lines spread swiftly across Taro's entire arm, and now he was struggling even to breathe.
“We have to get him to the infirmary! Right now!”
Liu was already searching frantically for his shoes.
“The medicine for mana poisoning is expensive, but if we don't hurry.......”
“Wait.”
Ren's voice was low and calm, unbelievably so for a boy's.
His gaze was fixed on Taro.
“Wait?! He's dying because of you!”
Min had woken at the commotion too and was watching the scene in horror. His Water Snake coiled uneasily around his arm.
“Just.......”
Ren raised a hand to hold Liu back.
“watch a little longer.”
Taro's veins were glowing now as though they would burst, and his breathing was ragged. Every sign pointed to the worst.
“Calm down, Taro.”
Ren took a firm hold of Taro's shoulders.
“Breathe with me. Slowly.”
“The mana.......”
Taro panted.
“is overflowing.”
“I know.”
Ren's voice did not waver.
“But your Beetle can handle it. You only have to guide it correctly.”
Liu froze in the doorway, torn between running out for help and trusting Ren's strange certainty.
“Give your body over to the flow of mana.”
Ren continued.
“The mana has pooled in your chest, hasn't it? Move it. Circulate it through your arms first.”
Taro nodded weakly and focused on the sensation. Slowly, the blue lines in his arms began to fade.
“Good. Now send some of it toward your back. Your Beetle is a creature of the earth. It's more natural for mana to flow downward.”
Min watched with bated breath as the blue lines moved according to Taro's will and gradually weakened.
“A temporary excess isn't poison. Once you know how to control it, it becomes medicine instead.”
Ren explained as he guided Taro.
“Your Beast was designed for this power. All you have to do is open the way.”
Gradually, Taro's breathing steadied. The blue lines vanished almost completely, leaving only a healthy glow beneath his skin.
“How do you feel?”
Ren asked a few minutes later.
“The world...... feels different.”
Taro opened and closed his fingers in amazement.
“Stronger, like I've become one with my Beetle. Was this...... my Beast's power all along?”
“This is exactly how it was always supposed to be.”
Ren smiled as he finally took his hands from Taro's shoulders.
“It's the power everyone has called poison and kept away from. But the real poison was never the power. It was the ignorance that couldn't handle it.”