It only took Ren forty-eight additional hours to recover and free Lyzea from her crystal prison.

The physical execution of the spell wasn’t the big hurdle anymore. Having successfully navigated the process with Sirius and Lykea, Ren’s mastery over the biological mapping was absolute. The terrifying complexity of the magic had simply become a mechanical routine with the new extra knowledge.

Now, the genuine struggle was no longer how to execute the spell, but when he could afford to do it.

Managing a monumental, world-altering power became an agonizing logistical nightmare when that power was finite.

His mind was overflowing. There was so much he desperately needed to practice: the molding of raw crystal, stabilizing the volatile three-way beast fusion, and decoding the radical new cultivation techniques.

The downloaded map of the eighteen global ruins also heavily implied there was still one undiscovered vault lurking somewhere in Yano Gold 3 territory. There was simply too much to do, and a pathetically small reservoir of time to distribute among the tasks.

Every single drop of mana he burned on a resurrection was energy actively stolen from others or his own progression. For the very first time, Ren was truly, viscerally feeling the crushing, isolating weight of being the only human on earth capable of performing these miracles.

But this time, pushing through the agonizing exhaustion was undeniably worth it... Because Luna and Lykea welcomed the aunt back into the world of the living with open arms.

And Lyzea, the widow of the traitorous Orion Starweaver, turned out to be vastly simpler to manage than anyone in the room had anticipated.

There was also absolutely no screaming, no drama.

When they gently sat her down and carefully explained the brutal history of the last few years, Orion’s violent coup, his catastrophic downfall, his death, and the sheer length of time she had spent frozen as a statue, Lyzea did not break down.

She didn’t weep at all for the husband who had manipulated her into becoming a living sacrifice for his own megalomania.

In fact, as the hours ticked by, a profound physical transformation overtook her.

The rigid, perfect posture of an aristocratic wife slowly began to melt. Her shoulders, which had been locked in a state of permanent, defensive tension for decades, finally dropped. She let out a long, shuddering breath, looking exactly like a woman who had carried a crushing boulder on her back for so long that she had forgotten it was there, only to suddenly have it lifted away.

Lyzea was not a malicious person... She was simply a woman cursed with an agonizingly strong sense of duty.

She had executed Orion’s every command without a single whisper of protest. She hadn’t done it out of profound, blinding love, nor out of paralyzing fear. She had done it because she genuinely believed it was her inherent place in the universe.

It was the exact psychological conditioning drilled into her from childhood: the high-house wife supports, the wife obeys, the wife absolutely never questions the ambitions of the man leading the house.

It was a suffocating, iron-clad script she had been handed from almost the day she was born, and she had recited every single line flawlessly throughout her entire adult life.

But now Orion was gone...

The suffocating obligation was dead. The manipulative aristocrats who had relentlessly pushed her into that subservient position no longer held a shred of actual power over her; the Night Faction was currently nothing more than a crumbling sandcastle entirely absorbed by Luna.

For Lyzea, it was, in the most literal, breathtaking sense of the word... Liberating.

For the very first time since she possessed conscious memory, there wasn’t a single person alive she owed her obedience to. To suddenly discover that absolute freedom at her age felt like a second birth.

The world was suddenly vast, new, and completely hers to explore.

♢♢♢♢

Eventually, the time came for Ren to return to the ’mud and blood’ of the Great Wall.

The second his boots hit the stone of his designated sector, he was hit with the exact avalanche of interrogations he had expected.

He had been gone for days... Far too many days.

The convenient excuse that he had been just "assisting with logistical installations" in other sectors could no longer support the weight of such a prolonged absence. If he wanted to keep his secrets buried, he had to sell the lie perfectly. The only other option was to openly admit to the military brass that he had been forcefully pulled from the front lines because he was an impossibly valuable, classified combat asset.

Neither narrative would go unnoticed by the veterans.

The underlying problem was glaringly obvious: the other young recruits who had been abruptly shuffled to different sectors alongside Ren, using the exact same "sudden emergency" smokescreen, hadn’t seen any action.

They hadn’t encountered heavy combat. They hadn’t faced massive, anomalous mutant invasions. They had basically sat around doing absolutely nothing new.

Their temporary assignments had been just as mind-numbingly quiet as their old posts. To the rest of the Vanguard, it looked exactly as if the recruits had been reorganized out of sheer bureaucratic incompetence, or perhaps due to a phantom alarm that never actually materialized.

Once the supposed emergency quietly expired, every single one of those recruits had returned to their normal posts.

Everyone except Ren...

Ren returned extremely late. When confronted by his superiors, he delivered his alibi with a flawless, deadpan expression: he had been kept behind to ’help’ in the installation of more defensive towers and conduct archery training for the local garrisons in the adjacent sectors.

It was a lie, but it was a lie spoken out loud with such highly specific, pragmatic military utility that it miraculously backfired entirely in his favor.

Instead of sparking deeper, dangerous suspicions about where he had actually been hiding, the story painted him as a hyper-competent logistical genius. It made him look like a soldier so undeniably valuable that high command was forcefully passing him around from sector to sector just to upgrade the entire Wall’s defensive grid.

The archery techniques he had previously taught in his own sector had already drastically improved the veterans’ kill ratios; it made perfect tactical sense that command would want him to teach those exact same methods elsewhere.

He had accidentally gained a massive amount of military prestige without even trying...

But there was another, far more terrifying reason the veterans bought his story.

His tower wasn’t just a theoretical concept anymore.

Before he had left for the ruins, Ren had constructed an autonomous, experimental watchtower a hundred meters beyond the Wall’s defensive perimeter. It was a structure forged from dense wood and heavy earth, intricately wired with his custom mana-absorption runes.

But the tower standing in the plains today, was absolutely not the same structure he had left behind.