The flight back to Tokyo was a hollow, pressurized silence. Inside the cabin of the Committee's high-speed mana-jet, Ren Hanshin sat alone in the rear. He didn't look at the luxury leather seats or the digital displays showing their record-breaking speed. He only looked at the small, sapphire marble in his palm.
It was quiet now. The Heart of the Ocean no longer screamed. It hummed with a soft, steady rhythm, like a sleeping lung.
Ren's right arm was a gruesome sight. The flesh from his elbow to his fingertips was charred black, the result of forcing his raw mana into the divine core. It was simply dead, his vitality was crawling, struggling to regenerate cells that had been vaporized by the God of Magic's lightning.
He was a ghost. A single flare of temper, a single moment of reaching for the Weaver's thread, and the red numbers would hit high. He could feel her, the God of Fate sitting just behind his eyes, her fingers hovering over the controls of his soul.
