Chapter 253: Chapter 253 – Oh Right, My Pinky

Jason pauses and facepalms, ‘Though I might want to finish up with what I was trying to do with my fingers. Gods and Goddesses, I can’t even remember exactly what I was doing.’

Jason shifts his attention to his pinky and the scene there brings it all back. He had been observing the lines in his pinky and when experimenting the one line untwisted and frayed. After that he had put in a temporary fix. But like most temporary fixes, since it worked, he forgot to go back and fix the problem. Now he can see that while the line hasn’t frayed at the end. The whole string has started to untwist and loosen right up until the crystalline node at the joint. Give it another month or maybe even just a couple weeks and it would have fallen apart.

Jason’s eyes have gone wide at this discovery. ‘Well. I guess it is a good thing I remembered. And I guess it is a good thing that I have time to work on this nonsense.’

Jason settles back in and observes the threads again. Since the last time, he had experienced new things and learned more about his energy. In particular was his ability to clad his feet with his war stomp. The ability to keep what was a temporary effect going was an important breakthrough, even if at the time he didn’t notice how he did it. Now though, he turns his sight towards the threads and nodes of his pinky once more and goes over the area with a fine-toothed comb.

He looks closer and closer, noticing the threads within threads and deeper beyond that. Eventually he reaches the end, but this time Jason is willing to believe that he has found the true end of it. Now each individual thread is the size of his finest threads off of his core. At this level of detail he still isn’t able to manipulate them with the detail Jason would like, but that’s life.

What is more interesting to him is when he turns his sight to the crystalline nodes. Now viewing the node at such a level-of-detail Jason can see what the crystals actually are. Of course he had somewhat expected it, but confirmation settles him. The nodes are just the finest of threads packed into a solid form. Twisted so tight that even on the end where the line has loosened the crystal shows no sign of coming apart. At least not yet.

Or that would be the case if Jason didn’t have a plan. After looking at the node, it is clear that the threads don’t have to follow the rules that an actual thread does. The connection between the node and line seems to phase through itself. With a light hand, Jason begins to spin the node connected to the loose thread. Faster and faster the crystal node spins until it reaches a critical point. Along the edges of the crystal, threads start to expand outwards as it comes apart.

With a deft probe, Jason enters the node with his mental power. On the inside now he experiences an epiphany. The structure, the divine structure! Like a crystal spun from heaven’s firmament. And then the crystal bursts apart, the threads no longer able to maintain cohesion. With this development, a stabbing pain radiates out from his pinky.

Jason clamps down on the thread leading to the next node and opens one eye. He looks down to find not only does it hurt, but the pinky is in fact bleeding. He shakes his head and pulls out gauze to wrap it. While the damage itself doesn’t worry Jason, he doesn’t want to bleed all over the bed.

Back to the thread, Jason notes that even with it clamped down, things are still unravelling. Besides that, all the threads now released from the crystal node are now floating freely. This more than the unravelling is the likely source of the damage. Whereas before the space was mostly a void, these threads had started to knock against the edges.

But Jason has a plan. He already had tested spinning the crystal to take it apart. Now he grabs the blob of threads and gathers them together before spinning it all once again. This stalls the rest of the threads unravelling, but that is all. Jason expected this because if spinning the threads together could fix things, he would have been done with it last time. While he hadn’t spun it during the last attempt, he still twisted the threads together to quite a degree.

The structure of the node was more important than spinning the threads. In fact, now that Jason has had a close look at the process, it is quite possible he could do so without a spin if his control got just a bit better. For now, though, he needs to fix what damage has already been done.

Still spinning the threads, Jason makes a single tweak at the core of the mass. Then, like a real life crystal, that single seed grows as the threads attach to the pattern laid out by him. Soon enough, a crystal node like the one he had deconstructed was once again located in the last knuckle of his pinky. And now with the node recreated comes the task he had failed at before, reforming the thread.

But he doesn’t stop spinning the node. Instead he keeps it spinning at a speed barely below the point at which it had come apart. Jason focuses on the threads coming out both sides of the node. With each thread spinning on its own, he groups them together in threes before making the bundle itself spin in the opposite direction. This forms them together into a string.

Jason holds the string there, continuing the new direction of spin and watching for the threads to come apart. After a minute of waiting though, the new string stays strong and so he repeats the act with the rest of the threads. And again, but with the strings this time. And finally once more, recreating the original lines, tied just as tight as they had been.