Today was the day…
The Mantis reached Silver with the same quiet reliability that Ren's secondary beasts tended to show when they weren't in the middle of a crisis: no fanfare, just the solidity of something that had been accumulating what it needed for exactly as long as it needed to.
It was that easy.
Cultivating any of the three secondary beasts was nothing compared to the daily cost, pain and complexity of the process his mushroom required, a price he had long since built into his routine without treating it as a burden.
He was perfectly used to it so any other process even felt like a massage.
For today's first massage last requirement he absorbed a costly speed rune toward that end.
The 50% speed and attack increases were the Mantis's primary yields and they installed into the system with the naturalness of something that had been waiting there already, latent in the bond, needing only the node to give them a channel.
The Wolverine reached Gold 1 fifteen minutes later.
