Understanding Selphira's system was like reading a language you knew but in a handwriting you had never seen.
The forms through which mana circulated in the turtle and serpent systems were there, recognizable once you knew what to look for, present in the structure the way words were present in an unfamiliar script if you already understood the grammar.
But the way the crystallization had incorporated them wasn't superposition. It wasn't a layer on top... It was intimate integration, the crystallization having preserved the mana patterns of Selphira's beasts the way a cast preserved the shape of what had been poured into it.
Yet it was translated using those ancient geometries, the same patterns of the runes Ren had been studying, but having translated the routing into the solid state by rotating each vector fractionally, just the precise amount needed for each piece to lock into the structure it now formed.
