Ren was utterly destroyed…
He was barely clinging to consciousness, operating strictly on the phantom fumes of a burnt-out core, yet he was still meticulously circulating the most complex containment and recovery runes he had learned.
He was running on autopilot, but it was the terrifying, hyper-competent autopilot forged from years of surviving brutal mana filling and depletion in the harshest cultivation imaginable. The part of his brain responsible for deliberate, conscious thought had almost shut down to conserve energy. What remained was pure survival instinct, forcing the runes to work in his battered circuits.
He had exactly one percent of his energy left. That tiny, flickering ember absolutely could not be allowed to die.
