Orion looked at the energy around Ren with those eyes that had spent years learning to read the kinds of patterns corruption could have, and he didn't find what he had expected to find.
The corruption was still there, present, dense, real… But it wasn't doing what it should have been doing.
It wasn't driving Ren toward the loss of control he had calculated so many times with the meticulousness of someone who had run the experiment before in other contexts. It wasn't responding to the anger the way every Yino subject had responded to comparable emotional states, nor was the flow working the way the mutants responded when the crystal flow was adjusted, the way every piece of his model predicted it should.
It was doing something else.
Orion's expression changed.
He drew out the remaining purple crystals.
