Novel Full Chapter 1025 - Taming Diamond Beasts
One thousand one hundred and ten days to get here.
Three thousand from the beginning, from the day the cultivation journey started.
Nearly three years since he had walked into sixth grade and into the battle against Orion.
General Ren hadn’t just counted the days. He had lived them, which was different, and the difference showed in the way his body moved now, at speeds that would once have required conscious direction and now simply happened, the way breathing happened, the way balance happened. The way it only became genuinely fun to reach half the velocity needed to break the sound barrier while mounted on his enormous golden mantis, the air parting around them with a sound that had no good description except cutting the storm.
The world had expanded enormously. And in that new world…
The fire mountain had been watching him from the distance for a few hours now with the specific indifference of geography that didn’t know time existed.
But today, the guardian was going to know that Ren existed.
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Now an important military leader at the wall, betrothed to the three most prominent houses of Yano/Yino, and a few months after his Mantis reached Gold 1… Ren had taken a few days to test what that meant in practice.
Around 1 year of cultivation still remained before his mushroom reached Platinum 1. But with the Mantis at Gold 1, the Wolverine at Gold 2, and the Hydra at Gold 3, the threshold he had been approaching for a long time had finally opened.
The three-way fusion.
It wasn’t like the fusions other double tamers used. Conventional fusion divided the beasts into equal portions and assembled something that was half of each, structurally coherent in the language of the runes precisely because the division was clean and the result had a clear shape that wasn’t too hard to translate both ways. Both halves present, both contributing, the configuration readable.
But a beast that was one third of each of three different sources risked losing the coherence that made each organism functional. Three languages in the same sentence: all three present, none of them fully itself. The grammar breaking down at the seams where they tried to coexist.
So this fusion worked differently.
The strongest beast, in this case the Hydra, was the foundation. The other two amplified it from inside, adding their capacities to the existing structure rather than fragmenting it. The Hydra didn’t become less itself; it became the frame within which the others could express what they were without any of them losing the thread of what they were.
The Hydra had three heads, finally.
The Wolverine gave the prismatic elemental quality, that multicolored property that turned the diamond scales into something that caught light from every angle simultaneously, each facet holding a different frequency, the whole surface alive with it. The Mantis gave her wings and her edge, and beyond those the precise sense of multi-eyed angle and timing that let three separate heads coordinate as though they were one mind with three perspectives looking outward from it.
The wings emerged from the fused beast’s back with the span required to move that much mass through the air at speeds that the size would have made impossible to anyone who didn’t understand how power bonuses and mana rewrote the rules. Even as a result of the fusion… Functional in the way that things were functional when they had been grown for a purpose rather than added to one.
Ren’s primary beast existed within that fusion in the only place where it made sense: at the convergence point of the three beast systems, not yet awake but serving as the central node, the root system that everything else grew from. Still dormant, but still present since the day it had decided to wait.
The power of the fusion reached levels Ren could feel rather than calculate.
His perception multiplied across 4 simultaneous viewpoints, not switching between them but holding all at once, the way a chord held all its notes rather than playing them in sequence. His reaction times compressed to the point where the familiar gap between thinking and moving closed into something continuous. Its system was so entangled that it was the first time Ren could merge with the power and say with certainty that he understood what his beasts experienced in fusion. Not as a concept, not as something he had inferred but as an immediate fact. The fullness of it… The quality of being more than one thing without being confused about what you were.
It was enormous.
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The guardian of the fire mountain was technically a dragon, but not in the strict sense.
It was what the records Julius had obtained from Dragarion’s archives described as a Diamond Fire Dragon of one hundred years, unique in its species across that century while it gathered sufficient energy to scale to the next sub-ring in Diamond territory. The first form of a true dragon, the stage at which the creature absorbed the full power of an ecosystem, where the component elements hadn’t yet fully unified and the body still carried the marks of that ongoing integration. Something becoming itself, not yet finished, the process visible in the way the form shifted slightly depending on where you looked.
A guardian that needed to live alongside the mountain it protected to stabilize its form and power before attempting the next level.
Diamond 1. The accumulated power of ten Platinum beasts, or one hundred Gold beasts, enclosed in a single entity.
Lava and red crystal in proportions that shifted depending on the angle, the deep internal heat visible through the crystalline surface in patterns that moved, slow and constant, as though the creature’s own circulation was geological. The dorsal spine was expressed as ridges of volcanic rock, each one big enough to have its own local name, the scale of it requiring distance to understand correctly. The eyes carrying the temperature of white light that didn’t blink because something burning at that level couldn’t blink or stop seeing, couldn’t feel the fraction of a second that other creatures spent in darkness between one look and the next.
A fire dragon, which looks more like a huge salamander with some dragon-like characteristics and a body made of lava and red crystals
The fire mountain’s territory was the guardian’s territory, and the mountain had been here long enough that the records answered the question of how long with “long enough that the numbers are no longer the relevant point.”
The approaching figure on the golden mantis from a distance that should have been safe and Ren could already feel the wind from the altitude had a heat in it, not the ambient warmth of the mountain itself, which existed as background, but the concentrated heat of something powerful. A complete picture assembled from 4 simultaneous readings.
Ren smiled.
He hadn’t come here for the territory.
He had come here because this was the next necessary objective.
He pushed the fusion deeper.
The mountain watched.
The guardian moved.