Novel Full Chapter 1028 - Taming Chronology - 2
Ren was fighting back…
His father’s ‘chivalrous’ advice, filtered through the logic of his age, the advice of his classmates, of dubious practical value but offered with great confidence and something that was his own, that had been waiting for the right moment to emerge… all of it combined to produce a version of Ren in those situations that each of the three girls, separately, found consistently unexpected in the most productive sense of the word.
But together they always found a way to return the favor, with the frequency and enthusiasm of people who had found a preferred hobby and had no intention of releasing it.
They could embarrass him indefinitely by referring to him collectively as funny exaggerated (or maybe not in their honest minds) things like: our gallant savior, king of the crystals, chivalrous knight of love, and so on… alluding to the promises made and the fact that they would catch him eventually. Always together, always at maximum volume, always coordinated.
But Ren had discovered, with some surprise, that the repetition of this stopped working the way embarrassment was supposed to work. Each day it gave him less redness and more determination. Each reminder was a pending chapter on the list of things that needed to be completed before the list of things he actually wanted could begin.
Three reminders of things he wanted to achieve turned out to be a different kind of engine than any he had used before.
There were still minor obstacles in the castle and some within the Ashenway family that couldn’t significantly affect things for now, at least until the moment came to formalize everything. But to reach that moment, Ren had asked for time: he wanted first to give them everything they were missing, everything he could obtain with his maximum effort.
The girls, one by one, had been relatively easy prey for that argument. Liora understood that for Larissa and Luna, having their parents present at the ceremony would mean something even bigger. As for herself… That one hadn’t been a day of ‘Gallant Ren being particularly bold’ where she was concerned, but she still played by very helpfully assisting the other two with their revenge.
Ren was living a happy adolescence, but he had to master the crystals.
That was where both lists ended.
♢♢♢♢
Around 2200 days since Ren had begun his cultivation journey…
The seventh year of academy arrived with the feeling of something outside changing category rather than level.
The outer rings were different from before, not only in how dangerous they were but in the way the ecosystem functioned within them. The corruption filtering up from underground through the territory had found ways of consuming the Silver and Gold ring ecosystems that were less like direct invasion and more like accumulated influence, the way a tide changed a shoreline through repetition rather than through any single wave.
The tamers who operated there regularly collecting materials encountered a presence that was different from the one the rings had always carried, active hostility of something that had decided it wanted them gone.
The Mantis reached Silver 2 on day 2190.
Ren didn’t celebrate much. It wasn’t enough to change anything yet.
The following month, the Hydra reached Gold 2.
This time, with both improvements combined, the picture was a little more promising.
The first thing Ren verified was the effect on his crystal work, specifically whether the distance between where he currently was and where he needed to be for the statues had changed. What he found was that the gap had closed meaningfully, the improvement was luckily nonlinear in the way that combined bonuses were always nonlinear for him. But still far from sufficient. He accepted that and kept moving.
Eighth year was approaching, along with the formal announcement of Ren’s betrothal to the three most important young women in the kingdom, the preparations Julius, Selphira and Arturo had been building across the preceding twelve months were almost ready. That was its own kind of weight, different from the cultivation weight but present alongside it every day.
But Ren was more focused on something more immediately intense that was coming sooner, made possible by the power increase he had acquired a month before the end of seventh year.
On day 2490, when his Wolverine reached Gold 2 and the Mantis reached Silver 3, Ren had what the operation required to be safe.
The plan involved ten simultaneous active fusions. It required the city walls to be covered by the people best positioned to cover them in the main group’s absence, a coverage problem Julius and Arturo had spent months solving in advance. And it required coordination between people who had fought together long enough that the coordination was about execution rather than about basic understanding, the kind of synchronization that couldn’t be trained in a week.
The elemental dragon guarding one of the mountains at the beginning of the Diamond 1 ring was not the kind of adversary measured in terms of absolute difficulty. It was the kind measured in terms of how many operational systems you could sustain simultaneously in its presence without any one of the ten failing at the wrong moment. If they could manage this, only the fire ring, the light ring, and the darkness ring would remain.
With Taro, the 3 girls, Min, Liu, Zhao, Lin, Selphira, and Victor, all fused in their best available conditions, the dragon had been defeated without excessive difficulty. Not easy, but normally defeatable, and the difference between those two things was precisely the gap they had spent the previous year preparing. Every decision in those twelve months had been made with this specific threshold in mind, and the threshold had been accurate.
The fourth elemental ring came into Ren’s hands as a major victory.
But their return nearly became a major defeat.
The hybrid corrupted beasts had been waiting for exactly that opening: ten of Yano’s best tamers outside the defensive perimeter for long enough that the pressure on the walls had reached the point where Julius and Arturo, without the main group, had been forced into decisions about what to hold and what to temporarily let give. The kind of decisions that consumed resources faster than they could be replaced and that left marks in the defensive structure that took weeks to repair.
They arrived back barely in time. By a margin nobody would have chosen to repeat.
No one knew if the corruption had gotten its objective this time…
The meeting that followed had the kind of silence at the end that meant everyone had reached the same conclusion simultaneously and nobody needed to say it out loud, but someone had to say it anyway because that was the function of the silence.
“We need to be stronger to send a smaller group next time,” said Ren, which was the obvious conclusion and therefore the one that fell to him to put into words.
Julius nodded with the expression of someone who had already expected it before they started talking, but who had needed the experience to happen so that the younger and more ‘bold’ members of the group arrived at the same place without him having to push them there. Some conclusions had to be lived rather than told.
The city needed better defenses against corruption.
The plan had been in motion for some time: bring every young tamer in the city who hadn’t already been ruined by cultivation errors to Gold rank.
All of them. The entire new generations. Ren’s contributions had accelerated that process in ways the numbers from before his arrival couldn’t have been used to calculate, the cultivation knowledge he had spread, the techniques he had shared without treating them as proprietary, all of it compressing timelines that would otherwise have taken too long. But almost two years still remained before the process was complete, and two years was two years during which the corruption wasn’t going to stop growing and doing what it did.
The outer expeditions grew more difficult.
Not impossible. More difficult in the way that required more resources to produce equivalent results, which was exactly the wrong direction for a system already operating near its capacity if it wanted to accumulate enough to keep elevating so many people.
Eighth grade would give Ren his ‘Mooshito’ at Gold 3.
With that, the task of finally reaching Sirius… of doing for a complete statue what he had done for Selphira and Victor and what the experiments had confirmed was theoretically possible, might finally be within reach.
Day 2600 was three months away.