Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1067: Chapter 1067 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Secrets

The fusion dissolved with the particular kind of exhaustion that settled in when someone had been sustaining something longer than they would have preferred.

Like a sprint held until you come out the other side breathing hard; it didn’t leave you emptied for the rest of the day, but it asked for real effort, and the asking was felt in the specific way that high-intensity efforts were felt, not in the bones but in the system around the bones.

Liora was more depleted than Ren, which was predictable and no more comfortable for being predictable. Her maximum time in fusion was shorter, the cost per minute higher, and although both of them had more than half their energy left, the distribution between them wasn’t even. Ren noticed it and didn’t mention it, because saying it changed nothing and Liora wasn’t the kind of person who needed her own state pointed out to her in order to know it.

The enormous mutant beast dissolved slowly.

Not the way the mutants from the upper levels had died; those had remained as bodies after being defeated. This one converted into energy while it went, and what was visible in the last moments of the process was the spherical internal structure of something that had been built a specific way, the right size for the door, the right shape for a purpose.

The kind of design that matched what Selthia had said: a guardian beast, produced toward a single specific objective.

Ren confirmed it while watching the last traces dissipate and filed the confirmation in the place where he kept information that would matter later.

The group returned gradually, with the measured caution of people who had assessed that the risk had decreased but hadn’t decided it had decreased enough to drop their guard completely. The guards arrived in the formation they held when there was no direct order to follow, alert and ready for immediate combat, the posture of people whose judgment about the remaining risk was shaped by the chamber they were standing in.

The purple runes on the walls, layered and repeated to the point of obsession, created a discomfort that wasn’t direct danger but the feeling of being inside a space not designed to have people in it.

Mayo arrived with the expression she had when she had just been close to something that would have made an interesting Chapter.

Ren lifted the nucleus from the fallen beast.

It was still partly purple, the proportion of corruption more complete and advanced than in Sirius’s crystal, which was still affected but hadn’t reached the halfway point yet.

The spherical crystal in his palm carried the weight and structure of something that had been part of a different beast and that was still what would give him access to whatever was on the other side of a door he couldn’t cross directly.

He couldn’t help analyzing it before moving on.

He looked again at the corrupt runes on the walls.

Looked at the crystals...

Calculated what Selthia had been building toward, what would have needed to happen for the process to become irreversible, and what remained between the current state and that point.

"We need to integrate it," he said. "And to integrate it we need to get close to the door so... Time to bring in the sacrifices."

Shizu stepped forward.

She positioned herself close to the door, closer to it than anyone else in the group, with the posture of someone who had been waiting for exactly this instruction and had waited for it.

"Now, Lord Ren?"

Ren nodded, he couldn’t approach the door himself.

The crystallizing beam didn’t distinguish between someone coming to activate it correctly and someone coming for any other reason; it distinguished between whoever carried the correct elements for the activation to work and whoever didn’t, and Ren carried the element that was needed but couldn’t be the one left incapacitated when he was the one who was supposed to be releasing everyone else.

But there were people who could be the sacrifice.

Shizu’s Wolverine had the correct element and the capability, but she wouldn’t be the one in front either, because they had brought some of the people who had done enough that nobody in Yano was going to protest too loudly about what was being asked of them. Among them, members of the families of Astor and Jin.

Ren looked at them, covered in saliva, tied up and kneeling on the floor, wide-eyed.

They looked back at him with the varied expressions of people who understood why they were there but were still processing the fact that being there was real, that the thing they had understood intellectually was happening with their bodies in it.

"Yes," Ren said. "Now."

Getting them here had not been simple.

The families that had helped Orion were not what they had been before the ceremony. The fines and penalties had left them what was needed to exist as factions on paper, and the Gold-rank tamers they had once had were fewer between the battle and the ones who had chosen regular military service, the ones who had migrated toward other territories when it became clear that their family’s political position wasn’t going to recover quickly, and the ones who simply were no longer there.

What remained was enough for what was needed, barely, but enough.

Through unofficial channels obviously.

No document was going to record this precisely as it was. There was language for these things, the language that castle protocols used when something necessary didn’t have a box to fit in on the standard forms, and Julius was a skilled enough ’administrator’ to have anticipated that this expedition was going to require that language before Selphira asked him for it.

The one who met the required elemental opposition to wind was from the Astor family. An earth tamer, Gold 1, with the nucleus of the correct element for what the door needed as its second component.

He looked at the door, then at Ren, then at the door again.

Whatever he saw in Ren’s face told him that looking at the door was the correct use of his next few seconds.