Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1068: Chapter 1068 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Secrets - 2

Young, younger than Ren had expected, with the face of someone who had processed the terms of the arrangement and arrived at the conclusion that it was the best deal available in his situation: survive the crystallization, which Ren would reverse afterward, and have his family’s remaining penalties reduced by half.

The sad math of someone who understood they were not in a position to negotiate and had been offered more than their situation strictly justified.

Arguably a generous deal.

It was the deal that corresponded to what they had done and what they were able to offer.

The Astor tamer was watching the door with the attention that came from not being able to look away from something one very much wanted to look away from, the fixed gaze of someone applying the full force of their willpower to remaining still.

It was a very convincing argument to stay still.

Ren looked at him. Looked at the earth nucleus readable in his system for anyone with the sensitivity to find it. Then looked at the door and at Sirius’s nucleus integrated into its surface, and began calculating what came after.

He couldn’t avoid feeling something like guilt, but it was necessary.

Until a voice arrived from everywhere.

"You guys don’t have to be so cruel, with the handsome chosen of the stinking devouring light right here."

Nobody in the group took longer than a second to recognize it.

Selthia again... No body, no projection, no physical presence like she’d had minutes before, but present in the space of the chamber regardless, in a way that took a moment to locate because it didn’t come from any specific point but from all of them simultaneously, each syllable arriving from a slightly different direction, the voice distributed through the architecture.

"Your tumor burned pretty well based on the smell," Mayo said. "Are you still here for some reason or do you just enjoy making the atmosphere unpleasant with your stench?"

"Ha, I’ll admit the unjust focus of that beautiful Hydra’s ray hurt somewhat, especially coming from the interesting boy that has a matching beast with me. That hit left me quiet for a moment," Selthia said, with the tone of someone conceding a point that still doesn’t particularly affect them.

"I went quiet when I realized there was no point in asking you to stop anymore. But I’m still bored of being alone, and this chamber is integrated into my network. I can see and hear everything in it even without being able to project myself or attack. I lost those two things with the guardian..." A pause that had the texture of someone settling in rather than finishing. "But existing here costs me nothing now. So here I am."

Ren looked at the walls with a strong inclination to break the runes and end the conversation, but he didn’t know how they would react in the chamber’s structure or whether he had enough power left to affect walls that were virtually indestructible.

He left them alone for now...

The voice changed direction with each syllable, not randomly but following a pattern, activating different runes in sequence in a simple brain to produce the acoustic illusion of something coming from everywhere at once.

The kind of design that made every surface in the chamber participate in transmitting what one part of it sent, a single large distributed system that happened to function like a very old and very strange speaker.

The runes were also tracking his position. And other things... He felt observed in a way that had nothing to do with eyes.

"What I’m proposing, handsome," Selthia continued, "is simple. You can place your own core there. You won’t fully crystallize; only the beast of your choice, momentarily, you could open the door even alone with 2 cores. Your system is different from ordinary people’s, and these doors were designed for entities like us. And you are one of them." A brief pause with something like significance placed in it.

"Like me..."

"A very obvious trap for someone who was supposedly being quiet and thinking," Mayo said. "Do you think we’re idiots?"

"It’s not a trap," Selthia said. And she said it with enough absence of urgency that it sounded different from how a trap would sound. "You and I were built to interact with these systems in ways others aren’t. They’re being punished by error; their full crystalisation it’s only a side effect of trying to carry a task too large for them. This is free information... Do with it what you want."

"There’s no need for you to confirm any of it, Ren," Liora said, with the firmness of someone who had arrived at a conclusion and wasn’t moving from it. She looked at the young Astor tamer. "We have what we need. And if you end up crystallized, we’re all left without the only person who can do anything about crystallization, which is exactly what she wants."

Ren nodded.

Then the purple runes above the door moved.

Not all of them; only the ones along the upper portion of the frame, a few non-purple lines that became visible when the corrupted ones reorganized themselves differently while Selthia did whatever she did when she worked through the network.

The resulting pattern was simpler than the walls, more readable, the kind of structure Ren could try to parse even if parsing it came at a cost.

"If you can understand even a fraction of it," Selthia said, "that’s exactly what I’m talking about."

Ren looked at them.

It took time... The runes carried layers of complexity and each layer contradicted or nuanced the one above or below in ways that made reading only the surface mean reading something different from what was actually written there. But in the lines Selthia had cleared and arranged in order there was something more accessible, as if someone had taken a complicated text and highlighted the sections that could be understood without the full context.

What they said, or what Ren believed they said after a long stretch of looking at them, was that the door had other activation modes. Another for those the system already recognized as part of itself.

He believed now.

He wasn’t certain... The difference between believing you were reading something and actually reading it was precisely what made this dangerous to consider, and he was aware of that gap while he stood in it.

But he couldn’t rule it out completely.

"Ren." Liora’s voice had the tone it had when a name was the complete instruction.

He looked at her.

She was looking at him with the expression she had when she had read something in his face that she didn’t like and needed to confirm she had read it wrong.

She hadn’t read it wrong.

Mayo looked at him too. Then at Liora. Then back at Ren with the face of someone who had just updated an evaluation in a direction they hadn’t anticipated.

"He’s not actually considering it, right?" Mayo said.