Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1069: Chapter 1069 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Secrets - 3

The young man from the Astor family was watching Ren with hope and fear in equal measure, the precise combination that came from calculating in real time that if Ren did what he appeared to be considering, the deal the Astor tamer had already accepted was no longer necessary.

Good in one sense: he wouldn’t be risking himself. Bad in another: his family wouldn’t receive the reduction in their sentence. His face was doing the math openly while he waited to see which side it would land on.

Ren didn’t respond.

He just kept looking at the runes intensely.

He was thinking about what he might understand about these structures if he did it, not about opening the door itself but about what the process would show him, what it would teach about how this kind of architecture worked.

Information no book had... The kind that lived in the doing here and nowhere else.

He was also thinking about Selthia, and about the unknown gap between her reasons for wanting him to try this and whether the things she was saying were true. Those were two different questions, and the answer to one didn’t determine the answer to the other.

"And if you use your guy as an earth elemental sacrifice," Selthia said, letting the silence run as long as it needed before she finished, "you’re also going to run into a compatibility problem... The door reads the state of the central core first at the moment of activation to fix an energy frequency, and this one from my pet is fully corrupted. Sirius’ crystal heart already has corruption in it but it’s not yet compatible with the core. And so the earth-element sacrifice you want to use will need to have corruption above the halfway point as well before the proportions are correct, otherwise the door rejects both of them because what my former pet left behind is the first key."

Nobody reacted to that immediately, at least not visibly.

The Astor tamer processed the new information with a face that genuinely couldn’t decide whether what he’d just heard was good or bad for him personally.

"You’re going to have to wait for both of them to be more corrupted than clean if you’re not connected yourself to the door and will be incapable of reversing the corruption from inside," Selthia continued. "Trying to understand crystal corruption from outside could take the you of now a great deal of time you don’t have, because even though the guardian beast is no longer here my rune network is still active, and eventually I’ll be able to open the door myself, and then the artifact I have positioned elsewhere will come to fill that gap and trap you for me, my darling."

"Never yours! And still an unnecessary risk," Liora said, before anyone else could speak. "Even if everything she’s saying is true, it’s Selthia saying it, and Selthia sure has her own reasons for wanting Ren to do this." She looked at the runes on the walls the way you looked at something when what you really wanted to see was the mechanism behind it. "No!"

"That plan reeks of fatal trap indeed, seriously," Mayo said, with conviction. "Any plan Selthia is actively promoting has to have something inside it that doesn’t work in our favor... That’s not even a question."

"It does benefit me," Selthia said. "Yes, of course it does... But you are already trapped since either option gives me opportunities." She said it with the tone of someone not bothering to deny the accusation, only separating the accusation from the verdict.

"The first option: what I want is for Ren to fail to understand the process. For the nucleus he delivers to become fully corrupted. For that to give me access to his interior space again." A pause. "I have a stronger Hydra now, a bigger one and a new friend... I have a rematch pending."

"If the mana she’s using can be read, she’s telling the truth..."

"Fantastic," Mayo said. "At least she’s honest."

"Or the second option," Selthia continued, without additional inflection, "if he uses the sacrifice and things go wrong that way, those two people end up with corruption in their system and that also gives me an interesting access through them. All my pieces are unfortunately crystallized at Diamond where I can’t change them yet just like you... But this is already in my range of capabilities, and there are tasks that require human hands, things I can’t complete without someone who can move outside my network. I’ll also have time while they’re being corrupted to come collect them with my favorite artifact."

The silence that followed was the kind where the honesty of what had just been said needed a moment to finish landing.

"So whichever option we take benefits you somehow, you’re playing 4D chess to trap Ren in 3D at the end," Mayo said.

"I don’t understand your reference, but... almost any option. Yes." Selthia didn’t apologize for it. "But what I said about the compatibility is also true regardless of me saying it. Both things can be true at the same time."

Ren was looking at the runes above the door.

The same lines Selthia had reorganized to make them more readable. He had been studying them while the exchange moved around him, and somewhere between the confirmation of Selthia’s motives and the silence after, something had shifted in what he was seeing. Not in the runes themselves. In how he was reading them.

They were genuinely part of Selthia’s internal network; she couldn’t lie through them, there was no mark of contradiction integrated into the runes that repeated endlessly like a simple but intense network of nodes, and what they said made sense.

So this was a challenge to understand the corruption directly in the crystal, in both senses at once.

If Selthia wanted access to his interior space for the rematch, what she needed was for Ren to do exactly what she claimed he could do: understand the process well enough that the nucleus he delivered didn’t become corrupted, and be capable of pushing the corruption back from inside the system.

But that was the opposite of a plan designed to make him fail. If she wanted him to fail, the last thing she would do was show him how to succeed, right?

Unless she calculated he wouldn’t be able to win regardless.