Novel Full Chapter 1072 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Digi-Fight
Chapter 1072: Chapter 1072 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Digi-Fight
Ren didn’t even tense.
That was the first instinct and it was wrong, because tensing against corruption was giving it exactly the kind of resistance it knew how to consume.
He had learned this the hard way the first time the corruption had been dense enough that aggressive resistance made things worse rather than better. His system had remembered that lesson even when his mind had been too occupied to consciously recall it.
So he relaxed...
Not completely, not the way you relaxed when there was nothing to worry about, but the specific opposite of tensing: keeping the system active, the channels open, the circulation running without giving the corruption a pressure point to push against.
Like keeping water moving so sediment doesn’t have the stillness to settle. Fern would have understood that analogy better than any mana theory Ren had ever written.
He analyzed...
The incoming corruption had a signature, distinct from what the wall’s corruption produced and distinct from what the chamber mutants had carried, though it shared lineage with both.
It had structure, the signature of something cultivated or designed rather than simply generated, repetitive patterns that corresponded directly to the exterior runes and told any system that read them which frequencies to amplify and which to suppress.
Not raw corruption; instructed corruption.
Ren read the patterns...
Deliberately, without urgency, finding the primary amplification axes first and then the secondary ones, looking for the points where the structure was repeated because the points where something is repeated are the points where its limits and weakness are more predictable.
No different in principle from reading the crystallization runes in Selphira or Victor, only more complex and more dynamic, a living flow rather than a static crystal. But the same skill applied.
Selthia’s writing style, which was embedded throughout in the purple runes, had a strange quality: more intense than Liora’s, more precise than Larissa’s, almost artistic in places, hiding small details in the geometry that required real attention to catch. But it had internal logic, and anything with internal logic Ren could eventually read.
He found the first reduction point at two minutes.
Not to stop the flow but to divert a fraction toward an expulsion channel that didn’t carry the effect the corruption was built to deliver. The equivalent of opening a secondary valve to reduce pressure in the main line without shutting anything down.
The advance slowed... Not enough for the danger to clear, but enough to confirm it could be affected, enough to show the system had seams.
The second point took longer because it sat deeper in the pattern and required him to have read enough of the surrounding architecture to know where to look for it. When he found it the additional reduction was smaller but more stable, the kind of adjustment that didn’t easily undo itself even when the system tried to compensate.
He was learning. And while he was learning, the door’s interior space was taking shape around him.
♢♢♢♢
The space was unlike anything Ren had entered before.
Not the empty library of his own mind. Not the abstract beast mental architecture that fusions produced.
This one had the geometry of something built deliberately, a space that responded to the runes outside the way a room responded to the building containing it, the interior defined by the exterior in every proportion.
The floor, if that was the right word, was a translucent blue that Ren recognized as the base color of mana before corruption touched it. The walls shifted that blue progressively toward purple at the margins, and the margins were still moving inward.
The whole space being dyed from the edges toward the center.
"Hello again!"
Selthia stood at the far end, wearing the figure Ren knew but different, fused with the Hydra, which had reached Platinum during the time Ren had spent climbing to Gold. Crystal scales caught the blue-purple light and scattered it.
Corruption and its vast energy network once again gaining advantages that seemed unfair.
The Hydra at that rank was visibly different from how Ren’s looked; brighter and more irregular at the same time, the quality that accelerated corruption-growth produced, results faster and stability lower, the tradeoff written plainly in the surface of every scale.
Beside her, a beast she indicated slightly moving her face with something between a smile and a presentation.
Not what Ren had expected after the thousand-ton mutant insect above, though the connection to some of the appendices it had was there once you knew to look for it.
A compact insectoid creature, Silver rank, with the original architecture before the corruption had altered the base form past recognition: the external plates bright and reflective, the articulation closer to the design it had started as. The parts the corrupted insect had once had, before Selthia had pushed it through too many processes.
A beast ’soul’, extracted from the body before Ren and Liora had finished destroying it in the physical world.
"I don’t have the improved egg to give it a better foundation yet," Selthia said, without particular drama about the limitation.
"But even without your help opening the door to get it, the base skillset is interesting. Very adaptable." She looked at the creature with something approaching fondness, in whatever proportion Selthia had fondness.
"It was fortunate that even while corrupting its physical body so heavily, my mind being so embedded in its system gave me access to its ’soul’. Integrating it into my true system, which is still crystallized, so was a great deal of work. But it was worth it... Before you and your irritating girl-friend destroyed it."
Ren attacked.
He had the fusion active, which meant the power he projected was many times bigger from what he would have had without it, and he used the moment while Selthia was still presenting the beast to drive the purifying light ray toward what might be the corruption’s source point.
"Cheating," Selthia said, without moving.
She split the attack with the Platinum Hydra’s reflective plates, and what wasn’t split reached her already reduced. More resistance than a Platinum 1 tamer had any business having.
"This field," she said, answering a question Ren hadn’t asked aloud. "All that energy from outside, all those years of work, have to be useful for something."
A brief laugh.
"In here I can move considerably more power than I could move out there... Cooonsiderably more."
She had built the chamber for this. Every rune on every wall, every layer of corrupted mana amplification, every mutant used as fuel in the selection system above, all of it had been infrastructure for this interior advantage: this space, where the weight of the room sat behind her side and against his.