Chapter 1290 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction

Chapter 1290: Chapter 1290 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction

Ren lowered his eyes back to the bottom half of Arturo’s report, his brow furrowing as a specific set of figures caught him off guard.

"She sent a detachment of her elite units into the mountains to force-breed Diamonds, using the exact cannibalization method Sirius and Liu witnessed in the southern cavern," Ren said, his finger tracing the column of numbers.

"At the same time, she sent the rest into the outer rings to mass-produce standard beasts. Looking at Arturo’s deductions here..." He paused, running the math in his head a second time in disbelief. "She went from two hundred and fifty Platinums back up to five hundred. She almost doubled her main army in less than a day. What has it been, sixteen hours?"

The room went quiet as the weight of that timeframe settled in.

Doubling a force of hundreds of Platinum horrors in two-thirds of a day was an absurd, unprecedented rate of production. Ren knew the grim arithmetic of the corruption’s food chain by heart.

Under the old baseline, it took two base Silver beasts devouring each other to birth a Silver 2, and four to make a Silver 3. Moving up the ladder required forty base units for a Gold 1, eighty for a Gold 2, and one hundred and twenty for a Gold 3. By the time a single mutant breached the Platinum 1 threshold, it had consumed the equivalent of one thousand two hundred base Silver creatures.

The corruption’s runic system had always traded energy efficiency for speed, and at the highest tiers, that conversion rate became downright gluttonous. Those twelve hundred base units doubled to twenty-four hundred for a Platinum 2, climbed to nearly five thousand for a Platinum 3, and then skyrocketed to almost fifty thousand for a single Diamond.

Fifty thousand original Silver mutants, ground down and compressed into a single walking mountain of flesh.

Ren knew the outer Platinum rings bypassed a huge chunk of that bottleneck; out in the deep wilds, devouring a single native Platinum beast was enough to spawn a mutant of the same rank... Even so, visualizing the sheer caloric and energetic equivalence required to push Selthia’s existing army up the ranks made his head spin.

Driving the growth limit of an ethereal network that massive seemingly required an ocean of mana.

’Wait a second,’ Ren thought, following the ecological implications of that hunger.

If Selthia had simply chosen to sit back for a while, letting her swarm graze on the outer Platinum rings to build an unstoppable tide, she would have sucked those territories completely dry in a matter of weeks.

No matter how vast the outer rings were, the natural world could not replenish beasts fast enough to feed a parasite scaling at this rate. The corruption had reached a stage of growth that the planet itself could not sustain indefinitely, making it an ecological dead end in the long run, yet a terrifyingly lethal threat in the immediate present.

Ren pieced together the mechanics behind this sudden acceleration.

This explosion in breeding speed had only become possible after Selthia’s beasts breached the Platinum threshold, a milestone she originally achieved by capturing the deep rune chambers inside the ancient ruins.

Now, by feeding the southern Shadow Core into her network, the entire ethereal grid had grown denser and more efficient. That single dark catalyst had pushed her production speed into another exponential leap.

Every single asset the corruption absorbed, whether it was an ancient ruin, a guardian’s core, or a new elemental affinity, triggered a dangerous surge in its overall capacity.

"That is why we cannot let her walk away with a single piece of the Light Dragons this time," Ren murmured, speaking mostly to himself as his grip tightened on the scroll. "Every prize she swallows widens the throat of the hive. It is like throwing dry timber into a furnace; the hotter her network burns, the faster it devours everything around it."

As he stared at the map, one final loose thread tied itself together in his mind.

The ancient rune chambers Selthia controlled inside the captured ruins were acting as signal amplifiers and incubators for the horde...

Holding those specific architectural nodes was likely what allowed her mutants to digest mana and scale their ranks so rapidly. Once Liora had a moment to breathe and recover her strength, sending her out to systematically incinerate those ruin chambers might be the key to crippling the swarm’s production line.

It was a solution for another day, as they had an incoming siege to survive first, so Ren filed the target away in the back of his mind.

????

Ren ran a last silent simulation in his head, the power of one of Selthia’s beasts...

And ran the step-by-step evolution of Selthia’s army from the beginning of the conflict to this exact hour.

In the early to mid stages of her campaign, the Witch’s Gold-rank mutants had been big but nothing special. If one of those creatures crossed paths with a native Platinum beast in the outer rings, the wild predator could crush it with a single, casual swipe.

Back then, Selthia would have needed to throw dozens of Golds into the meat grinder just to chip away at a wild Platinum’s scales and drain its stamina. Her swarm had to rely on constant energy recycling, devouring their own fallen on the spot just to drag the fight out long enough to wear a superior opponent down.

Without the ancient ruin chambers to force-breed Platinums, that grueling attrition rate made expansion into the outer rings a losing proposition.

The energy she spent to kill a wild beast was greater than the prize she got back. That bottleneck was the sole reason her territory had remained stagnant for so long.

Then came the second phase, when she unlocked the deep ritual chambers, like the underground trap that had nearly claimed Ren’s life.

With those runic incubators online, she finally began fielding her own Platinum-tier horrors. Her frontline beasts grew thicker carapaces and dense enough muscle to survive several direct hits from wild equivalents.

Even so, they were still fighting dry... They lacked elemental affinities, which left them at a severe disadvantage against the specialized beasts of the deep wilds. Against a native Fire Platinum, which boasted lethal offensive output, or a Water Platinum, which could mend torn flesh almost as fast as it was cut, Selthia’s early Platinums still lost the one-on-one exchanges.

She could expand her borders, though the pace remained a slow, costly crawl.

That brought the simulation to the present day, where her horde had absorbed both the resistance and the active control of five base elements, plus the newly acquired shadow affinity.

In a head-to-head clash today, one of Selthia’s Platinums still had slightly lower raw output in any single element compared to a wild specialist.

However, her creatures now held a massive advantage in durability and elemental versatility.

A mutant that could answer wildfire with a shield of water, or ground a wind strike with earth mana, was no longer cannon fodder; it was a genuine contender.

Worse still was the logistics of their sustain. If a wild Platinum managed to maul one of Selthia’s elites during a fight, the injured mutant simply had to reach back, grab a few accompanying Silvers or a single Gold from its own 500 smaller pack, and swallow them whole. The runic digestion would mend its broken bones on the spot, push its core density a fraction higher, and allow it to turn around and butcher the exhausted wild beast that had wounded it a moment prior.

Looking at the completed picture, Ren grasped the true scale of the crisis sitting on their doorstep.

Selthia had reached a real tipping point where she could double the size of her elite army on an almost daily basis.

That rate would naturally dip a bit once her swarm pushed deeper into the wider outer rings, where the sheer geographical distances took longer to cross and the native beasts operated in tight, symbiotic packs that defended one another.

Yet even accounting for that friction, her current rate of expansion was staggering.

????

"She is being foolish again," Ren said, looking up from the parchment with a strange note of pity in his voice.

"Why do you say that?" Luna asked, stepping closer to his side.

"Because she finally unlocked a terrifying rate of growth, and she is squandering it by attacking us right now while her numbers are still manageable," Ren explained, gesturing to the troop counts on the map.