Chapter 1304 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 8

Chapter 1304: Chapter 1304 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 8

The Light Dragon possessed zero extra defensive countermeasures against the onslaught.

And against every historical precedent, the exact outcome Ren had engineered came to pass better than expected.

The Light Guardian, the ancient healer universally feared as the most resilient creature on the continent, the beast whose prodigious regeneration was supposed to drag any battle out into a grueling marathon, finally exposed its heart.

And it took exactly five minutes.

Through the torn flesh of its underbelly, framed by the powerful darkness of his own negative beam, Ren saw it. The transcendent, pulsing core of the guardian shone through the layers of radiant muscle that were currently dissolving faster than they could knit back together.

Five minutes... To break the dragon that was supposed to outlast them all by pure regeneration.

Ren had achieved the impossible because he had not relied on some mid brute force to win a war of attrition. He had arrived armed with the perfect executioner’s tools.

He brought the heavy black water that the light element could not physically repel.

He brought negative light to cancel the beast’s very essence.

He brought five perfectly synchronized Tamers overflowing with raw dragon ether.

Every single variable had been meticulously calculated to ensure the world’s most stubborn healer fell not to exhaustion, but because it had finally met a damage output it could not out-heal.

"There it is," Ren murmured, the beam of negative light still roaring from the Hydra beneath him. "We almost have it. Just a little more."

The five commanders pressed their advantage, driving their strikes deeper toward the exposed core, racing to conclude a legendary siege in a matter of minutes.

They had actually pulled it off...

The Light Dragon fell in record time.

The relentless assault from the four dual-contract Tamers, the agonizing burn of the heavy black water, and the existential cancellation of Ren’s negative light beam had collectively torn a massive, gaping crater into the guardian’s chest. Through the ruined flesh of its underbelly, the transcendent core lay completely exposed.

Ren did not waste a single second.

He dropped from the broad back of his Jade Hydra, executing a rapid succession of short-range jumps that carried him directly into the hollowed-out chest cavity of the fallen behemoth.

But the moment his boots touched down inside the glowing crater, something felt profoundly wrong.

????

Ren stared at the core, his brow furrowing in deep confusion.

The heart of a Light Guardian was supposed to be a white sphere of absolute, blinding purity, the physical condensation of untainted radiance.

This core was not pure...

It was covered in a dense, intricate network of golden veins. Thick, pulsing lines wrapped around the brilliant sphere, forming a living web that throbbed with a heartbeat entirely separate from the dragon’s own rhythm.

And Ren recognized those golden lines.

He recognized them entirely too well... He knew them intimately.

They looked identical, in a way that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, to the mycelium hyphae of his own symbiotic mushroom.

They were a perfect match for the golden mana network Mooshito had meticulously farmed for evolution energy in the now supposedly gone cradle, that energy that ran throughout Ren’s and Mooshy’s system making it wider and stronger, the very same system that was now able to contain the corruption, granted him his supernatural perception, and anchored his mind to the world.

It was the exact same mana texture.

The exact same golden luminescence from those ancient spores.

The exact same pattern of interwoven filaments.

Ren slowly lifted his gaze from the core, looking at the surrounding cavern of the dragon’s chest cavity with new eyes. Now that the blinding glare of the guardian had dimmed, and he knew exactly what to look for, he saw the horrifying truth...

The golden veins were not just wrapped around the core.

They were everywhere.

They spread deep into the surrounding walls of glowing tissue, branching through the dragon’s internal organs like an invasive root system that had hijacked the creature from the inside out.

The Light Guardian had not been a pristine, untouchable being.

Something had been living inside it... Something had taken root in the dark, growing silently within the beast’s chest, tangling its golden threads through the guardian’s organs, its core, and its very essence.

A cold, sobering realization settled over Ren’s thoughts.

’Was the dragon not fighting at full strength then?’

That single question explained everything. It explained why the execution had gone so smoothly, following his theoretical blueprint to the letter and even better.

It explained why the most resilient dragon in the world, the legendary healer that should have dragged this battle out for at least days, had crumbled in five minutes against a strike team that, no matter how perfectly coordinated, should not have been able to overpower a prime guardian that quickly.

He hadn’t fought a Light Dragon at the peak of its power... He had fought a compromised host.

He had executed a beast that was already weakened, severely parasitized, and actively being consumed from the inside by this sprawling golden network.

A terrible premonition settled heavily in Ren’s gut.

Still, he could not afford to squander the opening. The core was right there, exposed and within arm’s reach. Whatever this invasive fungal network was, the prize remained the prize, and humanity desperately needed it.

He reached out to rip the core free from the thick root system anchoring it in place.

If his theory was correct, Ren held a distinct advantage here.

If this golden web was indeed fungal in nature, a biological cousin to Mooshito and his own internal network, then Ren knew its exact weaknesses. He had spent years coexisting with a parasitic web just like this one. He knew exactly what made it thrive, and he knew exactly what killed it.

And the fastest way to kill a golden fungal network was pure corruption.

Or, more accurately, the two opposing forces mutually canceled each other out.

Inside Ren’s own body, he had to manage the two energies with painstaking care, routing them through separate, insulated channels. If he allowed the golden mycelium energy and the purple corruption to clash directly without his strict supervision, they aggressively annihilated one another.