Chapter 1308 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 12

Chapter 1308: Chapter 1308 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 12

The Light Dragon devoured the chimeric creature whole...

But the golden mushroom beast was not truly defeated, nor was it digested. The myriad of stolen survival traits it had acquired during its long exile allowed it to survive inside the guardian’s stomach.

It quietly extended its golden fungal threads throughout the host’s body, silently siphoning the dragon’s ambient energy and slowly metamorphosing over the years, without anyone, not even the guardian itself, realizing it was still alive.

That history explained everything...

It explained the horrific sight Ren had witnessed inside the chest cavity.

The golden hyphae suffocating the core.

The baffling ease with which the dragon had fallen, because the guardian had never been operating at its true peak; it had been secretly drained from the inside out for years.

It explained why the golden network felt so terrifyingly identical to the mycelium that had been woven through Ren’s own ’rebirth’ place.

But Ren did not know much of that history.

He knew little of the ruined forest, nothing of the chimeric creature, or the rogue explorer who had documented it. To Ren, there was only a familiar fungal web wrapped around a stolen core, a sickening premonition in his gut, and a headless corpse that was currently pulling itself off the ground when it should be turning into dust.

????

The golden creature was finally awake.

It woke because its massive host had died.

And it woke because a vile, unmistakable surge of corrupted energy had just brushed against its golden threads.

The tiny pulse of dark ether Ren had used to purge the core had acted as an alarm bell.

That peculiar corrupted frequency was the only thing in the world the chimeric creature recognized as its mortal enemy. It was the exact same poison that had burned the net in its home forest to ash years ago.

It was the same energy the creature had sworn an oath to annihilate when the purple horde slaughtered the fungi its network depended on.

It had just felt that poison again.

It felt it radiating directly from Ren.

The small pulse of corruption Ren had summoned to kill the hyphae and secure his prize had not gone unnoticed. The creature recognized the scent of the venom it had sworn to avenge. It awoke inside the ruined shell of its host with a single, overriding directive hardwired into its aberrant nature.

Annihilate the source of the corruption...

The severed neck of the white dragon no longer ended in a dragon head.

Instead, massive clusters of golden mushrooms erupted from the ruined flesh, growing at a visible, sickening speed and taking the darkness and fire as new energy.

They anchored themselves to the dead light tissue, rapidly bridging the gaping wounds. Where the guardian’s head used to be, a colossal, pulsing mass of golden fungi bloomed, crowning the reanimated corpse and throbbing with a heartbeat of its own.

The corpse was no longer just a light specialist, any energy could be absorbed and used.

Seven eyes snapped open across the surface of that golden mass.

Not five, as Kieran had seen in the forest years ago. There were seven now. Red, blue, green, brown, grey, black and white.

Each eye glowed with a distinct, hypnotic movement, their irises swirling in dizzying patterns of light designed to invade the mind of anyone foolish enough to meet their gaze.

All seven eyes locked directly onto Ren.

A primal spike of danger pierced Ren’s chest. It was a raw, paralyzing terror he had not felt since he was ten years old, staring into the hypnotic eyes of the frogs in his very first forest adventure.

The reanimated carcass of the Light Dragon drew itself up to its full, towering height.

"TAKE COVER!" Ren roared, jumping desperately sideways. "DO NOT LOOK AT ITS EYES!"

The golden mass crowning the corpse split open, revealing a cavernous maw, and fired.

The concentrated light beam of the ancient chimeric creature, a devastating weapon forged from golden fungi and centuries of buried hatred, tore across the southern sky, aimed squarely at the only enemy its biology recognized.

????

A beam of concentrated radiance tore across the sky.

It was the stolen energy the parasitic creature had been hoarding from its host for years, released all at once in a blinding flash aimed straight at Ren.

The beam missed him by a fraction of an inch; he could feel the blistering heat of the attack singe the air beside his face.

Ren instantly channeled a massive surge of ether into his eyes, causing them to glow with a deep jade hue. Even with that mana shielding, he purposefully kept the creature’s seven hypnotic eyes at the very edge of his peripheral vision, refusing to look at them dead-on.

Something primal in his gut warned him that staring directly into those swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns would be a mistake.

Whatever was wearing the dragon’s corpse possessed abilities completely alien to a guardian, yet eerily similar to certain predatory traits found in the deepest southern jungles. Why did a beast born of light possess such traits?

However, this was no time for academic questions. It was time to fight.

Ren reorganized his squad on the fly. "Liora, keep your spiritual fire locked on the heavy water pooling on the ground, do not let that inferno die out! The rest of you, flank it and hammer the sides leading toward the stomach from behind! I will draw its attention from the front!"

The reanimated carcass was bulky and sluggish compared to the natural grace the Light Guardian once possessed. Yet, it was fueled by an ocean of stolen power, and every single beam it fired carried enough output to cut a Platinum-tier Tamer in half without breaking a sweat.

Ren sent his Hydra into a steep dive, narrowly dodging a second barrage, and focused his senses on the only thing that mattered. He was hunting the new core, the massive energy signature he had felt swelling in the beast’s gut, the artificial heart acting as a substitute for the one he had just claimed.

His heightened perception locked onto the target immediately, a dense, throbbing presence buried deep within the golden mass.

With a single mental command, he brought the Hydra’s jaws to bear and unleashed a beam of negative light straight down from the clouds.

The attack never reached its mark.

The beam easily bypassed the dead white flesh of the dragon, but right before it hit the artificial core, it crashed against an invisible barrier. To Ren’s surprise, a portion of the attack, even the negative shadow ether, was actively absorbed into the shield.