Chapter 1233 - Taming the Old World - Still Leading

Chapter 1233: Chapter 1233 - Taming the Old World - Still Leading

Consequently, Ren settled on an intermediate protocol to save some stress.

He would proactively deny Moosh any absolute administrative access to his mind or memories whenever the exhausted beast finally woke up from its coma... Just some segmented access with the same excuse of hiding any private matters with the girls.

This was absolutely not an accusation, nor was it intended as a punishment; it was a necessary precaution. Ren would firmly close that specific, vulnerable sector of their ethereal tether, the deep connection that allowed the mushroom to casually read his most intimate, unfiltered thoughts whenever it wanted to catch up on current events.

He would maintain this mental firewall at least until the hypothetical day they finally breached the third vault and he could listen to the rest of the engineer’s encrypted briefing.

Furthermore, there was a brilliant, built-in diagnostic test embedded within this precaution.

If Mooshito ever explicitly requested the Seed Fusion Potion in the future, Ren would instantly recognize the concealed, parasitic intent. The ancient engineer’s warning effectively served as a lie detector; any sudden, uncharacteristic interest the mushroom displayed in that specific upgrade would be a glaring, undeniable red flag.

Even so, a sharp, suffocating ache tightened Ren’s chest just contemplating the scenario.

He desperately did not want to believe that Moosh had been deceiving him for all this time. Perhaps the reality was vastly more complex than the engineer had managed to convey in a rushed, heavily monitored broadcast. Perhaps the golden mushroom was completely ignorant of the apocalyptic programming buried deep within its own code; perhaps the ultimate betrayal was not a conscious, malicious decision, but a latent, overriding biological mechanism, something that triggered entirely without the creature’s consent.

There were simply far too many crucial pieces missing from the board.

Ren deliberately chose to shelve the crisis. He would carefully archive the agonizing doubt, refusing to actively feed the paranoia.

He would patiently wait for the day, assuming they survived long enough to see it, when he finally stood inside the chamber of the third vault and could listen to the complete, unredacted truth.

Until that moment arrived, he would maintain a wall of silent, ironclad precaution, and absolutely nothing more.

For now, there were far more pressing matters demanding his focus...

Two sovereign dragons remained on the board, holding their respective cores and rings. The monstrous entity trapped within the star-prison was relentlessly clawing its way to freedom. His own mana-biological system was only partially recovered. And the world, ultimately, lacked the basic courtesy to pause while Ren processed a profound existential crisis regarding his supposed lifelong companion.

Ren swept his gaze across the silent chamber of the newly claimed first sanctuary, reflecting on a specific phrase the ancient engineer had casually dropped in the recording.

He had referred to this half of the divided world as a prison.

Ren absolutely did not share that sentiment.

This was his home.

He possessed zero concrete intelligence regarding what lay on the other side of the planetary divide, past the blinding rift of light, in the territories he only recognized from ancient murals and hypotheses. But here, on this specific side of the chasm, he had everything that truly mattered.

His people.

His parents.

The three beautiful women who loved him.

His friends who had forged themselves into elite commanders... And a grumpy, brilliant spore mushroom that he now, agonizingly, had to treat with a sliver of calculated distrust.

Perhaps the landscape during the engineer’s era had been very different. Perhaps back then, with the sovereign dragons exercising absolute dominion and humanity ’desperately hiding in the cracks’, this half of the world genuinely had been a brutal prison, or perhaps something even worse.

But to Ren, in this current moment, this world (as savage and undeniably cruel as it could be) was also profoundly fascinating, and undeniably beautiful.

It was a domain worth bleeding for; he had absolutely no desire to escape it.

Ren sharply slapped his own cheeks with both hands, the solid thud of organic flesh in the right meeting also the cold clink of Diamond-rank crystal in the left, physically shaking the paralyzing doubts from his mind.

"Enough," he muttered to himself. "I will dissect that nightmare later..."

Fortunately, the corruption seemed to understand that engaging the Vanguard today would yield absolutely nothing beyond a massive depletion of resources. The entire incursion had been a flawless, clean victory, remarkably similar to the miraculous extraction of Luna’s mother and aunt from the Light and Darkness ruins.

He turned toward the ancient doorway, facing his loyal elites and the distant promise of surface light.

And he began the long ascent...

Somewhere near the cavern entrance, a certain Qilin prince was likely interrogating Zhao with relentless insistence regarding the events unfolding below, while Min and Mayo eagerly fed the royal completely fabricated, wildly exaggerated tales of what did NOT happen just to witness his horrified reactions.

♢♢♢♢

Before officially setting a course for the capital, Ren diverted the strike force south and then slightly west, charting a path toward the designated Wood zone.

Exiting the Wood sanctuary, which ironically sat deep within the Shadow zone and not this one, he took them to go directly to the dual Wind and Earth ruin.

Because that was the exact geographic coordinate where he had cloned his Mantis core a while ago. Furthermore, one of the ancient pedestals inside had previously been occupied by Sirius’s corrupted core, leaving only a single slot available. However, Sirius had since been liberated; his core was no longer entombed in that subterranean chamber. This meant a pedestal currently sat entirely vacant, and Ren possessed the means to exploit it.

Utilizing his golden mushroom, exactly as Mooshito had explained shortly before slipping back into its coma, the process was remarkably simple. He merely needed to compress the fungal core into the most spherical shape possible, and the natural encystation sequence had already handled the vast majority of the form heavy lifting.

Through this specific method, Ren could successfully synthesize a second elemental amplifier aside from his friend’s wood one.

Technically, it would be his seventh, assuming one counted the five sovereign crystals he had left to power the runic array of the star-prison...