Chapter 1234 - Taming the Old World - Still Leading - 2

Chapter 1234: Chapter 1234 - Taming the Old World - Still Leading - 2

That extra injection of raw power would undeniably prove vital in the impending clashes against the sovereign Light and Darkness dragons. And when facing those two ultimate guardians, the absolute strongest entities remaining on the board, Ren was going to need every single microscopic gram of advantage he could scavenge.

The strike force descended upon the dual sanctuary.

It was the exact same subterranean complex where Selthia had previously orchestrated a massive ambush, the very cavern that had been absolutely overflowing with elite mutants, unbreakable artifacts and corrupted purple runes during their last visit. Ren breached the threshold with his guard completely raised, fully expecting to encounter heavy, entrenched resistance.

He found absolutely nothing...

There was no mutant army. He only detected a handful of pathetic, low-tier scouts scattered across the perimeter, clearly left behind merely to monitor the space and trigger an alarm. The intricate runic traps that Liora had aggressively scorched during their previous infiltration were technically repaired, yet they remained entirely deactivated, completely dead like severed electrical wires.

"She siphoned away all the ambient energy," Zhao observed, scanning the massive, empty chambers. The owl and raptor Tamer had miraculously managed to convince Victor again to let him join the descent by weaponizing his impossibly pathetic suffering face.

"That appears to be the case..." Ren meticulously read the residual ethereal signatures using his mana perception. "She utilized this sanctuary for a brief extra period, and likely the exact second her network registered our presence at the Wood ruin, she quickly evacuated her resources from the surrounding nodes to prevent their destruction. She absolutely refuses to risk losing her bigger biological assets in skirmishes she perfectly knows she cannot win."

"Then why hasn’t she launched a decisive strike against the remaining dragons?"

Ren did not possess the complete, verified answer, but he harbored a grim tactical suspicion. "She is likely hoarding her assets and waiting. Storing raw energy, amassing mutant biomass, consolidating everything. But she actively refuses to strike the guardians because she knows that if she commits her forces to a siege, we will immediately flank her and try to steal the prize with all we have. She is deliberately retreating, patiently waiting for us to engage one dragon so she can simultaneously ambush the other on the opposite side of the continent. But I absolutely do not like how cleanly she surrendered this territory... She likely can expand a lot more and waiting is also not a winning strategy for us, the dome won’t last forever."

♢♢♢♢

Ren secured his synthesized crystal without a single complication.

And this specific amplifier proved to be the most structurally fascinating asset he had got to date.

It was not merely a versatile wildcard like the others, capable of seamlessly adapting to any combination or amplification of elemental energies. This unique crystal featured microscopic, glowing golden veins weaving through its body, a direct ethereal manifestation of his mushroom’s special power that Ren had learned to instantly recognize.

And those golden veins provided concrete, undeniable runic upgrades: it generated a noticeably higher barrier density and power output than the standard amplifiers, boasted superior structural resistance, and contained a larger overall energy capacity.

Ren spun the glowing gem in the air, his eyes tracking the light. It was an upgraded wildcard. It was exactly the caliber of tool that dictated the difference between life and death in a clash against a sovereign guardian.

It was another flawless, completely free victory...

Ren secured the crystal within his shadow space, unable to suppress the dark, nagging thought that invariably followed any easy unearned feeling of fortune.

Easy victories never lasted forever.

Ren rapidly ordered the strike force back to Yano.

They had already dispatched the majority of the necessary avian messengers, coordinating logistics with the capital’s high command, reporting the successful reclamation of the sanctuary and the acquisition of the new amplifiers. The tactical blueprint for the coming days was crystalline in Ren’s mind, perfectly ordered despite the suffocating background noise of his newfound existential doubts.

Reinforce the monolithic prison a fraction more each day. Finish purging the jagged crystals from his mana-biological system. And then, without any further hesitation, launch a direct offensive against the first dragon.

The sovereign Darkness dragon of Yano.

Ren cast one final, lingering memory back to the hidden chamber of the first sanctuary, focusing on the small, human-shaped indentation that was now permanently sealed, and he meticulously locked everything he had learned down there in the exact same mental vault where he stored all the terrifying puzzles he could not solve today.

♢♢♢♢

Back in the capital, Ren immediately initiated his medical protocol.

He deliberately burned through exactly half of his available mana reserves to aggressively dissolve the stubborn clusters of crystal choking his pathways. This session successfully reclaimed 12% of his system.

It was a highly encouraging metric compared to his initial attempt, where that exact same expenditure had only yielded a meager 9% recovery. The ethereal efficiency was undeniably compounding as the blockages cleared; every single jagged shard he melted away facilitated the destruction of the next.

His internal network was now operating at a stable 67% capacity.

Tomorrow, he would almost certainly secure at least a 13% yield with the exact same output. The bottleneck was that this specific healing process did not rely on raw data processing power since the parts were very small. Synchronizing with Wei’s fungal network or linking to the girls’ ethereal tethers offered almost absolutely no advantage here; they could lend him massive computational bandwidth, but they could not grant him their reserves.

What Ren desperately required was a significantly larger system capacity.

There was one blindingly obvious, astonishingly reckless method to achieve that: injecting their raw, external mana directly into his core. However, executing a maneuver like that right now, while his system remained fractured and microscopic crystals still jammed the flow, was precisely the kind of arrogant gamble that would cost him vastly more than it would gain. The sudden influx of mana pressure would simply enlarge the trapped crystals, permanently shattering ethereal arteries that were on the verge of healing naturally.

The risk was absolutely not worth the reward.

Patience, therefore, was his only viable weapon. The recovery would simply have to dictate its own pace.