Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 527: Chapter 527 – Taming the Fourth Year: The Weight of Success (Part 2)

The academy had been forced to negotiate a cap on his resource allocations to avoid extreme expenses, but fortunately, the Ashenway and Dravenholm families had given a subsidized amount to increase the limit.

Yet even this generosity paled compared to the income he generated through his written cultivation methods, sales of innovative items, and acquisition of incredibly high-quality resources.

Wei, the professor who had once publicly humiliated him, now worked as his personal editor and copyist. The irony wasn’t lost on either of them, but Wei had proven surprisingly skilled at refining Ren’s technical explanations and making them accessible to less advanced cultivators.

“Your understanding is extraordinary,” Wei had admitted during one of their editing sessions, “but your explanations often are random or assume knowledge that most people simply don’t have. You need to remember what it was like before you knew everything.”

Together they had produced over a hundred cultivation manuals that were sold to the kingdom for prices that would have made the Patinder family of some years ago weep with joy.

The millions of crystals he had accumulated represented real wealth… the kind of fortune that could change lives. But Ren intended to cultivate to high levels, and his mathematical skills were sufficient to know that these millions would disappear quickly once he began seeking more Gold-rank and higher resources for his fungus.

A certain banker would surely cry when he started making larger and larger withdrawals.

King Dragarion, in his final acts before the ultimate battle, had established a support fund of one million extra for Ren. It wasn’t enormous by royalty standards, but it provided a steady stream of resources that complemented his other income.

More significantly, it had granted him responsibilities in the former Goldcrest territory, lands confiscated after that family’s betrayal during the war.

Julius, now acting as King in all but official title (despite Victor theoretically having more responsibility), had wisely understood that both Ren and Zhao were at critical stages of their development.

Instead of burdening them with full administrative responsibilities, he had asked his brother Arturo to handle the territory’s management. While asking little of Ren and Zhao, who only provided ideas and strategies, gradually learning the political and economic aspects of governance while maintaining their focus on personal cultivation.

The lessons were fascinating but sobering. Governing wasn’t simply about making good decisions, it was about navigating competing interests, managing resources that were never sufficient, and making compromises that left everyone partially satisfied or more often than not… dissatisfied.

“Politics is like cultivation,” Arturo had explained during one of their meetings, “except instead of improving yourself, you’re trying to improve systems that actively and often dumbly, resist change.”

The former Goldcrest territory remained a source of political tension. Larissa’s original plan to dramatically restructure the nobility had lost momentum after the King’s loss. Without Dragarion to back aggressive reforms, and with Selphira in a state of grief that affected her political effectiveness, confronting the tens of thousands of high-level tamers who formed the opportunist factions had become impractical.

Julius had managed to implement some concessions and light punishments that were democratically supported, but the deeper reforms Larissa had envisioned remained a deferred dream.

The noble factions had lost power and influence, but remained what Julius described as “a hard bone to crack” without the crushing power of a Dragarion to intimidate them into submission.

These incomplete political changes were a constant reminder of the most painful absence of all.

King Dragarion remained crystallized in the corrupt chamber beneath Yino’s castle, his form preserved in pure white crystal that no one had been able to move or affect. The mana density in the crystallization was Diamond Rank, a level of power beyond anything the kingdom could currently handle.

The sight had become a pilgrimage of sorts for the kingdom’s most powerful tamers. They would descend to the chamber, study the crystallized King, and inevitably leave with the same conclusion: it was impossible to move or change.

Julius and his brothers had completed two-thirds of the thousand-day method, hoping that reaching intermediate maturity (which Ren’s parents already had achieved as proof) would give them the power necessary to affect their father’s crystallization.

But after numerous observations and analyses, Ren’s fungus had confirmed what everyone feared: the mana density was effectively Diamond Rank. Not even several mature Gold tamers working together would have the power necessary to make a significant difference.

Ren had new capabilities thanks to all the accumulated power from the 3 main rings and the dormant seed that had cracked from the dragons’ energy. He could now sense mana patterns thousands of kilometers away, analyze power structures previously beyond his understanding, and most importantly, had begun to understand the fundamental principles behind high-level magical crystallization.

But he was still far from sufficient.

This reality had added urgency to Ren’s goal of reaching Gold 1. According to his hopeful calculations, that would be the absolute minimum necessary to analyze the crystal structure with sufficient detail to understand if reversal was even possible. But even reaching Gold 1 wouldn’t guarantee anything… it would only give him the tools to determine if there was hope.

And then there was Larissa.

For two complete years, he had had no contact with her whatsoever. She had left the academy immediately after the events in the corrupt chamber, and according to Julius, had withdrawn almost completely from public life to study with a private tutor.

The absence gnawed at him constantly. During quiet moments between classes, while walking the academy halls they had once shared, even during his greatest triumphs, thoughts of her would surface unbidden.

He had written letters, dozens of them… many still, most of them he never sent. What could he say? How could words possibly bridge the chasm that had opened between them?

Ren understood, at least intellectually, why Larissa might need space. She had lost her father in a traumatic way, and he had been instrumental in that loss, regardless of the circumstances.

But intellectual understanding didn’t alleviate the constant pain of knowing he had hurt someone who had come to matter so much to him.

Sometimes Julius would share brief updates: she was progressing well in her studies, her cultivation was advancing, she seemed to be finding some measure of peace. But these fragments only made the silence more profound.

His words were always kind but final. There would be no messages passed, no arranged meetings, no forced reconciliation. Larissa had made her choice, and Julius would respect it.

So Ren threw himself into cultivation with renewed intensity. If he couldn’t fix the past, he could at least try to change the future. Every breakthrough brought him closer to Gold 1, closer to the power that might… might… be sufficient to understand the crystallization that held the King.

And perhaps, in some distant hope he barely allowed himself to acknowledge, closer to being worthy of forgiveness from the girl whose father he had helped take away.