Read Novel Full Chapter 1154 - Taming the Old World - Myths - 3
Chapter 1154 - Taming the Old World - Myths - 3
It meant that whatever was currently casting that sprawling, suffocating shadow over them absolutely could not be scared away…
It was an entity so overwhelmingly powerful that their only viable survival strategy was to be utterly, perfectly invisible.
Ren swallowed hard, fighting his screaming biological instinct to draw mana. He slowly tilted his head upward.
And when his eyes finally focused, decoding the colossal silhouette blotting out the sun, the icy spike of panic in his chest actually thawed.
He relaxed… Slightly.
It was a Platinum 3 beast.
Logically and biologically, a creature of that catastrophic caliber had absolutely no business hunting in the Gold 3 ring.
Also, maybe funnily for the timing, it existed at that diamond-level-size for the exact same evolutionary reason the gargantuan bird-clouds had achieved their unnatural size: it had made a brutal compromise. It had sacrificed its infinite potential for future growth, entirely abandoning the path to the Diamond rank, in exchange for maximizing its physical and magical parameters to the absolute, ceiling of its current tier, and the only movable ceiling, even if extremely slowly, at that.
It was a creature that had permanently surrendered tomorrow's rank to become an untouchable god in Platinum rank today.
It was a predator that specifically fed on deep terrors, those buried nightmares to grow bigger.
Periodically, it abandoned its hyper-low-altitude nest to undertake a massive, quarter-world migration to the opposite side of the empty fissure. And unlike ordinary beasts that would slowly suffocate and degrade in the mana-starved atmosphere of the outer rings, this creature possessed a terrifyingly efficient biological workaround.
It didn't rely on ambient ether.
It ruthlessly harvested the accumulated cores of the deep terrors it hunted, actively storing them inside its body to function as portable energetic batteries. It used them as external fuel tanks, burning the stolen mana to comfortably sustain its massive flight through starved airspace.
Yet, even with that biological advantage, it meticulously avoided the true dead zone, the city that was completely, utterly void of mana. It didn't execute a perfect, linear crossing. It deliberately flew a massive, sweeping arc, meticulously tracing the outer perimeter of the Iron ring, carefully skirting the absolute worst of the dead air without ever plunging directly into the 'mana abyss'.
Occasionally, during the peak of migration season, the citizens of the sister cities could spot them from the safety of the Wall. They appeared as small black specks gliding through the sky, high above the earth.
The Dragon Storks.
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Understanding exactly what he was looking at, Ren finally, completely relaxed.
A Dragon Stork, no matter how apocalyptic its sprawling shadow felt as it washed over them, was not an active threat. It was simply commuting. It was strictly following its ancient migratory route, after hunting its specific, nightmarish prey, and quietly hoarding its energetic cores.
It likely possessed absolutely zero biological interest in two tiny, insignificant Tamers quietly hovering over a rotting swamp.
As long as they didn't do anything colossally stupid to provoke it. As long as Ren kept his aura compressed, refusing to leak the level of mana that might cause the behemoth to misclassify them as either a threat or a snack, the colossal creature would simply pass right over them, exactly as it passed over the iron ring near the new Wall every single season.
Ren let the gargantuan presence smoothly glide through the clouds directly above them.
The Platinum 3 behemoth was a razor-sharp silhouette carved against the blazing sun, entirely, beautifully oblivious to the two microscopic specks watching it from the dark swamp below.
It wasn't a danger.
They just had to let it pass.
Zhao also knew exactly what these colossal beasts were.
Basically, everyone in the sister cities knew what they were. And yet, practically speaking, absolutely nobody knew a single real thing about them.
The Dragon Storks were the silent, mythological engines responsible for redistributing the vast majority of low-level wild beasts across the surface territories. They flew across the sky, leaving a sprawling trail of reactivated cores in their wake. When those dormant, falling cores interacted with the ambient ether of their respective geographical drop zones, they activated, officially birthing the localized beasts that populated the outer rings.
It was a massive, half-planetary cycle that occurred almost every single year. It was considered as natural as the changing of the seasons, and it was a phenomenon rarely discussed outside of highly specific studies.
Except, there was no actual field of academic study for this in Yano.
In a city where only a microscopic fraction of the population was physically capable of surviving a scouting route this dangerous, there was no rigorous science behind these creatures. The absolute best the Vanguard possessed was a handful of blind guesses, a collection of frantic, terrified observations made from miles away, slowly twisted by generations of grunts into a reverent, untouchable tradition.
Without brilliant scholars capable of getting close enough to actually study them, high-caliber apex predators like this were elevated into living demigods in the eyes of the common people.
They were just tiny, ominous black dots gliding through the sky during migration season, entirely shrouded in the terrifying mystery that naturally surrounds anything humanity can see but cannot comprehend.
Zhao had absolutely no idea if the colossal beast soaring above them was naturally aggressive. He didn't truly understand the biological mechanics driving its migration.
But what happened next was the exact, undeniable reason he absolutely loved exploring the deep zones with Ren.
Ren didn't just watch the shadow pass. He began to dissect the myth.
The gargantuan bird, Ren explained, his voice quiet but echoing with the absolute certainty of the crystal supercomputer data resting in his mind, lived perched atop a sprawling, Diamond-density-level crystal nest. It categorically refused to eat anything other than the deepest, darkest terrors that successfully achieved their Platinum 3 evolutionary forms at the absolute bottom of the Great Fissure.
Anything weaker than that simply did not possess the mana density to justify the astronomical energetic cost of hunting it.
It was an apex predator hyper-specialized in a singular, incredibly rare type of prey. Its entire existence depended on a razor-thin natural filter.