Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1157 - Taming the Old World - Changes - 2

As they cautiously followed the suicidal march deeper into the rings, the heavy, sinking suspicion in Ren's chest metastasized.

Something was about to change. He didn't have the exact data to prove what it was yet, but the crushing, suffocating sensation accumulated with every single mile they flew. It was a primal dread Ren had learned the hard way never to ignore after everything he had barely survived.

Finally, the corrupted trail breached the Platinum border.

The mutant swarm began to behave in a way Ren had never witnessed before. The corruption moved with a terrifying, absolute madness. It was sheer recklessness.

As he stared down at the suicidal march, his mind finally locked onto the only logical explanation for this anomaly. And the exact millisecond the realization fully crystallized, his stomach plummeted into his boots.

For Selthia to fearlessly burn her mutants like cheap kindling. For her to aggressively hurl them into the Platinum rings on a completely suicidal trajectory. For the corruption to suddenly behave with a frantic, desperate temerity that entirely violated her standard tactical doctrine...

It could only mean one specific, terrifying thing that actually justified such a staggering cost.

Ren absolutely refused to stop.

Flying slightly behind him, Zhao felt a cold, heavy knot of genuine anxiety tightening in his stomach. They were aggressively pushing the boundaries of their safety. They were taking an uncalculated risk by plunging directly into a tier of power they had explicitly promised they would not explore purely out of curiosity.

But Zhao remained silent, because he was just as profoundly intrigued and terrified as Ren.

What they were currently witnessing defied the old wall of those monsters. The Platinum rings had historically always been completely void of mutants. The apex predators roaming these depths were far too strong, and their density of mana was far too crushing for Selthia's cheap, disposable pawns to do anything.

The fact that the corruption was now successfully penetrating well beyond its maximum theoretical range was a likely catastrophic anomaly. It was a tactical impossibility that neither of them could afford to walk away from without completely understanding the mechanics behind it or humanity may risk a terrible surprise.

The mystery did not last long.

Deep in the rotting gloom, they began to find corpses.

Two colossal Platinum-tier beasts' nests lay broken with their residents dead in the mud. Their massive, heavily armored bodies were currently being systematically devoured by a writhing, screeching carpet of mutants.

Hovering above the gruesome scene, both Ren and Zhao stared in cold disbelief. They ran the math in their heads, trying to comprehend exactly how a swarm of weak, mindless Silvers could possibly hollow out a nest of Platinum apex predators. It was like watching a swarm of babies successfully dismantle a steel fortress.

There was only one logical explanation.

The grim answer practically assembled itself in Ren's mind: the swarm was not acting in silver alone here either anymore. The Silvers had to be spearheaded and supported by one or more Platinum-tier mutants. The mindless sea of Silver rot wasn't what was actually killing these untouchable wild beasts; it was whatever nightmare was quietly marching alongside them.

And then, miles deeper into the zone, they finally found what looked like the frontline.

The corrupted river had been violently dammed.

A monstrous Platinum wild beast, a gargantuan, heavily coiled serpent boasting a thick armor of deep blue and venomous black scales, had sensed the rumbling. It had aggressively breached the surface from its massive mud mound, colliding head-on with the marching river of corrupted Silvers.

It had completely stalled the swarm's advance.

The serpent was casually, effortlessly annihilating the mutants, there were even gold rank bodies here. It thrashed its massive tail and snapped its jaws, generating an impassable blockade. Judging by the sheer, staggering volume of shattered bodies littering the swamp, the slaughter had been going on for quite some time. Thousands of Silver corpses literally carpeted the earth around the serpent's coils, forming a gruesome, rising tide of dead meat.

But as Ren watched the slaughter from the sky, a deeply sickening, familiar sensation washed over him.

He had seen this exact mechanism before. Back in the ancient ruins, where Selthia had painted the stone walls with dark runes, allowing her mutants to cannibalize their dead comrades to aggressively force an evolution.

The exact same nightmare was happening right here in the mud.

The endless waves of mutants pouring into the meat grinder weren't just attacking the serpent; they were frantically devouring the thousands of corpses the serpent left behind. And with every single mouthful of rotting, corrupted flesh they consumed, their physical mass swelled. They grew slightly faster, slightly denser, and slightly stronger.

It wasn't a massive, instant jump in power. Individually speaking, a slightly bloated Silver mutant was still mathematically useless against the crushing power of a Platinum serpent. But it was a cycle. It was a perfectly closed energy loop. And if that cannibalistic cycle wasn't immediately shattered, given enough time and enough biomass, it would inevitably make some big enough beasts to grind the Platinum beast down to the bone.

Only, this time, the cycle didn't have to wait for the math to catch up…

From the absolute back of the severed marching line, practically retracing its own footsteps, a colossal silhouette emerged from the dark.

A Platinum-tier mutant.

To Ren's hyper-analytical eye, the monster didn't behave like a mindless beast. It moved with the efficiency of a logistical foreman walking down the line to manually inspect a jammed supply chain. It didn't even charge with blind fury… It just moved fast with an eerie sense of purpose, arriving solely to eliminate the obstacle interrupting Selthia's flow of troops.

And then, stepping out of the shadows right behind it, a second behemoth appeared.

Another Platinum mutant.

The wild, blue-and-black serpent was a true apex predator. It could slaughter a single Platinum mutant in a duel. The wild beast held an advantage: it could freely unleash its devastating elemental skills without agonizing over its mana reserves, a luxury the mutants fundamentally lacked.

But against two coordinated Platinum mutants that possessed grotesque, hyper-accelerated regeneration? Against two behemoths that could damage its armor, regenerate insanely fast and actively stop to devour their own dead, using the slaughter to replenish their stamina and grow incrementally stronger with every single exchange of blows?

The battle tipped.

The serpent's elemental advantage simply couldn't outpace the sheer, crushing mathematics of endless regeneration and superior numbers.

The serpent fought viciously, but eventually, the massive blue-and-black coils full of bite marks went limp. It crashed heavily into the mud.

The dam broke. The supply line instantly regenerated, and the endless river of Silver mutants surged forward once again, washing directly over the shattered corpse of the majestic beast that had tried to stop them.

But the absolute worst part came immediately after.

The horde of mutants didn't just march over the dead Platinum serpent. They swarmed it. The bigger ones aggressively sank their teeth into its mana-rich, hyper-dense flesh, consuming the supposed apex predator whole. And as they digested that premium, Platinum-tier biomass, the entire swarm visibly pulsed, growing noticeably stronger.

The cycle wasn't just self-sustaining anymore. It was exponentially escalating.

Selthia was actively using the very wild beasts that were supposed to halt her advance as high-octane biological fuel to grow her army.

Hovering high above the slaughter, Ren suddenly felt the ambient ether warp strangely against his skin.

It wasn't just the suffocating, heavy stench of raw corruption. There was a deliberate, architectural pattern woven into its mana.

He narrowed his eyes, sharply focusing his expanded perception. And the moment he looked past the physical blood and mud, he finally understood.

Runes.

That was the unnatural, static texture in the purple mana river he had been sensing since they breached the zone. It wasn't just a mindless swarm marching through the swamp. The entire push was intricately woven with invisible, corrupted runes. They operated exactly like the ancient carvings on the ruin walls, forcefully directing, trapping, and violently amplifying the cycle of cannibalization and growth.

Selthia had changed the rules of the board again.

A block of solid ice dropped into Ren's stomach as his mind tied the loose threads together.

Securing that special egg… Or successfully extracting the prisoners she had so desperately wanted from the fight at that ruin. Whatever specific asset she had successfully smuggled out of their last brutal encounter, had actually handed her the missing architectural key.

It was a seemingly subtle acquisition, but the consequences were apocalyptic. She had finally acquired the capacity to flawlessly replicate the ruins' internal, enclosed scaling mechanism out here, in the open world.

This was catastrophically bad.

Looking down at the pulsing, expanding river of corrupted flesh, Ren and Zhao could clearly see the horrifying truth of the board. Depending on what the absolute ceiling of this new cannibalistic cycle was, depending on exactly how strong these mutants could become before their bodies collapsed, the entire macro-structure of the power rings was in imminent, mortal danger.

If this corrupted line was allowed to keep marching, continuously feeding on every single apex predator foolish enough to stand in its way, violently growing in mass and power with every single victory, there was absolutely no guarantee where the limit would stop.

They desperately needed to see exactly how far this marching line went. They had to trace the vein to its absolute terminus. And they had to sound the kingdom-wide alarm, provided it wasn't already too late.