Read Novel Full Chapter 1158 - Taming the Old World - Black Mountains
Chapter 1158 - Taming the Old World - Black Mountains
The terrifying reality unfolding directly beneath them was vastly, infinitely worse than anything they had previously believed.
Selthia wasn't defeated.
Ren's autonomous towers hadn't beaten her. The mutant strikes against the Great Wall, the Platinum decoy in the Southwest sector, the meticulously probing of his defensive grid, all of it had been nothing but secondary, performative noise. It was a massive distraction playing out on the surface, while her true operation was being quietly executed down here in the dark, miles away from the Vanguard's prying eyes.
Selthia had been dedicating the absolute vast majority of her real military power to an entirely different front from the very beginning.
And that hidden front was marching straight toward Yano's remaining dragons.
Ren and Zhao pushed fast through the invisible atmospheric barrier of the ring's frontier, crossing directly into the Platinum 2 ring.
The beast communities sprawling beneath them were exponentially larger here. The massive, organic formations didn't just dot the landscape anymore; they dominated it, forming a jagged, towering geography of their own. But deep within these colossal biological structures, a profoundly cruel, ancient ritual was unfolding, the same brutal arithmetic that governed almost everything in selective nature.
Inside every single community, the massive water serpents were fighting.
They weren't fighting the encroaching corrupted swarm, nor were they fending off external apex predators. They were violently, mercilessly fighting each other.
It was a grotesque display of evolutionary fratricide.
They were deliberately reducing their own internal competition, brutally executing their own siblings in the mud simply to inherit the local space and concentrated resources left behind after the fight.
The ruthless survivors of this cannibalistic culling were visually distinct. Their scales were no longer a vibrant, aquatic blue. They had darkened into a deep, light-swallowing black.
They were already actively manifesting the physical, crushing qualities of the Shadow Dragon. The primordial Dark element was suffocating the Water element and making it secondary, imposing its dominance with a terrifying gravity that had only been faintly hinted at in the lower rings. Here, the Water element was actively yielding its territory. Shadow was aggressively taking its place as the absolute, dictatorial nature of the ecosystem.
And the bizarre, symbiotic boundary between the massive armored snails and the glowing fungal trees was rapidly degrading.
What had functioned as a clear, mutualistic partnership between two distinct species in the Gold 3 zone was now violently fusing into a single, grotesque, interconnected beasts system. The biological borders between one organism and the next were literally melting away. The flesh, the roots, and the stone shells bled into one another until it was almost impossible to tell where the flora ended and the fauna began.
The individual communities were physically metamorphosing into single, gargantuan monsters.
And yet, despite the huge power of these new organic mountains, the corrupted beasts were still advancing.
The mindless mutant swarms were still somehow capable of eliminating the heavily evolved serpents through sheer, suffocating numbers, inching their way into the sacred Diamond entrance zone piece by corrupted piece.
From the sky, Ren spotted the horrifying evidence. He stared down at a completely decimated biological community...
A massive organic hollowed mountain that, just days ago, must have been fiercely pulsating with many aggressive serpents' life, was now nothing more than a hollowed-out, rotting shell entirely overrun by corruption.
And looking closely at the frontline, Ren realized that three specific Platinum-tier mutants acting as the vanguard were apparently all it took to orchestrate the slaughter.
Down here, those three Platinum mutants were no longer restricted to simply stockpiling the baseline power of their current rank. The hyper-accelerated cannibalization cycle, violently turbocharged by Selthia's hidden runes and fueled by the hyper-dense meat of slaughtered Platinum 1 and Platinum 2 beasts, was aggressively pushing their mutant biology beyond its limits.
They were violently ascending toward the Platinum 2 tier themselves. Every single ancient community they devoured exponentially added to their raw, destructive power.
The rotting mutants weren't just miraculously keeping pace with the exponential power scaling of the terrain. If this horrifying cycle wasn't stopped, they were going to vastly surpass it.
Eventually, the air grew incredibly, painfully heavy. They breached the absolute threshold of the Platinum 3 ring.
This time, colliding with a mana density of this magnitude was a fundamentally different physical experience for Zhao than his last awful, PTSD inducing brush with it.
His majestic Raptor had already surpassed his Owl in raw mana output some time ago. More importantly, operating as a true dual-contract Tamer wielding two distinct, highly cultivated beasts, specifically thanks to his Owl having finally completed the long and expensive thousand-day training method, granted his human-beast biology a massive new resilience. That deeply reinforced internal mana network and allowed him to exist normally in this suffocating airspace without instantly succumbing to lethal mana poisoning.
But it was still incredibly heavy.
Zhao physically felt the crushing power of the ambient environment with every single breath he took. It felt exactly like a massive red iron plate resting directly on his lungs. It was the distinct pressure that constantly reminded a human Tamer they were currently intruding on a plane of existence they absolutely had no right to comfortably survive in without forcibly fusing.
Down here, the biological communities had finally achieved exactly what they had been desperately striving to become since the outer rings.
Every single towering organic mountain now housed only one giant serpent hidden deep inside its core. It was completely, utterly black.
This was the solitary, ultimate survivor…
The singular apex predator that had endured the cruel, cannibalistic selection process of the previous rings.
And this serpent wasn't just integrated into the community ecosystem anymore. It possessed absolute, tyrannical control over it.
It was no longer just a massive snake living inside a convenient shell of different organic matters; it was the conscious, beating brain of a monolithic entity. The entire mana-biological system had completely fused into a single, terrifying unit. The serpents could literally command the entire mountain of organic matter to move. The colossal mass, heavily permeated with dark mana, now operated exactly like a gargantuan, black body possessing a unified will of its own.
The serpents housed within these moving mountains already boasted distinctly draconic features. The sharp, angular lines of their armored bodies. The broad, crowned shape of their massive heads. The terrifying way the pure shadow didn't just surround them, but seemed to emanate from deep within their scales.
Here, the beasts were biologically locked and loaded, standing on the absolute precipice, ready to take the final, true evolutionary step into becoming dragons.
And the territorial wars raging across the zone were relentless.
Black mountain violently clashed against black mountain. The colossal communities engaged in a state of perpetual, earth-shattering combat. They were constantly, brutally fighting to determine the absolute strongest among them, the single, undisputed king that would successfully supplant the Diamond-tier Dragon in the ancient, hundred-year evolutionary cycle.
They were fighting like always…
But now they were fighting for the sacred right to ascend and claim the throne of the Guardian when it was finally time for the current dragon to move on.
It was the most brutal, unapologetically pure system of natural selection in the world. It was the exact, ancient biological engine that had been flawlessly governing mana creatures since the absolute dawn of time.
But that exact, perpetual war of succession was precisely the fatal flaw that had blown the gates wide open for Selthia's corrupted army.
Ren instantly understood the nightmare the moment he read the terrain.
The Black Mountains were so completely, obsessively focused on violently destroying one another, so entirely absorbed in the ancient, internal competition that would crown the next guardian, that their massive bodies were constantly riddled with gaping wounds and exposed flanks.
Not a single mountain could afford to divert its overwhelming kinetic force toward the creeping river of mutants without instantly exposing its throat to a rival mountain.
And Selthia, or whatever hyper-intelligent aspect of the corruption was actively managing this new subterranean operation, had calculated that exact, fatal crack in the ecosystem's armor. She was simply letting the absolute most powerful non full dragon beasts in the world blindly execute each other, while her mutating corruption silently flooded through the gaping holes their endless war left behind.
Maybe it was the same in Platinum 2, the fight to select also giving her the chance to feed…
Ren's heart accelerated. Beside him, Zhao's breath hitched.
Because the endless river of mutants showed absolutely no signs of stopping. It just kept pushing.
Wave after corrupted wave, violently feeding on the dead, scaling in power, and ruthlessly exploiting every single Black Mountain that was too distracted by its own holy war to notice the rot chewing at its roots.
If this cannibalistic cycle managed to reach the absolute bottom...
If these hyper-scaled, rune-powered mutants managed to swarm the oldest, most ancient serpent... the absolute apex predator that had successfully survived the last slaughter to become the Guardian during the last cycle... the reigning Diamond Black Dragon...
Ren stared down into the suffocating, pitch-black depths of the Rings. He looked toward the half point of his half of the world, where the largest Black Mountains were currently waging their eternal, earth-shattering war, completely and utterly blind to the rotting plague quietly crawling around them through the mud.
'Is it already too late for the Guardian of the Shadow Mountain?'