Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1160 - Taming the Old World - Guardians - 2

A chill crept down Ren's spine as he ran the timeline. Selthia had possessed this scaling mechanism for some months now, ever since the exchange in the ruin. There was absolutely nothing stopping her from deploying this exact strategy on the other side of the continent.

Over in Yino, her corrupted network was significantly larger and far more entrenched than it was here.

And if she used the 8 artifacts…

Ren's expanded perception didn't reach that far. Operating mostly in Yano, he had spent his patrols meticulously monitoring the major movements in his own zone.

But what if she had slipped right past him, routing her swarms through the deepest, most remote territories?

Selthia could have already claimed several elemental rings while everyone in Yano was patting themselves on the back for "defeating" her at the Wall.

"Professor Zhao." Ren turned to face him. "We separate here…"

"Get far enough away from the guardian, then fuse," Ren instructed. "Fly at maximum speed to avoid trouble… Check on as many of Yino's elemental guardians as your time limit allows. When your fusion is near running out, head straight back to the city and report everything."

Zhao nodded firmly. He understood the gravity of the situation.

"I'm heading to the other side," Ren continued. "If Selthia slipped out of my range and reached our remaining Fire Guardian, it would be a disaster." He paused, his jaw tightening. "After that, I'm flying to check on the Light Guardian. It's geographically closer to Yino, so I need to know if it's dealing with the same mess as this one."

He cast one last glance down at the shadow mountain, the half-asleep dragon and the moat of corpses…

Even the 8 artifacts were an easy match for this one so it could wait.

"It's a blessing that this guardian has the strength to hold out. And it's a blessing we found this now, rather than months down the line when it finally gets overwhelmed." His expression hardened. "But we can't get comfortable. Selthia commands an immense territory and the sheer volume of beasts she can manufacture is staggering… What we are looking at right now isn't even a fifth of her total biomass."

Zhao looked down at the sprawling swamp and silently agreed with Ren.

"She decided to leave the Wall alone for now, maybe because she doesn't want to feed the new towers until they are useless against her. Now she's using this new scaling mechanism to steal the rings that were previously out of her reach." Ren spoke with the chilling clarity of a player who had just seen the entire chessboard. "We cannot let her take a single one of our seven. And we also cannot let her claim all seven of hers."

Zhao gave a final nod.

They split up.

One shot toward Yino. The other deeper toward the west of Yano.

♢♢♢♢

Ren backed away before calling upon his mana, and Zhao mirrored his caution.

Neither of them wanted to risk a stray spike of energy rippling through the heavy air. If the Shadow Guardian sensed their true power, it might decide the intruders were finally worth lifting its second eyelid.

They retreated in absolute silence, gliding away in opposite directions. Once the monolithic black mountain faded into the suffocating gloom of the swamp, they officially parted ways.

Ren charted his course back to the Wood ruin first.

As he flew, the pieces of the puzzle finally locked together in his mind. The ruin wasn't just a buried vault; it was acting as the central logistical node for the corrupt swarm. It was the exact junction where the marching lines of silvers split and routed themselves across the continent.

Selthia was using the ancient architecture as an early warning system.

If Ren hadn't claimed the ruin yet, it meant he either hadn't found it or hadn't figured out how to open it. Selthia desperately wanted to know the exact second he finally cracked the seal. Perhaps she planned to ambush him while he was distracted inside. Perhaps she intended to trap him in the dark with the artifacts, mirroring the exact nightmare she had orchestrated during his descent to save Sirius.

The ruin was a tripwire, patiently waiting for a curious boy to pull the wrong thread.

But Ren was not here to pull threads today.

He had returned to this junction to trace an entirely different line.

Selthia was cleverly only surfacing silver, weak, hard to find beasts for the supply lines and hiding the strong ones far from detection.

So dropping to the lowest, safest altitude possible without brushing the rotting canopy, Ren paused. He took a slow breath and engaged his dual-fusion for just a second.

It was a calculated risk. Spiking his aura meant Selthia's network might ping his location, effectively telling her that he was onto her game. But he absolutely needed that momentary expansion of his sensory range. He had to find any vein of mutants marching further west, pushing into the territories he hadn't yet scouted.

The pulse washed over the underground…

And he found them.

The trail was buried incredibly deep, cutting right through the Platinum depths, a geographical depth that, up until today, had been a completely impossible environment for the corruption to survive in.

Ren instantly severed the fusion. Relying on his baseline perception now that he knew where to look, he followed the marching procession.

He let the sickening scent of the corruption guide him as the ancient terrain began to shift. The oppressive, stagnant humidity of the Black Swamp evaporated, replaced by a dry, blistering heat that cracked his lips. The air grew thin and tasted faintly of sulfur. Beneath him, the rotting mud hardened into jagged stone, taking on the charred, baked hue of bedrock that had spent centuries sitting too close to a furnace.

He had entered the Fire elemental zone.

The corrupted trail finally breached the surface right at the absolute edge of the Platinum 1 boundary.

It led directly into the mouth of a gargantuan, hollowed-out volcano still deep and hidden from perception by deepness and runes in the walls.

Hovering near the rim of the caldera, Ren looked down into the crater. Selthia's mutants were swarming inside the massive bowl, frantically feeding on one another.