Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1221: Chapter 1221 - Taming the Old World - Impasse - 2

Lending their core was absolutely not a burden he wanted to force upon any of his allies. Loaning a mana heart was vastly different from lending a fast small bird for mail and payment; it required surrendering a fundamental piece of one’s own body.

Nevertheless, possessing two crystals rather than a single one would create a staggering, potentially decisive advantage in the apocalyptic battles looming on the horizon.

The moral logistics of the idea were far too muddy, so Ren forcefully shoved the thought aside. At least for the present moment.

There were vastly more pressing priorities to address first.

His mana was completely drained for the day. The immediate agenda was remarkably simple, dictated entirely by his failing biology rather than his tactical ambition: rest...

Tomorrow, he would expend half of his recovered ether to heal his crystallized pathways again, and then he would return to reinforce the dome. He would repeat this exact, grueling cycle, day after day, until his internal mana flow was sufficiently stabilized. Because in his current, heavily compromised state, his system choked by countless small shards of crystal, he simply could not risk engaging in open combat against a sovereign Light or Darkness dragon.

Stepping onto a battlefield of that caliber, with his ether constantly jamming at hundreds of different junctions, would be an absolute, guaranteed death sentence.

He desperately needed a functional body before he could execute any offensive maneuvers.

Every other tactical objective on the board had to wait.

♢♢♢♢

The following morning, Ren altered the medical blueprint.

Instead of focusing his restoration efforts on his left arm, which remained a solid block of transparent crystal from the elbow down to his fingertips but retained sufficient mobility to be temporarily ignored, he decided to attack a vastly more critical threat: the small clusters of crystal that were born as energy explosions from his main channels, now seeming buried dangerously close to his heart.

These specific crystalline deposits were not visibly alarming, nor did they threaten amputation, since most were even inside the muscles, but they aggressively obstructed his internal ethereal flow at some critical, foundational junctures.

He began the agonizing process of dissolving them, isolating the shards one by one.

He made measurable progress, yet the procedure was very expensive and disheartening. There were hundreds of these microscopic fragments embedded in his tissue near the bigger mana veins, and despite their minuscule size, marshaling the absolute concentration required to melt them exacted a heavy toll. They were composed of pure high Diamond-rank mana, representing the absolute most stubborn, unyielding material he had ever attempted to transmute.

Eradicating a mere forty of those tiny deposits had already devoured a full fifty percent of his daily mana reserves.

Forty fragments eradicated, out of hundreds remaining.

And the resulting improvement in his runic control was frustratingly marginal. He estimated less than a ten percent increase in overall efficiency, ten at best.

It was still a noticeable upgrade, certainly preferable to zero progress.

But it left him staggeringly far from the biological threshold required to even entertain the thought of entering a combat zone of that level.

♢♢♢♢

Having already burned half of his available ether on his own recovery, his contribution to the architectural reinforcement of the dome that afternoon was scarce again.

Another day added...

Between his weakened output, Julius, and the combined efforts of the Vanguard’s earth manipulators, they barely managed to maintain the three-and-a-half-day margin.

They did not increase the countdown. They merely prevented the trapped entity from shrinking the timeline further. And as they desperately packed fresh material into the primary escape tunnel, they registered that disturbing consequence: the overall thickness of the dome was subtly decreasing in secondary locations.

The hyper-compressed bedrock was beginning to thin in areas they hadn’t directly reinforced; they believed it would end up behaving exactly like a thin sheet pulled far too tightly across a mattress, creating slack and structural vulnerability on the opposite end.

The dome and subterranean material was definitively not infinite. Ren had already outlined this exact reality. Every single day of delay they forcibly squeezed out of one specific sector was paid for, incrementally, by weakening the structural integrity of another.

When the grueling session finally concluded, Ren slumped back against the ringing metal of the dome, his lungs burning as he gasped for air, and stared down at his solid crystal left arm and his restored right hand.

Three and a half days on the clock. A heavily fractured biological vessel. A desperate tactical blueprint that hinged on exploiting a deactivated trap within a ruin and, potentially, asking a loyal ally to temporarily surrender a piece of their very soul.

It was a remarkably contrived arsenal to work with.

Yet, as long as the monolithic dome continued to hold the nightmare at bay, and his right hand retained the capacity to weave runic commands, a path forward remained, no matter how narrow it had become.

Tomorrow, he would purge more crystal. Tomorrow, he would reinforce the dome again.

And very soon, he would march on the Wood ruin.

♢♢♢♢

Four days slipped by in a grueling blur of physical therapy and runic engineering.

The meticulous recovery of Ren’s central system core had successfully breached the fifty-five percent threshold, and with every single small shard of crystal he painstakingly transformed back, his overall ethereal efficiency crept noticeably higher. His internal mana flow encountered fewer jagged obstructions, running cleaner and significantly faster through his previously choked pathways.

The immediate results of this internal restoration were blatantly visible in the ongoing reinforcement of the monolithic dome; the Vanguard had officially reclaimed a full four-day margin of error, clawing their way back from the previous three-and-a-half-day deadline.

Theoretically, the logistical situation was destined to improve exponentially from this point forward.

Every consecutive day of healing granted Ren a slightly faster recovery rate than the last, creating a compounding biological snowball effect. Once his nervous system was fully purged of the Diamond-rank crystals, he and the Vanguard’s earth manipulators could effortlessly stretch the containment timeline well beyond a five-day margin. The cold mathematics of the battlefield, for the first time in months, were actually beginning to skew in humanity’s favor.

And yet, despite the promising trajectory, Ren made the abrupt tactical decision to march on the Wood ruin immediately.

He refused to wait until he was 100% medically cleared for deployment.