Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1251 - Taming the Old World - Significance Embrace

Ruthless prioritization remained the only path forward…

And today, the absolute highest priority was a Shadow guardian dragon.

During a brief breakfast, Ren addressed his parents directly.

"I want to ask you to be extremely cautious while manning the inner defensive wall," he instructed, his tone serious. "Do not engage in any unnecessary risks and do not attempt to play the hero, please… Ok?"

Reed and Fern exchanged a quick look and brushed off his concern with their usual easygoing warmth.

"We are going to be just fine, son," Reed said, piling significantly more food onto Ren's plate than the young man could ever hope to finish. "You are the one going up against a dragon today. You better worry about yourself, seeing as you are facing the actual hard part."

"Dad, I'm serious!"

"We are serious too," Fern replied, using that firm, gentle tone that left no room for argument. "You are about to fight one of the four strongest guardians left in existence. And you want us to be the careful ones, when we are going to be tucked safely behind a massive wall with the entire army right next to us... Ren, really?"

Ren let out a soft sigh and tried his best to convince them.

"There is hardly any danger for me," he insisted. "Seriously, I am incredibly durable now. And the strike team I am taking is exceptional. With all of us together, a dragon just isn't the insurmountable threat it was a few years ago... I am going to be fine, instead I worry we are leaving you with too few of the strongest fighters!"

The two cooks looked at him with complex expressions, silently realizing that both sides of the table were just terrified for each other. Fern offered a tender smile, her eyes growing noticeably misty.

"Do you know what this reminds me of?" she asked softly. "It reminds me of the day you came home as a ten-year-old boy and showed us you had hatched what everyone believed was the worst possible beast from the cheapest egg in the world. Even back then, you promised us you were going to be just fine after all..."

"And I was..."

"You were." Reed reached out and rested a large, calloused hand on top of his son's head, exactly as he used to do when Ren was a little boy. "Listen to me, Ren. We still don't care if you have only a grumpy mushroom living in your head, nor do we care if you have something that looks like a real sovereign dragon waiting in your chest. It doesn't matter to us that they call you the Glorious General, or that half the capital bows when you walk past…"

"To us," Fern continued, gently cupping his face with both hands, "you are still our little tamer, same as always. We will always be incredibly proud of you, but we are also going to worry about you, every single day. Even if you tell us a thousand times that you are safe, that is just how being a parent works... It never switches off."

Ren pulled them both into a deep embrace.

It was a fierce, anchoring hug from someone who knew he was marching toward danger and desperately wanted to carry that familial warmth with him.

"Do you remember what Yang told Dad that one day?" Ren murmured against them.

His parents nodded against his shoulders. They remembered it perfectly.

"I am not going to sacrifice myself either," Ren promised. "That is not part of the deal... I am going to live, and I am going to come back home, whatever it takes. Sacrificing myself would be the easy way out, living is the actual hard part, right? And I am choosing the hard part, because I want to come back to this exact table. I want to have countless more breakfasts just like this one. So just trust me, same as you always do."

The three of them stayed like that for a long, quiet moment, holding each other in the warm kitchen while the rest of the capital frantically prepared for war outside.

And as Ren stood there with his face buried in his mother's shoulder, he realized that this specific feeling was the core of it all.

Living meant willingly accepting the pain of absence and the heavy risks that caused so much stress. It meant enduring the agonizing hours of not knowing if someone would return, the suffocating tightness in your chest, the endless sleepless nights.

No one who genuinely loved another person was exempt from that burden.

But it was always worth it... Every single time until the very end.

Because even if you spent a massive amount of time suffering, stressed, battered, and entirely consumed by the possible terrible events, it ultimately led to this. The reunion, the profound embrace that followed the pain. And rather than ruining the moment, all that previous suffering made the subsequent embrace infinitely sweeter. It transformed the relief into a true reward.

A future reunion earned through sheer perseverance tasted remarkably better than one that cost nothing or little if at all.

Ren finally pulled away from his parents, offered them a bright smile, and quickly wiped his eyes without trying too hard to hide it.

"So, I will be back soon," he told them.

"You better be," Reed replied gruffly.

"Be careful," Fern whispered.

Ren stepped out of the cozy kitchen, heading toward the star dome, toward the Yino territory, and ultimately toward the sovereign Shadow Dragon. He carried the lingering warmth of that embrace like a sacred promise that there was something precious waiting for him on the other side of the battlefield.

Something genuinely worth coming home for.

♢♢♢♢

Finally, after expending ninety-nine percent of his mana to reinforce the massive dome, Ren's journey northward began within the desolate boundaries of the abandoned city.

It was the dead half of Yino, that sprawling expanse of empty houses Li had traversed in his carriage weeks ago, crossing the very same bridge as always toward Yano.