Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1288 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Inference

Ren stood there, lost in deep thoughts, his right palm pressed flat against the warm, humming metal of the containment dome, and he finally pieced together why the prisoner was digging faster.

Listening to the rhythmic, mechanical grinding echoing through the bedrock, he compared the current pace of erosion against the baseline equations he had calculated the day before.

The discrepancy was undeniable...

The construct trapped inside was operating with a noticeable surplus of kinetic power.

When he aligned that sudden spike in output with the timeline of the surface war, only one logical explanation remained: the Shadow Core.

Selthia's horde had failed to hold the southern mountain, and they had lost the elemental ring to Sirius and Liu, yet they had managed to salvage the dead guardian's heart. Somehow, from miles away, that stolen core was actively feeding the beast buried beneath the capital through its ethereal net.

Ren followed the thread of that deduction all the way to its structural root.

His star-shaped prison was an exercise in targeted frequency cancellation. The five massive pillars surrounding the dome were specifically calibrated to intercept the five standard elements of the natural world: fire, water, earth, wind, and wood. By running the stolen energy of those five dragon cores in an inverted phase, the array choked the energy network and neutralized the purple dragon's control.

That five-fold suppression was the sole reason the mechanical vessel had been stripped of its five Hydra heads and capped at the base threshold of the Diamond 1 tier.

However, the shadow element was not among those five pillars…

That dark one was entirely absent from the blocking array's runic code. Because there was no sixth pillar humming with an inverted shadow frequency to cancel the signal, the subterranean energy grid remained wide open to that specific wavelength.

The power of the southern Shadow Core was bypassing the interference entirely. It slipped through the cracks of the blockade like water through a sieve, pouring straight into the half mechanical half meat monster to fuel its excavation drills.

"Of course," Ren murmured, his fingers tightening slightly against the vibrating steel. "The lock has a blind spot. And Selthia just shoved an elemental dragon core's flow of energy straight through the gap."

The moment he diagnosed the flaw, the theoretical solution presented itself... And right behind that solution came a mountain of logistical problems associated with it.

Ren currently possessed the exact counterweight needed to seal the leak. Sitting inside his own shadow space was the core of the northern Dark Guardian he had slain just 12 hours ago. If he pulled that core out and integrated it into the prison's architecture, creating a six-pointed hexagram tuned to darkness now too, he could establish a phase-cancellation for the shadow element just as he had for the other five.

The blind spot would vanish…

The external battery would be severed, and the mechanical dragon's digging speed would plummet back to its previous crawl.

The catch was that reweaving a live containment array of this magnitude was impossible without Mooshito.

Upgrading a five-point star array into a stable six-point hexagram was not as simple as driving another pillar into the dirt. It required shifting the geometric balance of the entire cavern, recalibrating the runic interference patterns, and maintaining perfect harmonic tension across six distinct elemental frequencies simultaneously.

A human mind could not process that many moving variables at once; it required the biological supercomputer of the little mushroom's mana-mycelium network.

And Mooshito was currently dead to the world…

The tiny symbiote had slipped into a deep hibernation immediately after they erected the prison, completely spent from the ordeal. Before curling up to sleep and many previous times already, he had made his terms for waking up crystal clear: he wanted to be elevated to the Platinum rank, and he expected a full buffet of seven elemental rings waiting for him as a reward.

But Platinum was still more than 13 months away.

Ren knew there was only one brute-force method to bypass that contract and jolt the mushroom awake ahead of schedule.

He would have to tap into the pillar of the mana vein down the castle purified to raw dragon energy to at least 250% of his energy, march back down to this dome, and physically rip all ten active orbs, both the ruin crystals and the elemental cores, out of their pillars.

By absorbing that staggering, unrefined surcharge into his own body all at once, he could generate the exact threshold of internal over-pressure required to trigger an emergency reaction on his system and shake Mooshito out of his slumber.

The possible consequences of attempting such a maneuver right now were nothing short of disastrous.

First, forcing a premature awakening through sheer energetic trauma again carried a high risk of damaging the little mushroom's body and widening the structural crack in their core.

Second, pulling the orbs out of the pillars to use them as an alarm clock meant dismantling the prison while the prisoner was wide awake.

The dome only stood because the five points of the star were locked in continuous resonance. If Ren powered down the grid to wake his partner, even for ten seconds, the suppression field would collapse. Those ten seconds would hand the purple dragon the exact window it needed to regenerate its Hydra heads, tear through the reinforced metal, and breach the wall, undoing everything the Vanguard had bled to avoid.

Even if the beast somehow stayed put, the sheer energetic cost of building the upgraded array was a massive hurdle.

Adding the shadow element meant expanding the circuit from ten individual nodes, five cores paired with five crystals, up to twelve. Channeling and stabilizing twelve draconic nodes simultaneously required exponentially more ether and mental bandwidth than ten.

Ren glanced down at his left arm…

The limb was still heavy, somewhat rigid, and encased in a thick layer of translucent crystal from his previous battles. His system was not fully recovered. Forcing the load of all that energy and twelve elemental nodes through meridians that were already partially petrified made full-body crystallization a distinct, terrifyingly high probability.

Ren pictured himself frozen as a crystal statue falling to the floor, and he grimaced.

Beyond the personal danger, the strategic timing was also terrible...

Attempting a high-risk modification of the vault before securing the Light Dragon was a gamble with terrible odds.

If the strain left Ren exhausted, unconscious, or encased in mana rock, the surface war was almost effectively over. Even if he succeeded in upgrading the lock before passing out, an incapacitated glorious general could not contest the final guardian. Without him on the field, the race for the last elemental mountain would tip hard in the corruption's favor.

He would successfully plug a leak in the basement while losing the war for the roof.

The math simply did not support the risk… Not yet.

♢♢♢♢

Ren stood in silence, rearranging the operational sequence in his mind until the variables aligned in humanity's favor.

The optimal play was to hunt the Light Dragon first…

Even with the mechanical beast chewing through the wall at an accelerated rate, the clock still offered them a workable margin.