Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1338 - Taming the Old World - One Second - 3

Ren made his choice… He would not forge the prison.

He was never going to sacrifice his very first contracted beast, the humble creature he had genuinely resented at the very beginning of his journey. It had started as a mere Spore when he was just a ten-year-old boy frantically trying to brush the fungus out of his hair out of embarrassment, ashamed because it was universally classified as the weakest entity on the registry while everyone else paraded magnificent, awe-inspiring monsters.

Yet today, that tiny mushroom was irreplaceable.

And his attachment today had nothing to do with its utility on the battlefield anymore. It was anchored in their shared history, the crushing guilt of forcing the symbiote into hibernation by his mistakes, and the countless lethal encounters where it had been forced awake and silently kept him breathing without ever failing.

The mushroom had been there long before Ren meant anything to the world.

He was not going to lose it now.

That decision allowed zero room for negotiation. Ren completely stopped treating the symbiote's sacrifice as a tactical variable to be debated and immediately cemented it as the immovable foundation upon which every subsequent action had to be built.

"No."

That single word continued to hang in the suspended time, floating between Ren and the golden mycelium as an absolute decree.

Ren had promised to find another way, and the exact millisecond the declaration left his lips, the hyper-accelerated, clinical portion of his intellect was already dissecting the situation to secure it. He utilized the frozen expanse of time to review the entire problem from its roots.

The very first step was reclaiming administrative control.

"What are you..."

Mooshito could not even finish the question. With a single, impeccably precise mental strike, Ren stripped the symbiote of its command over the network. He slipped effortlessly past the golden hyphae with the indisputable authority of a system owner claiming his domain. It was not a harsh usurpation; he simply unplugged the mushroom from the helm of its own biology before it could mount a protest, driven by a singular, overriding priority in this frozen sliver of time.

Evacuate the lethal ether from their system without causing more damage.

As long as that catastrophic overcharge continued surging through Mooshito's now fragile hyphae, it would systematically burn the damaged network to ash with every passing second. The runic prison and the dragon were now secondary concerns.

The absolute first step was diverting the energy flood before it completely washed away the foundation of the house.

But where could he safely dump it?

The crystal hearts were already at maximum capacity. They were brimming to the edge, physically incapable of warehousing another single ounce of mana, also he couldn't break a friend's heart for another. So Ren dismissed them in a fraction of a heartbeat.

The primordial dragon cores, however, operated on entirely different rules.

They were not static containers with hard limits; they were organic resonators. The more raw power poured into them, the higher their internal frequency scaled, much like a wire humming clearer as the physical tension increases. They could swallow a massive portion of the deadly current, so Ren immediately began routing the energy tide toward the seven guardian drops.

"Wait, that does not..." The mushroom's telepathic voice shifted abruptly from its morbid, serene resignation into shock. "How are you doing that? Those specific runes... The algorithmic sequence to route that energy directly through that channel. I never taught you that architecture… Where did you learn it?"

Ren offered no reply. He had zero seconds to waste on a lecture, and the truth was slightly uncomfortable anyway. Since he had deduced the pathways entirely on his own by exploiting the golden network to artificially expand his own cognitive processing speed. By silently observing the intricate runic architecture connecting the grid to the cores while Mooshito was busy planning its own martyrdom, Ren had learned to decipher a completely foreign layer of their shared system without the symbiote ever guiding him.

Mooshito fell dead silent for a fraction of an eternity, slowly processing the staggering reality that the fragile human it had just resolved to protect through the ultimate sacrifice had casually hijacked the master controls of its own net.

"You grew up far more than I realized," the mushroom whispered, the awe bleeding clearly through the link.

Then, the primordial cores hit their ceiling.

Ren sensed the impending bottleneck before it manifested into a catastrophic time wasting. All seven artifacts were vibrating at such a terrifyingly high frequency that the excess resonance was beginning to bleed back into the golden network instead of being safely absorbed.

They were magnificent amplifiers, true, but even Diamond rank resonators had energy limits. That ceiling had just been reached, and it was not enough.

He scanned the grid, a creeping knot of anxiety finally fraying the edges of his clinical calm.

There was still far too much dragon energy trapped in the loop, and the golden network would still burn. Dumping the remaining payload all at once was not a viable exit strategy. Forcing that incomprehensible volume of ether to discharge in a single burst would instantly rupture his own spiritual veins due to the sheer, concussive whiplash of the release.

The very meridian system he had painstakingly cultivated through years of agonizing discipline would shatter like glass in a second… No, he had to continue fragmenting the load. He had to cram the remaining ether into more auxiliary containers, just a little bit more, just enough to stop Mooshito's hyphae from turning to ash.

And the symbiotic mushroom, the entity that had entered this frozen second fully committed to dying, suddenly changed its mind.

Watching the boy work triggered the shift. Witnessing Ren act so impossibly stubborn, so opposed to accepting the clean, mathematically logical sacrifice, so fiercely willing to rupture his own veins rather than let go of the partner he refused to lose. Mooshito had prepared an entire, elegant speech about grand destinies and shedding weak links, and Ren had casually tossed the entire eulogy into the incinerator with two words and a wave of his hand.

"The rings," Mooshito suggested abruptly through their link.

Ren halted his frantic processing for half a heartbeat.

"The four energy amplifiers on your hand. We can use them to reinforce the grid's structural integrity... It is not their intended function, and they are terribly inefficient for this specific task, but I can forcibly overcharge their matrices just like the guardian cores. We can distribute the pressure. Having all seven would be ideal, but..." A brief pause. "Four is better than nothing..."

"Yes! Thank you... Let's use absolutely everything we have!"