Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1340 - Taming the Old World - First Chamber

Ren jumped near the entrance and bypassed the final stretch of the descent entirely.

Channeling his control over his own mana infused materials, he mentally forced the armored entrance of the vault to split open before his boots even hit the ground. The heavy steel plating, wood and stone obediently retracted the instant he willed it.

Yet, his internal meridian system was still catastrophically overloaded.

And that huge surcharge left a footprint.

It was not a subtle trail... He was bleeding an ethereal signature so intensely massive, so far beyond the standard scale of output, that it cut through the small space exactly like a distress flare fired into the dead of night.

Anyone with a modicum of magical perception would have felt it immediately; the primordial purple parasite near him detected the spike with absolute clarity.

Despite being heavily besieged from every conceivable flank, and despite struggling against five elite Vanguard commanders actively anchoring the runic nodes while an incomplete prison matrix aggressively compressed its chassis, the mechanical titan reacted instantly. Its initial response was pure, unadulterated shock, the profound bewilderment of an ancient entity that completely failed to anticipate its prey executing the exact suicidal maneuver Ren had just pulled.

But it did not waste a single second lingering in confusion.

Its shock rapidly hardened into ruthless intent.

It had absolutely no intention of squandering the golden opportunity. It lunged forward, following the blazing trail of Ren's ethereal footprint.

The Vanguard commanders, however, still held it.

They kept the titan physically tethered from multiple angles, each Tamer desperately hanging onto their assigned side, paying the agonizing physical toll required to restrain an entity boasting the weight of a moving mountain.

But the colossal machine had spent days quietly hoarding an apocalyptic volume of energy.

The mechanical dragon violently tore itself free from their combined grip. Ripping through the suppression field cost the beast precious time, and that delay was precisely the window the young man desperately needed.

Ren surged ahead…

He initiated a rapid-fire sequence of simultaneous spatial jumps, chaining the blinks seamlessly together without allowing himself a fraction of a second to breathe in between. Every single jump carried a steep systemic tax; forcing the catastrophically overloaded draconic ether through his fractured channels to execute the spatial translations punished his system, subjecting his internal veins to agonizing shocks that bit into him from the inside out.

Yet he simply ignored the pain.

Speed was the only variable that mattered right now. The Vanguard would not be able to stall the purple titan for long, and every passing second that the lethal surcharge remained trapped inside his core compounded the systemic damage to his friend.

Shortening the physical distance meant shortening their exposure to the poison and he vastly preferred the sharp, blinding bite of a high-speed sprint over the slow, agonizing erosion caused by hesitation.

The primary vault of Yino stood wide open.

It had always been open... It was the very first physical connection to the ancient planetary network, the oldest subterranean node on the continent, and one that had never required a genuine, high-tier complex runic lock during Ren's lifetime. The superficial ruins scattered across the surface above it utilized much simpler key mechanisms, simple level one artifacts that were completely irrelevant now, mechanisms Ren could effortlessly repair or bypass entirely.

Because this initial chamber was not buried nearly as deep as the secondary vault housing the corrupted core, Ren cleared the distance rapidly. He dropped out of his final spatial jump right in the center of the room, his physical body actively smoking from the sheer ethereal friction, his irises still blazing with that terrifying, borrowed energy.

And there he saw him.

Dragarion.

The exact same draconic energy that the king had weaponized years ago, the ancient power that had promised them eternal glory, had indeed empowered the old king to hold the line against an insurmountable enemy, only to reward his sacrifice by completely crystallizing his body.

He was a permanent statue until now.

A proud king reduced to a silent sculpture of himself, frozen by the exact same primordial authority currently crushing Ren's mana system, the very same energy actively threatening to rupture the boy's veins at this exact moment.

There was a dark, poetic symmetry to the scene, though Ren severely lacked the time to appreciate the bittersweet irony.

Under normal circumstances, Ren would have been completely powerless to extract Dragrion and the rings.

The sheer cognitive processing power required to untangle a crystalline algorithm of Diamond mana density vastly exceeded the limits of any single human brain. Reversing crystallization on this scale operated on a dimensional plane far above standard Platinum-tier logic; it was a labyrinth of runes folded within runes that would have required the synchronized, coordinated efforts of hundreds, perhaps thousands of mooshroom Tamers. It would also necessitate multiple Tamers utilizing golden mushrooms as central hubs to network the secondary civilian hosts, orchestrating an entire symphony of parallel processing grids just to scratch the surface.

But the Ren standing in this vault right now was not operating under normal parameters.

Furthermore, he didn't actually need to reverse the process across Dragarion's entire body. He only needed to isolate and decouple enough of the crystalline structure to physically claim the artifacts.

The volume of Diamond-tier energy required to execute that precise surgical extraction was currently a non-issue. Mooshito's network, fully expanded and violently overcharged to the absolute breaking point, provided Ren with an overwhelming surplus of processing capacity. He only needed a handful of seconds. He just had to isolate the exact crystalline boundary separating the statue from the wall of solid purple corruption.

Once he severed the king from the wall, he would have no choice but to forcefully shatter the base of the petrified fingers, because the rings were fused directly into the half closed hand, and there was simply no cleaner method of extraction.

He would have to offer his apologies for the desecration later.

The thought crossed his mind briefly, a fleeting moment of genuine respect for his father-in-law. He would eventually have to ask the king, a man who had sacrificed absolutely everything to protect this world, for forgiveness for snapping three of his fingers.

Larissa, driven by her cold pragmatism, would undoubtedly grasp the grim necessity with minimal complaint. Lutea might struggle with the reality initially, but Ren was confident she would… eventually… understand the terrible stakes.

But first: the extraction.