Chapter 1079 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - 2
Chapter 1079: Chapter 1079 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - 2
In the ninth chamber, the ruins finally demanded more than just their physical presence.
Two High-Gold guardians materialized from the floor and immediately fused, twisting into a massive, jagged cyclone of razor-sharp rocks and howling pressure.
For the first time in actual combat, Ren drew the Mantis crystal.
He left Sirius’s core safely tucked away. He wouldn’t dare use it for battle, nor would he try to fuse his mantis one with it. Using it as a weapon meant treating a person, the father of someone incredibly important to him, like a disposable field tool. Even if the crystal was still partially corrupted, even if the man was currently trapped in the petrified statue they had left behind and even if he could repair it later, Ren refused to cross that line.
The Mantis crystal, however, was entirely different.
It was, technically speaking, a clone of his own system. The door’s mechanism had taken a perfect scan and stored the original. But the replica the system spat out possessed the exact same structural integrity. It held the identical neural-mana pathways the Mantis had carved into Ren’s own system.
Those invisible, metaphysical sockets were still waiting inside Ren’s body, perfectly shaped for the crystal he now held in his hand.
It was like holding the final piece of a puzzle, intimately knowing the exact shape of the void it was meant to fill.
Using it didn’t feel like wielding a weapon. It felt bizarrely akin to flexing his own fingers.
The synergy wasn’t merely skill like Orion’s case; it was instinctual. The moment his skin touched the faceted surface, energy surged. Before Ren could even formulate a conscious command, the crystal aligned. The trajectory of his attack auto-corrected, his internal system calculating the flawless angle of execution in a fraction of a second. It felt less like casting a spell and more like extending a limb he had momentarily forgotten he possessed.
The fused High-Gold guardian took the full brunt of the crystal’s full strike. The beam of raw, Mantis-aspected gem light ray hit with such devastating, focused power that the construct simply ceased to exist.
The brief skirmish turned the ninth chamber into nothing more than a live-fire testing ground for Ren’s new weapon.
Finally, they breached the tenth chamber.
The ruins threw their last desperate defense at the intruders: a towering Platinum-rank entity, a flawless amalgamation of crushing earth and shredding wind. The beast roared, unleashing its full, unadulterated power in a sweeping shockwave meant to flatten them all.
Ren didn’t dodge.
He raised the Mantis crystal, projecting a perfect, impenetrable shield that absorbed the Platinum-level impact with a resonant, bell-like chime. Behind the safety of the barrier, Ren instantly initiated a fusion with his two remaining beasts.
The mana in the room grew suffocatingly dense. He charged the attack for five long and powerful seconds.
When he finally released it, the devastation was absolute. The Platinum construct shattered into a million harmless pieces.
The last guardian fell.
In its ashes lay the pristine core they needed for the last door in the very first ruin in Starweaver territory, the objective that had started this entire, grueling campaign. Ren picked it up, storing it alongside their accumulated spoils.
A deep satisfaction settled over him. This part of the job, at least, was completely finished.
The tenth and final reward chamber didn’t have a massive door requiring three cores to open.
The moment Ren stepped across the threshold, he recognized the architecture. It mirrored the water and fire ruins perfectly. It was the specific, deliberate layout of a space designed to be a final transit point, not a fortified vault.
This was the end of the line.
Without the oppressive, lingering hum of a pending trap or an active mechanism, the air here felt different. It was profoundly still. It carried the heavy, undisturbed quality of a forgotten tomb, a place that had waited in the dark for an eternity for someone to finally arrive.
The pedestals stood in the dead center of the room.
Resting on top were the double-contract potions. The system had hoarded them here, saving its greatest treasure for the very end rather than scattering them along the path. The vials glowed with a soft, pristine light, perfectly preserved after their long wait.
But they weren’t the only things waiting in the center.
And right there, exactly as Selthia had mentioned, was an egg.
The first thing he saw was that egg.
Not the petrified statue. Not the pedestals. It was the egg resting in the center of the chamber.
Somehow, it had entirely bypassed the mental inventory Ren had been building of what awaited them here. Selthia had explicitly mentioned it, yes, but hearing about an anomaly and actually standing in its presence were two entirely different things.
It was massive, far larger than anything newly formed had a right to be. Its surface didn’t look like a shell or scale; it possessed the distinct, sweeping quality of crystallized wind. It was almost silver, flashing with reflections that warped and shifted depending on where you stood. It was translucent, but not in the bright, piercing way of a light-aspected crystal. It was cloudy, like a storm trapped in glass.
Faced with the choice between Earth and Wind, the fallen guardian had clearly leaned into its superior affinity upon its collapse, exactly as Luna’s wolf had done.
Yet, a dark stain marred its beauty. Nearly half of the iridescent surface was bruised with a sickly, purplish tint. The corruption had deeply infiltrated the base system before the door’s automated, incomplete purification had severed the process.
Wind.
This was what remained of the Whisper of the Wind, the half-corrupted guardian capable of weaving terrifyingly real illusions. The exact beast Selthia had coveted for her own arsenal, the one that could forcefully project a person’s deepest desires into reality. It had left this legacy behind.
Staring at it, Ren realized it looked incredibly close to a superior, insectoid version of his own Mantis. Or would have been had it not already been fundamentally mutated by the jade energy of the seed.
Ren stared at the dormant storm in the shell for a long moment, calculating the vast, complicated implications it would have on their immediate future. Then, he deliberately forced his eyes away. Moving it right now served absolutely no tactical purpose, and the rest of the silent chamber was still waiting for him.
Pedestals dotted the expanse of the room. Atop them, the potions glowed with an unalterable, pristine light. They possessed the eerie perfection of items that had survived in the dark for decades, perfectly preserved by a system that maintained absolute stasis without ever being asked.
And there, in the back of the chamber, stood the statue of Sirius Starweaver.
It stood frozen, imposing, and tragically hollow, missing the heart that should have been beating in its chest. The very core Ren currently had stowed away, the one he would inevitably have to return in ways he hadn’t fully prepared for yet.
Since for now, Sirius’s core in his palm remained an active, grueling work in progress.
Thirty percent corruption. That was the wall he had hit, he had spent the entire descent passively purifying it, bleeding off the rot while simultaneously fighting, and this final thirty percent was the most agonizingly stubborn.
It wasn’t raw, chaotic energy anymore; it was the rot that had been given ample time to deeply integrate into the core’s architecture.
Purifying a soul while dodging strikes was far from the most efficient process. But it was the only process he’d had available.
He let out a slow breath... The massive door that would unlock the chamber where Lykea waited was a three-core mechanism.
But they had them now.
All three cores were finally in their possession. It was tangible, heavy progress, the kind you could actually feel in your hands.
Ren turned his gaze to his guards. They were staring at the glowing pedestals with the complex, muted expressions of people who had just stepped into a myth. They knew they were standing in front of something profoundly life-changing again, following Ren was always like this, but their exhaustion was still battling their disbelief. They hadn’t quite decided how to feel about it yet.
He looked at Mayo.
"The potions," Ren said, his voice cutting through the heavy silence. He spoke with the definitive tone of a commander concluding a tactical equation he’d been running in the background for forty minutes. "I’m going to advocate for your group to get them when we get out of here."
Mayo blinked, her gaze snapping from the glowing vials to Ren.
"Maria and Matilda too? Cool... So," she drawled, a smirk fighting through the grime on her face, "are we all going to be infected by that mushroom of yours?"
Ren huffed a quiet laugh at the deadpan joke, acknowledging the sheer absurdity of his spore companion’s mechanics without rising to the bait. He decided to play along.
"As many of you as I can manage."
Mayo processed the answer. Her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
"Good," she said. It was the simple, grounded response of someone receiving incredibly good news and seeing zero reason to complicate the moment with false modesty. "We deserve to be triples."