Chapter 1083 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Link-up
Chapter 1083: Chapter 1083 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Link-up
Mayo reached up, her fingers grazing the smooth cap of the glowing fungus. Her expression twisted into a complicated knot of amusement and profound indignity.
"I am acutely aware," she deadpanned, "that there is a mushroom sitting on my head."
"Not one... You all have many now," Ren replied, his voice already vibrating with the overlapping echoes of his reinitiating fusion.
"I haven’t decided if that makes it better or worse yet," Mayo muttered.
The others stayed quiet while touching them too. They had the exact same brilliant golden ones resting on their heads, but their expressions held something softer. It was the look of people who had just been handed something they hadn’t realized they were waiting for.
These new beasts were tiny. They were Iron-rank non-combatants that functionally added almost zero raw power to their arsenals. But they would be an extra beast in the end and were his... They had come directly from Ren’s own hands, a strange, intimate gift that made the little golden beasts invaluable.
Ren didn’t waste another breath. He violently threw open the connection, linking his mind to the seven new sensory networks simultaneously.
The extra space that would be helping with the huge influx of data wasn’t just space and the sensations and emotions of 7 girls hit him instantly. It wasn’t the cold, theoretical math of a computational expansion; it was warm, heavy, and intensely visceral. It gave him a feeling that raw numbers couldn’t describe.
It wasn’t his first time connecting with someone, not even a group of girls, and it wasn’t as intimate as his fiancés’ group connection or as big as the overwhelming, god-like processing power his fully awakened spore companion gave him, but it was something different from both of those. Smaller and less intense yet more friendly and pure.
And right now, in the razor-thin margin between success and failure, that ’something pure’ was exactly the lifeline he needed without extra meanings than that of helpfulness.
At the base of the stairs, Lin turned back for one final glance.
She was smiling.
It wasn’t the strained, artificial smile of a captain trying to boost morale before a slaughter. It was a quiet, profoundly satisfied smirk. It was the look of someone watching her prophecy fulfill itself right on schedule.
Without a single word, she pivoted and launched herself up the narrow, dark stairwell. She moved with terrifying speed, her legs burning with the potent, residual energy of her merging fusion, rushing upward to meet the skittering horrors head-on.
Ren dove back into the task.
As the connection deepened, he realized again that the true value of this extra network wasn’t the microscopic processing power of the 7 new Iron-rank mushrooms.
It was them.
Mayo and the six guards were friends. They had years of cultivation carved into their bodies. Their minds had developed the kind of expanded perception that only comes from the best cultivation techniques he gave them, a depth of mental endurance that their Iron rank beasts classifications completely failed to measure.
And more importantly, they trusted him. It wasn’t the fragile, abstract trust of soldiers following a commander. It was the blood-forged, absolute certainty born from standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the worst times.
That absolute trust translated directly into that pure mental access.
When Ren reached into their minds, he didn’t encounter the reflexive, guarded walls most would have instinctively erected when sharing minds and sensory feelings. The gates were thrown wide open.
They surrendered their mental architecture completely.
Even Mayo... She complained about the intrusion, and technically, the flood of shared sensory data was deeply uncomfortable, but she didn’t throw up a single barrier to block him. She gave him everything too.
The raw mental bandwidth flooded into Ren.
It wasn’t a god-like network, but it was real, tangible, and added directly to his own massive capacity. In a spell where the only bottleneck was the gap between his maximum mental output and the required data load, this extra ’external RAM’ was just enough.
His analyzing gaze surged forward. The intricate, impossible map of Sirius’s petrified body lit up under his expanded perception.
Ren locked down the vital organs. He mapped the entire torso. The head. He pushed even further, weaving the complex muscular structures of the deltoids, the biceps, the triceps, threading back the concept of living tissue from the solid stone.
But then, the pressure spiked again... The bottleneck returned.
It was further down the line, but it was the exact same absolute wall. The shared network was maxed out. Their combined mental capacity was redlining. The forearms and the legs, the extremities’ half still unmapped, were going to remain solid crystal. He had absolutely no processing power left to add them to the active transmutation without collapsing the entire process.
Sirius wouldn’t be happy or comfortable, but It would need to do...
That was when the Mantis bypassed his conscious commands.
Deep within his soul-space, the golden lined jade insectoid beast seized total, autonomous control of Ren’s physical body. Instantly, Ren felt the mental drain of his own biological functions vanish. The Mantis took over the invisible, background processing: regulating his heartbeat, managing his breathing, micro-adjusting his posture, even filtering the physical pain including the headache of the mana burn out.
It was the kind of neurological tax a human mind constantly pays without ever noticing. By ripping that burden away from Ren’s brain, the Mantis freed up a tiny, razor-thin fraction of cognitive capacity. It wasn’t much for someone with Ren’s level of perception. But it was the kind of relief you only notice when a crushing weight is suddenly lifted.
Yet the Mantis wasn’t finished.
Operating Ren’s arm like a biological puppet, it reached into his spatial storage. It pulled out the clone crystal, the perfect, faceted replica of itself the ruin’s door had generated earlier.
The crystal still resonated with the exact frequencies of Ren’s own beast system. When the Mantis connected it into the active circuit, it didn’t connect like the girls’ borrowed, external perception. It connected as a direct, hardwired extension of Ren’s own network.
It was a parallel processor that spoke the exact same native language as his core because it was born from it. The final piece clicked into place.
The needed network for the full job was complete.