Chapter 1085 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Recollection
Chapter 1085: Chapter 1085 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Recollection
He clearly remembered leaving the thirteen-year-old and his little group of friends behind on the trail.
The kid hadn’t gone down easily. He had fought back with a terrifying, reckless intensity. It was the exact brand of stubbornness Sirius had learned to recognize in the boy who eventually caused massive, world-altering problems, for better or worse, depending entirely on which side of the battlefield you stood.
"Stop playing hero and go back to school," Sirius had told him more or less with different words. He had spoken with the absolute finality of a man who had zero time for negotiations, heavily implying he would personally beat the kid senseless if he followed.
The boy had challenged him anyway. He had proven he wasn’t just a nuisance; he was genuinely dangerous.
But Sirius was an elite. He had crushed the kid’s resistance, turned his back, and continued his journey to get the stuff needed to recover the statue of his wife alone.
Then Julius had arrived, and the situation had rapidly spiraled out of control. The mutants had swarmed.
The beasts he encountered on the path to the chamber were exactly what one would expect in the outer rings: Silver-rank horrors, breeding in massive numbers as the corruption aggressively ate and rotted the root systems of the world.
But their movement hadn’t been mindless. There was a linear, unnatural pattern to their migration.
They were heading toward the city.
It wasn’t a perfectly coordinated military march, but there was enough consistency for a veteran to read the grim reality written in the dirt. A horde was gathering.
Even knowing that, Sirius hadn’t turned back. He couldn’t abandon his mission now. So he pushed forward, upstream against a relentless, snapping tide of mutated flesh.
He slaughtered them, one by one, carving his path into the dark.
But he had to ration his energy with the grim, calculated determination of a man stranded in a desert counting his last drops of water.
Mana was strictly reserved for catastrophic emergencies. Raw, physical strength had to carry him through everything else. It was the only viable strategy to carve a path through the suffocating tide of mutated beasts surging toward the city without burning out before he even reached his objective.
And the tide was massive. A relentless, chittering river of corrupted flesh.
He wasn’t entirely alone in the culling, though. The environment itself fought back. Golden Noses, clustered by sheer luck along the migration route, dove and pecked at the Silver-rank beasts flooding beneath them. They struck with the frenzied voracity of predators that had stumbled into a boundless feast. Many of the birds were so bloated they could barely move, yet they kept striking, driven by blind instinct because the feed just kept coming.
In the Gold 2 zone, the bloody pattern repeated. Deeper still, in Gold 3, the colossal, carnivorous sprouts of the giant forest floor were literally choking on prey. Some vines hung limp and unresponsive, their mana digestive capacities completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of bodies.
The entire ecosystem was gorging itself, and it still wasn’t enough to stem the tide.
But tactically, it made sense. The mutants’ strategy of forming a narrow column and brute-forcing a safe path through sheer numbers, was very effective.
Sirius’s contribution to the slaughter was added to the ecosystem’s toll.
He wanted to help the city more but that would burn his mana fast, so having no other choice, he tightened his grip and kept moving.
♢♢♢♢
By the time he reached the coordinates Zhao had provided in the Gold 3 ring, the landscape had been changed.
The massive, petrified claw tree that was supposed to serve as a landmark was completely gone, either moved or physically buried by the endless trampling of thousands of beasts. The subterranean sinkhole beneath it had been drastically widened. Mutants poured in and out of the crater in a ceaseless, churning flow, connecting to an adjacent tunnel that spiraled up the colossal dead body of the "tree" from underground.
The constant traffic had violently merged the two distinct entrances into a single, massive highway.
Sirius processed the chaotic terrain with the split-second analytical speed of a veteran Tamer.
They had been forced upward.
There was no other logical explanation for the subterranean flow violently breaching the surface with such intensity. If the ancient walls of the inner ruins remained what they historically were, indestructible, the mutants had hit a dead end below.
Although they might have begun their invasion of the ruins from lower down, Sirius surmised it had something to do with the flow moving toward the city.
The mutants had found access from above, wherever the chamber system had a natural opening or one created by something that predated all of this, and had descended in sufficient numbers for the traffic itself to widen the entry points.
To enter that saturated pit, raw muscle wouldn’t be enough. Wading into that river of flesh would be like trying to punch a waterfall. It was time to spend mana.
Sirius activated his shadow-step. He melted into the darkness, slicing smoothly through the dense tide without physical resistance. But when he finally breached the interior of the cavern, he found something deeply unsettling. The outward flow simply vanished.
The chamber was gorged.
The terrifying pressure driving the mutants to the surface had hit a saturation point. Inside the ruins, the problem ceased to be about the current and reverted entirely to volume. Sirius had braced himself for a duel against an ancient guardian. Instead, he found himself staring at a suffocating, wall-to-wall ocean of Silver-rank beasts.
He immediately cut his mana supply, reverting to physical force to preserve his core.
Hundreds of beasts stood between him and the first doorway alone. Hundreds more waited in every single false chamber that followed.
As he waded through the gore, a dark realization settled over him. These weren’t the actual ruins. These were crude, adjacent chambers excavated by the mutants themselves. It was an artificial hive built for some unknown, deeply unsettling purpose, likely the real reason the horde had breached until the surface in the first place.