Chapter 1092 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 4
Chapter 1092: Chapter 1092 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 4
Shizu hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second.
Seven people with different elemental affinities were brought here. They were together with the two members of the Astor and Jin families, brought along as unofficial sacrificial pawns. In the middle of a catastrophic crisis, they were nothing but dead weight.
Ren wouldn’t want to leave defenseless people behind, even technical enemies, but the brutal reality of the ruins left no room for morality. The families would still benefit as agreed, but the priceless artifacts and mana crystals stowed inside Shizu’s Wolverine were for Lin much more valuable than seven bodies that would anchor down a desperate spatial jump.
If Shizu’s Wolverine was destroyed before they escaped, the beast would simply regenerate from her core with time. She wouldn’t lose the beast, but the loot inside would be gone, falling right into Selthia’s hands. Giving that monster more ammunition of any kind was a fatal mistake.
Shizu made the cold, necessary choice. She violently expelled the seven prisoners onto the stone floor and immediately absorbed her beast back into her own body.
A massive shadow warped the air as Ren summoned his own Wolverine, bigger than hers.
"Get in now," Lin barked, already herding the battered group toward the beast’s gaping maw.
Ren’s Wolverine was a vault. It held mountains of harvested materials: eggs, crystals, weapons, artifacts. And because those items were born of pure mana, they integrated seamlessly into the beast’s spatial dimension back to Ren’s core without adding physical weight or resistance.
Living, breathing humans were fundamentally different, not originally born from mana. You couldn’t just drop a person into a spatial stomach and transform it into ethereal mana. To absorb someone alive, the Tamer had to actively cocoon them in their own mana, essentially dragging them through a localized time-space distortion your mana pushes to create.
It normally was agonizingly difficult and burned a massive amount of energy. Larissa had spent months mastering the technique to travel with Ren first, and only succeeded because of their shared high light element affinity.
But putting them into the internal system of the specialized beast did help because it reduced the energy needed, like a control aid. It acted as an external processor, a biological RAM, buffering the massive energy drain of the jump... Which was exactly why it was worth putting the whole group inside Ren’s Wolverine instead of making the jump without that help.
It wasn’t a pleasant ride. Unlike Shizu’s conventional, slightly slimy Wolverine, Ren’s storage was more defined by his shadow control, dry, suffocating, and pitch-black. But packing them inside for a moment was the only way Ren could generate enough thrust for a long-distance jump.
Leaving the seven prisoners thrashing on the floor clawed at Ren’s conscience, but leaving Sirius behind to become Selthia’s corrupted puppet was a nightmare he refused to allow. Luna was his absolute priority in that case. Seven pseudo-enemies paled in comparison to her father’s well being.
But the crisis was spiraling. If Ren didn’t want to drag an almost unconscious, trashing man across dimensions, and end up fainted by the effort, he had to force Sirius to snap out of it and help him with the jump.
Ren was already pushing his brain to the point of an aneurysm. He was simultaneously forcing his purifying mana into Sirius’s chest to fight the invasion while projecting a howling wall of wind to hold back the blackened artifacts on the stairs. A thick line of blood dripped from his nostril and ears, tracing the line of his jaw. The dual mental load was tearing him apart.
"Uncle Sirius, fight it!" Liora screamed at Sirius. Then she hurled the exact same desperate words, the exact same resistance mantra, she had screamed at Ren the day the corruption first claimed him.
Lin didn’t waste time on words. She grabbed Liora by the waist and unceremoniously hurled her into the Wolverine’s open jaws.
Then, running on absolute fumes, Lin stepped forward. She unleashed the very last dregs of her mana, taking over the wind pressure just long enough to give Ren a second of undivided focus.
"You have to hold on!" Ren roared over the howling gale, locking eyes with the kneeling commander. "Luna loves you! Despite everything... you cannot give up!"
Something deep inside Sirius Starweaver shattered... But it shattered in the exact right direction.
Inside Wolverine’s mouth, Hana sensed something and suddenly went rigid. A bizarre, phantom sensation brushed against her perception, strange in the chamber’s atmosphere.
This was the moment. Not only Sirius’ body... His will, the last vestige he needed to push back against the corruption with all his might, to also stop fearing Ren’s mana and begin working with it, opening himself to external control in the way passive resistance demanded.
He surrendered his stubborn, solitary resistance, opening his network to his full external control.
Lin saw the tension leave Sirius’s shoulders. Knowing the connection was made, she didn’t hesitate. She threw herself backward into the Wolverine just as her legs gave out.
Sirius gasped, regaining a fleeting, desperate control of his own body. He reached out and fused, his aura flaring, and poured his massive shadow energy into Ren’s shadow jump.
The world collapsed around them. They vanished into the void.
But the air in the cavern rippled with an unnatural mana distortion.
♢♢♢♢
Hana’s contracted beast, the Royal Venus Antenna, was unique within the group. It possessed a highly specific, rare capability: spatial disruption blocking. It was the exact same beast she had weaponized years ago as the expensive babysitter she actually was, acting as Julius’s operative, to repeatedly track down and trap the three mischievous princesses when they tried to teleport away into danger.
That hyper-tuned spatial sensitivity had screamed in alarm moments before. The dimensional current they were riding wasn’t flowing outward; it was bending back on itself with huge power.
"Don’t waste the mana!" Hana shrieked into the dark.
She was a fraction of a second too late.
The Wolverine’s jaws had snapped shut, dissolving back into Ren’s shadow, submerging them entirely in the violent swirl of shadow and earth mana of his beast space.
But when the darkness violently peeled away, the heavy, stale air of the seventh chamber hit their lungs again.
Ren stumbled, his boots scraping against the familiar stone. Sirius’ knees hit the ground hard.
They hadn’t escaped.
The jump had executed flawlessly, big reserves of Sirius’ mana had been burned, but the spatial destination had been hijacked. The corrupted flesh and the artifacts themselves had rejected their exit, violently ricocheting them back to their exact point of origin.
Selthia began to laugh.
It wasn’t the playful, coquettish giggle she had used before. It was a shrill, hysterical cackle... It was the uncontainable, euphoric laughter of a predator watching the trap snap shut flawlessly on its prey.
Sirius collapsed to both knees. The crushing weight of their failure hit him, and the purple corruption surged violently in his veins again, feeding eagerly off the sudden wave of despair.
Ren stared at the fleshy barricade on the stairs, his chest heaving, sheer disbelief painting his bloodstained face.
"There are six chambers in these kind of ruins with guardians that can be beaten into special eggs," Selthia’s voice vibrated through the rotting meat, still laced with breathless laughter. "My Platinum beasts from Yino haven’t arrived yet, that is true."
A heavy, deliberate pause hung in the air, letting the sheer dread of her next words settle into their bones.
"But I’ve had another little beast in me that I absolutely adore. It is incredibly helpful... especially when dealing with little jumpers who think they can escape and not pay the deals whenever they please!"