Chapter 1314 - Taming the Old World - Ominous Silence - 2

Chapter 1314: Chapter 1314 - Taming the Old World - Ominous Silence - 2

Heart hammering against his ribs, Ren threw his mana perception wide open and shoved his awareness straight through the woody, rocky and metallic shell of the dome, frantically sweeping the dark interior for the missing prisoner.

Half a second later, he found it.

The beast had not gone anywhere... The colossal half mechanical dragon was still sitting right in the dead center of the five-point star array, coiled and motionless in the dark.

It had not breached the wall.

Ren let out the breath he had been holding in his throat, though the wave of relief lasted for one single second before evaporating.

Because the moment his perception brushed against the entity’s mana signature, he understood why the digging had stopped.

The ancient parasite had not given up on its escape, nor had its mechanical limbs broken down from wear and tear.

It was pooling energy.

Ren narrowed his focus, reading the dense currents swirling inside the darkened cage with crystal clarity. The prisoner had pulled its claws back from the stone not out of defeat, but because it had overhauled its entire approach. Instead of grinding away at the rock inch by inch, only to lose all its progress every time Ren came down here to patch the hole, the dragon had gone completely still. It was drawing every trickle of ambient power inward, compressing the mana inside its chest for something else entirely.

’Why change tactics now?’

Ren swept his senses up along the curved interior of the dome, measuring the geometry of the escape tunnel the beast had carved over the last several hours, and the answer hit him like a cold bucket of water.

With its latest burst of shadow-fueled digging, the dragon had pushed the excavation shaft to a structural tipping point. The tunnel itself was still a bit more than 2 days short of the entrance, yet the surrounding stone had been compromised. Every time Ren came down here to "repair" the damage with his earth magic, he was not hauling fresh quarries of granite down from the surface; he was reshaping and pulling rock from the existing containment walls to pack the tunnel shut.

If he did that one more time to fill this new cavity, the entire section of bedrock on this side of the dome would be stretched just as thin. The total volume of stone on this side was fixed; filling the hole meant thinning out the surrounding shell.

The prison had reached the physical limit of how many times its walls could be recycled. And the thing locked inside had figured it out.

That was why the scratching had stopped.

Once the purple dragon realized the containment wall could no longer be thickened back to its original density, the slow war of attrition became pointless. It no longer needed to race against Ren’s repair schedule or dig a tunnel all the way to the light of day. With the stone shell stretched this thin, all the prisoner had to do was sit still, hoard its strength, and save up enough power to blow the weakened wall wide open in a single strike.

That single shift upended the entire logic of their defense.

As long as the dragon was digging, it operated at a measurable, predictable pace. Ren could read the depth of the groove, calculate the hours left on the clock, pour his mana into the rock, and buy the city another day of breathing room. It had been a straightforward footrace that Ren knew how to run.

A monster sitting in the dark charging a single, wall-shattering blow was no longer running a race. It was waiting, loading the chamber, and choosing the exact hour it wanted to walk out the door.

The dragon was no longer scrambling to break free before Ren could recover his mana...

It was deciding when to leave.

????

For a brief moment, Ren’s thoughts scattered in a dozen frantic directions at once.

Maybe he needed to drop everything and fix this right now...

He could fly straight back up the shaft to the castle vault, tap the ley line until his channels were overloaded to three hundred percent capacity, and fly back down here to rebuild the array on the spot using the two crystals and the two new cores sitting in his shadow. He could rip the ten active orbs out of the pillars, take the draconic backlash to jolt Mooshito out of his coma, gamble with full-body crystallization, and force the upgraded seal into place before the beast finished charging.

Maybe if he hurried...

Ren closed his eyes and forced himself to take a long, slow breath through his nose.

Second by second, he reined in the spike of adrenaline, forcing the cold, analytical half of his brain to take the wheel back from his panic.

He stood by the silent metal and ran the actual math.

Even though the dragon had switched to charging a single hit, that did not mean the jailbreak was happening in the next ten minutes.

Keeping his palm against the steel, Ren measured the exact volume of energy currently pooled inside the beast’s core, clocked the trickle rate of the shadow mana leaking through the array’s blind spot, and weighed both figures against the structural threshold of the thinned bedrock wall.

Even with the stolen Shadow Core feeding it from afar, and even with Selthia’s new Diamond mutants thickening the ambient network on the surface, compressing enough force to shatter this wall in one go was a massive undertaking. At the current rate of intake, the dragon would need more than two full days to reach critical mass... Quite possibly closer to three.

The proof was in the timeline itself.

If sitting still and charging a single blast had been the faster way out, the ancient machine would have done that on the very first day instead of spending so many punching its claws against the rock.

The fact that it had only pivoted to this strategy today proved that charging a single strike inside a five-element suppression field was agonizingly slow and expensive. The dragon had been forced to spend days thinning the wall by hand first, just to bring the required energy threshold down to a number it could realistically save up.