Chapter 1325 - Taming the Old World - 48 hours

Chapter 1325: Chapter 1325 - Taming the Old World - 48 hours

Ren descended back into the subterranean vault, accompanied by the girls, his closest friends, and whichever Vanguard leaders could afford to step away from the surface.

Arturo was absent. Someone had to manage the intricate logistics of the recovering capital, and the brilliant strategist simply could not spare the half hour required to fly down, stand idly in front of a metal wall while Ren worked, and fly back. However, Selphira made the trip, alongside the girls, Julius, Taro, Wei, and Finch, who carried Theodore perched dutifully on his shoulder. They were joined by a small detachment of civilian mushroom hosts that Wei had recruited to test his theories on mushroom networking.

Standing before the massive structure, Ren briefly asked Liora to hand back the Fire Ring.

He slipped the ancient artifact onto his finger and prepared to execute the final baseline repair. Operating without the massive surcharge of the castle’s dragon energy flooding his system drastically limited his raw output. He had to rely strictly on the rings and his two crystals, supported by the sprawling, interconnected mycelium web provided by the girls, Finch, Wei, the royal guards, the maids, and civilians. All of these hosts linked their own networks into Ren’s central node, feeding him their collective mana perception expansion.

That vast web was helpful, yet it only assisted him with the variables he already counted.

It drastically expanded his spatial awareness, sharpened his targeting precision, and smoothed out the flow of his available mana to direct the dense materials. It did not, however, expand the physical capacity of his own meridians.

That was his hard limitation... No matter how wide the golden network spread or how many hosts fed into the grid, Ren could only channel as much ethereal mass as his system veins could safely endure without scorching his channels. Consequently, his effective area of influence barely covered twenty to twenty-five percent of the dome’s total surface area, roughly equivalent to the radius of the hemisphere’s base.

They had been scraping by using every trick in the book.

Day after day, Ren had utilized a spiral distribution technique, physically dragging as much material as possible of the tri-elemental metallic alloy from the furthest reaches of his área of effect radius to reinforce the critical center. He had been robbing the outer edges of their thickness to pack more density into the central spot where the purple dragon was trying to break through. But physical mathematics had a strict ceiling, and Ren had finally hit it.

Because his operational range was limited to the base, continuing that spiral inward meant he had already consumed the outer perimeter almost entirely. There was simply no reachable material left to borrow without creating a fatal weak point that the containment pressure of a massive titan would eventually blow open. The floor of the vault had reached its final critical threshold of two days, confirming the exact nightmare Ren had suspected the moment he heard the titanic beast stop digging.

And nobody present could offer Ren direct assistance...

Despite knowing this, Julius and Taro engaged their double fusions and tried to force a miracle anyway. Tapping into their profound mastery over the earth, the two earth specialists attempted to sense the geometric curvature of the dome relative to the surrounding bedrock. They pushed downward on the upper hemisphere, straining to compress the higher walls and force excess material down to the base, desperately trying to give Ren fresh alloy to work with and extend the timer.

Yet they failed completely, even while pushing their elemental output to its upper limits.

"It is not yielding a single inch," Julius grunted, his palm pressed flat against the wall and his brow deeply furrowed from the immense strain. "I am sorry... It feels exactly like trying to push a mountain over with a single finger. It is just as frustrating as the first time we tried."

Beside him, Taro gave a defeated nod, dropping his hands from the structure.

The reason for their failure came down to three insurmountable factors...

First, the dome was forged from a high-tier amalgamation of elements that rivaled true adamantium in sheer density, making it incredibly stubborn by nature.

Second, the entire structure was thoroughly saturated with Ren’s unique mana signature, meaning the alloy only responded easily to his specific commands.

Finally, the dome possessed zero mana conductivity below its multielemental base. It was designed as the ultimate insulator to trap elemental energy, rendering it highly resistant to anyone lacking true multi-elemental authority.

To share control over any structure, a Tamer first needed to inject their own mana into the grid, a prerequisite this shielding simply refused to allow.

"I told you both earlier, you only need to focus on stabilizing the surrounding bedrock to help distribute the physical load so I don’t need to move the earth bellow as I work; there is no point in exhausting yourselves trying to mold the dome every single day," Ren explained, not breaking his concentration as he continued his own meticulous repairs.

"Even if we brought down a thousand earth Tamers of your caliber, it still would not work. Shared manipulation requires an active ethereal grid woven through the target material to connect every participant. This alloy is far too dense with my mana and dragon ether, and it will not conduct a single drop of your mana, not even if you both managed to reach the middle tiers of the Diamond rank. The support network cannot even initiate... Any Tamer touching this wall is acting entirely alone, pushing their own isolated strength against an almost immovable mass."

It was the exact architectural design required to trap the ancient dragon, Ren noted with a bitter sense of irony. That flawless insulation Mooshy created made it impossible for the purple parasite to hijack the cage, yet it simultaneously made it impossible for his allies to help him maintain it.

Left with no other option, Ren managed the structural shift entirely on his own, relying on his limited mana pool just as he had every day prior.

He pushed the final section into place.

He smoothed out the last remaining irregularity on the cavern floor, dragging the final lump of excess alloy inward until the central plate was perfectly identical across its entire surface. It was now a uniform shield without a single weak point.

It was the very best he could manage.

A week ago, chewing through a plate this dense would have taken the mechanical beast nearly three full days. Now, fueled by the stolen shadow energy bypassing the interference grid, that timeline had shrunk to just over forty-eight hours. The margin between Ren’s reinforcement capacity and the dragon’s destructive output had narrowed to a razor-thin wire, and there was no structural trick left to widen the gap.

Ren could theoretically drag material down from the upper hemisphere to thicken the floor, but he had quickly dismissed the idea as entirely useless. He was already operating at a severe deficit because his daily energy recovery rate was outpaced by the dragon’s excavation speed. If he wasted any energy from a day’s work at manually shifting metal from the roof down to the base, he would simply lose that vital time in the ongoing race against the creature.

The only logical path forward was to spend the final two days wisely: one day dedicated to healing his arm and clearing his still slightly crystallized body, and the second day focused on deep rest, ensuring he stepped into the vault at one hundred percent capacity before taking dragon energy and attempting the ultimate overhaul of the prison.