Chapter 1343 - Taming the Old World - Resistance

Chapter 1343: Chapter 1343 - Taming the Old World - Resistance

Ren was being relentlessly pushed backwards...

He desperately needed his Hydra.

His three-headed draconic fusion had remained on the surface, anchoring the light beam lockdown and heavily punishing the mechanical titan right up until that final, massive explosion allowed the parasite to slip into the crater. He needed to cancel the surface summoning immediately, pull the Hydra back into his core, and redeploy it down here inside the vault, where it could actually fight alongside him.

But canceling the summoning right now carried a lethally steep price.

Reverting the fusion meant dropping back into his base human form, even if only for a fraction of a second. It meant facing a concentrated beam of corrupted dragon breath completely unprotected, shielding his fragile human flesh against a torrent of that much corrupted energy that was currently vaporizing even the layers of his Diamond-dense crystal arm.

And the dragon refused to grant him even a single microsecond of breathing room. It continued dragging its colossal mass through the breach, relentlessly spitting a torrent of six corrupted elements directly at him. It punished him with the chilling, methodical patience of an ancient entity that had waited years to execute this exact sentence upon the boy, now a young man, who had dared to reject his enticing power, reject any invitations to a better net and even challenged it.

If Ren canceled the fusion right now, he would be instantly vaporized.

So, he held the line.

He endured the onslaught, but he was not merely standing still.

His cracked, crystallized left arm bore the brunt of the continuous breath attack, while the sheer kinetic pressure bulldozed him backwards. His boots slid across the smooth stone floor of the vault, dragging him steadily toward the far end of the chamber. Every single meter he lost was a meter the dragon gained, and the ancient beast was acutely aware of the shifting board. It aggressively pressed its advantage, steadily closing the distance to its ultimate objective.

Until it reached the closed second door.

The massive lock securing the two primary rings of Yino.

Ren saw it happen, and a cold spike of pure terror pierced through the searing heat of the combat. The purple dragon was inches away from claiming those sovereign artifacts. Ripping those rings from the lock and absorbing them together with the one it already had meant it would be able to open the important door.

It meant unrestricted access to the second chamber.

It meant claiming the other seed.

If the corrupted parasite breached that final threshold, nothing else he could do in here would matter.

Ren had been desperately trying to finish overcharging his last rings while weathering the blast, but he had to do something else right now.

He had to intervene immediately.

However, Mooshito was still crippled... The golden fungal network was still actively burning, struggling to process the lingering remnants of the catastrophic draconic overload that Ren had not yet managed to fully vent. If Ren forced the symbiote to expend even a fraction of its remaining energy on any offensive maneuver right now, the sheer strain could permanently destroy his friend.

Ren made his decision in a heartbeat.

His friend came first.

He poured every remaining ounce of his hyper-accelerated concentration into stabilizing the volatile dragon ether. He meticulously distributed the last dregs of the lethal surcharge, forcefully dragging the roaring river of draconic power out of Mooshito’s shredded hyphae once and for all.

"There! Thank you! We are finally... we are stable," the mushroom transmitted through the link. Its telepathic voice was incredibly weak and thoroughly exhausted, yet profoundly grateful and, most importantly, alive.

The golden network was utterly battered, but it had survived the purge.

"Great! Now we need to immediately elevate our baseline energy output... I need to fight back," Ren urged. "Right now!"

Because the purple dragon had already seized the two rings.

It was actively integrating the artifacts, but it certainly was not using them to politely unlock the heavy door. It forcefully absorbed the two primary rings of Yino directly into its own mutant meat chassis, swallowing them exactly as it had consumed the primordial cores. With every artifact it successfully assimilated, the destructive output of its purple breath got a bit stronger.

"Alright, we actually have viable options now," Mooshito replied, its calculating speed returning. "Actively consuming the 7 rings you are currently wearing could significantly reinforce our internal network. That true integration would grant your physical body a decent boost in elemental resistance. Offensively, however, we will only maintain the standard output multipliers you are already familiar with..."

"...But there is a catch. Keeping my golden network fully deployed for much longer carries a severe risk. The spiritual seed is actively fracturing. If I integrate those rings, the massive resonance we just pre-loaded into their matrices is going to exacerbate the seed’s deterioration. It is your call!"

"We have no choice right now but to take the risk... Consume them! I already promised them to you anyway!"

Ren did not hesitate for a microsecond. The rings of Dragarion had always been intended as high-tier sustenance for the golden network; he had accepted from the very beginning that he would likely never be able to return them to his father-in-law. It was a calculated sacrifice baked into his strategy from the start. "Eat them! Hurry!"

The symbiote wasted no more time on dire warnings.

Thick, glowing golden lines erupted across Ren’s arms. The luminescent hyphae wove themselves tightly over his skin and muscle, rapidly expanding to completely envelop his petrified left arm. The golden threads aggressively sealed the terrifying hairline crack in the crystal, forming a dense, mana-biological chainmail. The glowing lines surged down to his fingers, wrapped entirely around the seven overcharged elemental rings, and began to forcefully assimilate them.

Deep within his core, the spiritual seed cracked further.

It expelled another wave of the old purple corruption that had been poisoning it since the day Dragarion sacrificed himself. That familiar, suffocating, dirty heat seeped back into Ren’s spiritual channels.

It hurt... It carried that agonizing ache that always seemed to accompany doing the right thing, the inevitable physical toll attached to every single step forward he took to protect this world.