Chapter 1071: Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Secrets - 5 |
The first step inside the range was the hardest to take.
Not because Ren’s body resisted... But because the instinct built from years of combat and mana and situations where danger had a recognizable signature said that stopping was correct, and that continuing required overriding it deliberately.
Ren overrode it in the end and took the step.
The door lit up.
Not like the rune-light on the walls, that constant glow of stored mana sitting in passive suspension. This was different, more directed, like lines scanning him from head to toes.
The beam came immediately after.
Like something that had been waiting in a dormant state and had received the signal that what it was built to respond to had entered its range, responding in the only language the mechanism had available.
The guards tensed. Mayo moved half a step forward before correcting herself, the reflex ahead of the decision. Liora’s spirit fire lit in both palms without waiting for conscious instruction.
The beam covered Ren and...
More precisely: something happened that nobody watching from outside could see.
The beam didn’t impact, didn’t rebound and didn’t scatter... It just reached Ren and disappeared into him with the smoothness of water touching porous earth, finding the channel and moving through it rather than stopping against it.
From the walls came Selthia’s laugh. Not the kind that laughed at someone but the kind that laughed alongside someone even when that someone wasn’t laughing, the laugh of a person who had just seen confirmed what they already knew.
Ren barely heard it.
What was happening inside was louder than anything outside.
The door’s system connected to his mind perfectly and without preamble, the way two parts of the same network recognized each other rather than being introduced or adapted. Not words, not images, but something closer to instructions arriving directly at the processing level, bypassing language entirely. Ren read them the way he read everything: quickly, breaking the parts before the whole finished arriving.
Two beasts of minimum Gold rank with the required elements... That was the only condition.
Not Platinum, not Diamond, not the absolute power one would have expected from something built at this scale. Minimum Gold, and the element mattered more than the rank, which Ren had covered across all his beasts with room to spare.
The nucleus he delivered would be duplicated. One copy for the door’s system. The original would be returned at the end, directly from the final chamber, which meant the process wasn’t a sacrifice in the permanent sense but something closer to a capability verification, the system taking what it needed to know and giving it back once it had what it was made for.
The effect that crystallization had on a conventional person wasn’t what happened here.
Ren understood what the doors were.
Designed for someone like him... For someone like Selthia.
Not for the conventional tamers who had reached these places through strength or searching or accident, but for the ones the system recognized as part of the mechanism itself, the ones who could connect without the process needing to force the connection.
The ones this architecture had been waiting for.
"I still don’t know how you crossed paths with the dragon’s light," Selthia said from the walls, thinking aloud more than addressing anyone. "But here you are. You’re something special now. Almost like me." A pause. "You’re the product of someone’s attempt to stop the inevitable, built by working backward from what I am. The funny part is that the attempt came out better than they intended." Another pause, shorter. "You almost complement me instead of being my undoing."
Ren still didn’t respond.
Not because he had nothing to say but because the door had more to tell him and the conversation with Selthia could wait or not wait, and in either case he was here for what he had come to do.
He had entered fused, which was the precaution taken specifically for this moment, and the active fusion left the Mantis as the only available beast for the process. Not the optimal choice in terms of raw energy, the Hydra or the Wolverine would have offered a stronger crystal core at the end, but the Mantis had her own qualities, the ones Ren had developed in her from the beginning and that Gold 1 had matured into something without an exact equivalent in the system.
It was enough.
Ren directed his intention toward the Mantis in the way the door’s system had shown him to formulate it, and the Mantis system responded with the familiarity of something that had been waiting for someone to ask correctly, a recognition of the process rather than a reaction to it.
The beam interacted with the process in a way that wasn’t crystallization.
No pain at all... No resistance of the kind he had prepared every layer of his system to handle. Something closer to what happened when a well-placed rune entered resonance with the mana of the person activating it, that sensation of something finding its correct shape without effort because the shape had always been correct and the only thing missing was the moment of finding it.
Like two parts of a system recognizing each other across the distance between them.
Almost spiritual, someone with that world vocabulary would have said.
Almost digital, someone with a different kind of vocabulary would have said.
The connection completed.
And from inside the door’s system, before Ren finished processing what that meant, something answered. Fast, with the urgency of a long wait ending, not interested in another second of patience now that the connection was live.
But...
The attack came in the moment after the connection finished establishing itself.
Not like a beast’s attack, nor like a tamer’s in conventional combat. The corruption filling the chamber, the kind the purple runes on every wall had been amplifying since the group descended the first staircase, found the opening that Ren’s connection created and entered through the Mantis core cleanly, the way a key fit a lock it had been cast to match.
The gap was right now.
And Selthia, from inside her network, was already pulling.