Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

The opportunistic nobles weren’t destroyed, but ‘permanently precarious’ was a good way to describe their situation.

The fines and penalties that Julius, Arturo, and Selphira had imposed with the authority of the agreements that the losing side was required to accept had been calculated with the precision of someone who wanted the maximum possible payment without drowning the payer to the point where drowning became a reason to resist. That calculation was intentional. A destroyed faction had nothing to extract and a martyr’s grievance to organize around. But faction that was intact but permanently precarious had obligations to meet and no surplus to fund resistance with.

Better to have them working their entire lives in that almost slave like condition, not entirely unlike the position the Iron-rank tamers of the generations before Ren had occupied in the old system, than to give them nothing left to lose.

Aldric had negotiated from the paying side of that line too, because he had understood it was the only approach that let him and his family survive. He had been a competent negotiator, not in the sense of having obtained favorable conditions for his people, but in the sense of having identified the correct threshold where cooperation was the only option that preserved anything, and having guided the opportunist nobles and the once Orion-dependent Starweaver factions toward that threshold with enough firmness that they crossed it before their alternatives ran out entirely.

The result was an opposition that existed on paper and had the real power of a faction that had paid everything it could pay and was barely maintaining the minimum structure needed to remain a faction at all. Present in the formal sense, absent in any sense that mattered.

Nobody took anything from Ren or from Luna that was due to them.

Nobody was in a position to mention it, much less attempt it.

The Goldcrest territory had passed to Ren’s administration with all its access points, its ruins, and its resources.

Not only that, ruins throughout all of Yano gave him free access. Even those of Yino, including its strange “brain”, which Ren had felt an instinctive revulsion at touching and had not attempted to connect to his network again.

He had obtained several mansions in the noble sectors of the city. Rights over the ruins installations that had generated the water and fire crystals. He had also obtained crystals in a quantity that took two dozen seconds to read in full if anyone tried to state it completely.

Also a level of access to the castle and the archives that Julius had insisted was not “too much” but rather “what is needed to operate correctly at the scale you are operating at”, uttered with the delivery of someone who had made that argument enough times to have stopped feeling self-conscious about how it sounded.

He was free to leave on his own, though he hadn’t done so yet.

The only formal requirement: announce intentions before long expeditions so that there would be a rescue protocol in place if needed. Julius and Larissa had framed it with the bureaucratic language of an administrative requirement and the tone of a family member who knows they can’t prohibit anything but can at least know where someone went. Ren had agreed without argument because it was reasonable in the only way something could be reasonable when both parties understood it wasn’t a genuine requirement but a gesture toward someone’s concern.

In Goldcrest territory the difference had been visible in under six months and had not stopped improving as the years passed.

The resources Ren had injected, the systems he had introduced from what he had learned, the cultivation knowledge he had shared with the territory’s working population, all of it had produced an effect that no analysis before his arrival could have computed correctly. Goldcrest was now the primary supplier of materials and specialized articles for high-level cultivation across the entire region, something like a hub for the latest techniques and approaches, with a quality that the more established noble territories hadn’t matched yet and with a rate of growth in the classes that had previously been the lowest, and still hadn’t settled into a predictable growth curve.

In the streets of that territory Ren could no longer walk without being recognized.

In other parts of the city the situation was more varied. The distant zones that had never had direct contact with any of his visits maintained the indifference of distance in a world with limited communication. And there were families who looked at him with the specific hostility of people who needed a reference point for the losses they had suffered and had chosen that point with the logic of someone looking for a culprit before looking for a cause. The logic of resentment rather than analysis.

But nobody in either group had the real power to affect him anymore.

In the central city and the more developed territories, excepting the north, he was genuinely famous, the kind of famous where at least two out of three people in a street would have recognized him on sight.

♢♢♢♢

“Step six,” said Larissa.

Ren executed it.

Larissa evaluated. Marked something.

“Did you speak with Victor about the reunification of the old Starweaver factions?”

“Briefly.” Ren held the step six posture while answering. “The ones in the anti-reform faction are still trying to find something to use to generate a scandal before the betrothal is formalized out of resentment. They don’t have real resources for it, but the problem seems to be that the attempt itself might create enough noise to ruin Luna’s day.”

“I’ve handled it.” Said with the same calm she would have used to confirm a document was signed. “It won’t come to anything.”

“And the situation with Liora’s uncles still in high family positions?”

The pause was minimal. Short enough that most people would have missed it, not long enough to be called a hesitation. But Ren had spent enough time paying attention to Larissa for silences under a second to carry information.