Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1156: Chapter 1156 - Taming the Old World - Changes

Ren sharpened his mental focus, zeroing in entirely on the sickening pulse of corrupt energy.

It didn’t take him long to isolate the purple thread. Amidst the overwhelming, chaotic ambient noise of the Black Swamp and its bizarre, symbiotic ecosystems, the corruption stood out like a festering wound in a festering wound.

He tracked the invisible, jagged line of movement as it sank aggressively into the deep earth, plunging far beneath the shallow mud.

He narrowed his perception, tightly following the corrupted signature the exact same way a hunting hound relentlessly tracks the scent of a predator that absolutely does not belong in its forest.

”We are changing course,” Ren told Zhao, his voice tight with sudden, unwavering focus. ”Mark the exact coordinates of the grid we are leaving behind. We will come back and finish mapping this sector later.”

Zhao didn’t ask a single question.

He took one look at Ren’s face and instantly recognized that hyper-specific, terrifyingly blank expression. It was the absolute, razor-sharp concentration that meant Ren had just tripped over something vastly more important than their current mission. Zhao smoothly adjusted his grip on his aerial mount and silently locked their current geographical coordinates into his map, preserving their hard work.

The questions could wait. Zhao had learned months ago that when operating alongside Ren, questions almost always answered themselves, provided you possessed the patience to just shut up and follow him into the dark.

They tracked the invisible, rotting scent for a long, agonizing stretch of time.

The trail dragged them deeper and deeper into the suffocating gloom of the swamp, eventually anchoring at a massive, unnatural geological formation buried beneath a mountain of rotting sludge and petrified roots.

They had found it.

Ren stared down at the underground structure, his breath catching slightly in his throat. It was the missing Wood ruin.

Even buried under centuries of necrotic swamp decay, the ancient architectural majesty of the vault was undeniable. The entrance wasn’t a standard stone gate full of dense internal and contained to the imperceptible level mana. It was framed by two colossal, intertwined columns that had completely petrified into a substance harder than diamond.

Ren flew slightly closer, his eyes scanning the details with intense fascination. He could clearly see the ancient, hyper-complex runes carved directly into the stone. They were practically identical in their foundational syntax to the runes he had studied in the Fire and Water ruins, yet adapted with a sweeping, organic fluidity that strictly belonged to the Wood element.

The ancient magic still pulsed faintly beneath the ground, a dormant, sleeping god waiting for an administrator’s touch.

Every single knowledge-hungry neuron in Ren’s brain screamed at him to land. To press his hands against the door, inject his mana, decipher the ancient locking mechanism, and claim the world-altering secrets buried inside.

But he didn’t move. He just hovered there, his eyes narrowing into calculating slits.

Because slithering through the mud directly in front of the ancient, sacred door was a thick, concentrated vein of Selthia’s corrupted mutants.

Ren rapidly processed the tactical geometry of the scene. The mutants weren’t actively trying to breach the petrified wood. They were just aggressively swarming the perimeter. Was it an ambush? Selthia knew exactly what he was looking for.

She had trapped him inside a ruin before...

It would be trivially easy for her to park a suicide squad of high-tier mutants here, waiting for him to blindly rush the door in a moment of academic greed and bring the artifacts on him once inside.

Ren looked closer, tracing the erratic, pulsing flow of the corrupted mana.

That was when he noticed the anomaly. The corruption wasn’t just pooling around the ruin. The swarm was fracturing. While a contingent of beasts remained anchored near the door, a vastly larger, significantly denser column of mutants was actively marching away from the vault, plunging even deeper into an entirely different sector.

Ren made the agonizing ’to his curiosity’ tactical choice.

The ruin was securely locked. It had been sealed for centuries, and Selthia seemed far from ready to open it. The vault wasn’t going anywhere.

But a massive, highly organized army of mutants marching with a specific, unknown objective? That was an active, lethal play on the board.

He killed his academic curiosity, turned his back on the Wood ruin, and followed the moving army.

But as they pushed deeper, Ren eventually lost the trail.

The rotting vein of corruption sank drastically lower, bleeding into a subterranean depth that completely eclipsed his baseline sensory range. From his current altitude in the sky, staring down through hundreds of feet of dense, magical bedrock, the signal dissolved into unreadable static.

However, they were finally clear. They had flown miles away from the Dragon Stork’s active migratory airspace.

Without hesitating, Ren instantly engaged in the dual-fusion. He pulled the Mantis’s power directly into his spine.

His perception violently expanded. The suffocating darkness of the swamp’s bedrock suddenly became crystal clear, turning transparent in his mind’s eye. And there, buried deep in the crushing depths of the earth, the rotting trail snapped back into focus. It was vastly thicker, extending much further than he had originally calculated.

And its trajectory was undeniable.

The mutant army was marching straight toward the Platinum rings.

Ren frowned deeply.

Selthia absolutely should not do this.

Her corrupted mutants, predominantly Silver and Gold-tier trash, were mathematically useless against the genuine, catastrophic wild beasts that roamed the Platinum rings. Selthia’s creatures were not like the beasts of a human Tamer. They did not possess the miraculous, multiplying stat-boosts that a genuine soul-contract provided. They lacked the fundamental energetic reinforcement that allowed a tamed beast to violently punch above its base weight class.

Sending a swarm of un-boosted Silvers and Golds against the apocalyptic apex predators of a Platinum zone wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter. It was a completely wasted investment, throwing precious corrupted mana and hundreds of biological assets directly into a bottomless meat grinder for absolutely zero tactical gain.

And yet, there she was.

Selthia was deliberately, systematically marching her mutant army straight into the slaughterhouse, seemingly without a single shred of concern for the catastrophic loss of resources.

’What exactly is her plan?’