Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 480: Chapter 480 - Taming the Platinum Ring - 4

The second platinum ring turned out to be easier for completely different reasons than expected.

Zhao had expected to have to dodge the mobile creatures of the vine forest, but soon realized the beasts were too busy fighting each other to pay him any attention.

The ecosystem was in an intense warfare.

The ’Dragon Egg’, symbiotic fusions between trees, animals, and sprouts looked like mountains constantly crashing against each other, living structures fighting for some reason. The conflict was brutal, each representing a different strategy for dominating the new mana concentration place.

Zhao flew between epic battles, observing how they struck and confronted each other, affecting control over mana intersections.

Victory meant access to prime mana nodes; defeat meant stagnation and longer waits again.

”It’s really like flying through a war zone,” he murmured, dodging ’shrapnel’ from a spine projection that had been aimed from one competitor to another.

The creatures were so aggressive with each other that a small intruder simply didn’t register as existing. Zhao took advantage of the chaos, flying uninterrupted while staying as far away from conflicts as possible.

The battles were too focused, too intense for the combatants to spare attention for anything that wasn’t an immediate threat to their new territorial claims. Zhao was beneath their notice, a gnat flying through a battlefield of titans.

The journey through the second ring took hours, but was notably less stressful than the first. His only challenge was navigating around battles without getting caught in crossfire.

♢♢♢♢

The third platinum ring was also abnormal as it greeted him with disturbing silence.

Zhao had spent an entire day flying, consuming medicine against mana excess with increasing frequency. Fortunately, he had a ton of filled flasks and plenty of leaves for later.

As he advanced, he found a desolate landscape.

Where there should have been a forest of powerful crystallized sprouts, now there was... almost nothing. Broken structures rose like broken teeth from the ground, the remains of what had once been a forest representing the mountain guardian’s power.

The devastation was recent. Zhao could see where massive root systems had been torn from the earth, leaving crater-like wounds in the landscape. Crystallized bark lay scattered like fallen monuments, each piece large enough to serve as a building foundation.

”What kind of battle was this?” he murmured, flying through the enormous devastated landscape.

The answer came when he finally saw the mountain.

The crystalline structure rose in the distance, giant and imposing, but what caught his attention was what lay at its feet. A massive corpse, so large he had confused its contours with landscape features.

The Dragon Tree.

The creature that had dominated an entire ring lay broken and still, its form so immense that Zhao had to be flying just to take in its full scope. This hadn’t been just a tree; it had been a living mountain, a creature whose death had reshaped the entire ecosystem.

”Fortunately they hadn’t moved far from the epicenter during the end of the battle,” Zhao whispered, heading toward the devastation zone.

The battlefield was a testament to the power that had been unleashed.

Zhao flew over craters that could have contained small lakes, over shattered stones, over thousands of broken bodies of crystallized Wood Warriors that had been the fallen dragon’s soldiers.

Each crater told part of the story. Here, a massive impact where the dragon had been driven to the ground. There, a series of parallel gouges where claws had raked across the landscape. Everywhere, the scattered remains of wooden soldiers that had been caught in the crossfire of a battle between titans.

The marks on the terrain told the story of an epic struggle. Zhao followed the destruction patterns, reading the battle like a map until he finally found what he was looking for.

Among the rubble of rock and hardened crystallized wood, barely visible under a pile of debris, was a human form.

”Your Majesty!” Zhao shouted, diving toward the spot.

Dragarion was alive, but barely. His breathing was labored, his skin had a bluish tint that Zhao immediately recognized as extreme mana saturation. The king had pushed his system beyond all limits, and his mana circulatory system was paying the price.

The sight was shocking. This was the strongest man of the world who had commanded the respect of entire kingdoms, now reduced to barely clinging to consciousness beneath a pile of rubble.

”Yano?” the king’s voice was barely a whisper. ”How...?”

”Message from Julius,” Zhao explained quickly while pulling out one of his mana potions. ”We need you to return immediately. The political situation is critical.”

He poured the medicine onto the king’s lips, watching with relief as color gradually returned to his face.

The medicine was working, but the damage was extensive.

”Julius was always the dramatic one,” Dragarion murmured, barely awake, but gratitude could be caught in his faint voice. ”Though I suppose I should thank the timing...”

It was then that the ground began to tremble.

Zhao lifted the king who couldn’t even stand just as the first roots emerged beneath the Dragon Tree’s corpse. But these weren’t normal Platinum 3 roots; they were massive sprouts, pulsing with life not yet crystallized.

The new Dragon would not wait any time until the previous guardian was mourned. Now it was claiming its prize and its territory.

”Damned opportunists,” Dragarion murmured, but his voice carried more fascination than fear. ”Seems the replacement battle just barely concluded... You have great courage, but more than anything, incredible timing, still...”

The dragon’s corpse began to sink, pulled by the new tenant. Where the old dragon had been, a new one was about to take its place. The new one would consume the remains of the previous one, transforming faster than normal.

An endless cycle of succession that ensured the mountain’s protection.

”I see why it cost me so much to bring this one down... So it was about to become Diamond 1...”

”The new Dragon!” Zhao shouted as he realized what was happening. ”It’s taking its place now!”

”And it’s going to close the mountain when it evolves with the crystallized wood resonance,” Dragarion added, pointing with his eyes toward the crystalline structure. ”We have maybe 15 seconds before it seals the entrance for the next hundred years of its development.”

There was no time for detailed explanations. If they didn’t want to have to defeat a new Dragon, they had to move now.

Zhao grabbed the still-weakened king, activated all the flight power he had, and launched toward the crystalline mountain entrance while the world transformed around them.

The forest grew with speed that defied nature, building-sized tentacles rising from the ground, branches blocking the sky, a new ecosystem being born in real time feeding on the abundant mana.

The sight was like watching creation compressed into moments. What should have taken decades was happening in seconds, driven by the concentrated power released from the fallen guardian’s corpse.

The mountain entrance grew smaller with each second.

”Faster!” Dragarion urged, though he himself was too weakened to help.

Zhao pushed his flight beyond all limits, consuming the last reserves of mana in a final sprint toward salvation. The mountain opening closed behind them just as they crossed the threshold, sealing them inside.

In the crystalline darkness that followed, Zhao finally allowed himself to collapse, his mission completed but his escape now impossible without the help of his rescued charge’s power.

He had found the king. Now he just had to find a way to get him back.

♢♢♢♢

The king collapsed as soon as they had found a safe place inside the crystalline mountain.

Zhao caught him again before he hit the ground, immediately feeling how fragile the most powerful man in the kingdom had become. Dragarion had been running on pure willpower before his rescue, but now that he had found salvation, his body finally yielded to extreme exhaustion.

The contrast was stark and sobering. The man who had single-handedly ended a Dragon. The magnitude of his recent battle and the toll that such power exacted on its wielder...

”Your Majesty,” Zhao murmured, checking the king’s pulse. Weak but steady. ”Just rest. I’ll keep watch.”

The crystalline mountain rose around them like a cathedral of gems, its walls radiating soft light that eliminated the need for torches. But that same light confirmed what Zhao had feared: the walls were of a density that defied his understanding. Even with his evolved raptor, he had no hope of penetrating them.

The crystal formations were beautiful... Each surface seemed to absorb and refract light in patterns that suggested a structure far more complex than simple stone. This wasn’t just a mountain; it was a vast crystalline castle, and they were trapped within its body.

They were trapped until the king recovered from his exhaustion enough to use his power.

But even considering the king’s powerful regeneration, those wounds and damage to his energy system...

”Several days,” Zhao estimated, mentally calculating the king’s reserves. ”Maybe a few weeks.”

They had limited supplies, no way to communicate with the outside world, and no guarantee that Dragarion would recover quickly enough to prevent whatever political crisis had prompted this desperate rescue mission.

Zhao settled in for a long wait, his successful mission now transformed into a different kind of challenge entirely. Finding the king had been the easy part; surviving long enough to return him to his kingdom might prove to be the real test.