Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 1057

Chapter 1057: Chapter 1057 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 3

The corruption increased as they drew closer, installed gradually across the territory with the ambient pressure of something that was no longer any single source but the combined background of many small ones that had found the same channel.

It had been building without announcement.

Like the difference between hearing a sound and hearing the silence that remained after the sound stopped, but in reverse: a sound you began registering as you approached, which by the time you recognized it you had been hearing long enough not to know exactly when it started.

Ren had caught it at the Gold 3 border because he had the range to read the more marked difference.

But by now, in the open territory approaching the ruins, there was no ambiguity about it.

The group had sharpened. The attention each person was paying to the territory had changed, that particular shift that happened when people who knew what they were doing understood that it was time.

"We can’t engage the eight-part artifact," Ren said, when the perimeter of the clearing he remembered was close enough for its general shape to be visible through the trees.

"If the pieces are separated and fewer than half appear at once, we manage it. If they’re together or the full structure has already formed, we pull back." He paused. "I’m not confident we can handle the full one in our current configuration."

Lin processed that with the brevity of someone who had received the information they needed.

The guards nodded with the coordination of a trained group.

"What counts as together?" Mayo asked, in the tone of someone asking a genuine technical question. "Five and six separated is still fight as long as they don’t merge?"

"Yes yes, only if you’re feeling them as one presence instead of several," Ren said. "At that point, regardless of what else is happening, we leave."

Mayo set aside her usual jokes for a moment and nodded.

♢♢♢♢

The clearing became fully visible between the trees.

It was not the clearing Ren remembered.

The clearing he remembered had an opening in the ground, the entrance to the ruins system below, through which the Mantis had barely fit without disturbing the sprouts at the edges.

The corpse of the massive beast that had occupied this area when Zhao and the Mantis first found it still lay at the center of that opening, its scale making the surrounding territory difficult to process correctly.

What was here now was different in every dimension that mattered.

The corpse was still recognizable in its general structure; the distribution of what remained of the exoskeleton provided its original dimensions as a reference. But the center had been destroyed rather than consumed, with the specific kind of edges that were left when something had been forced inward rather than broken down from within, the irregular marks of something to which parts had been torn rather than the clean dissolution of energy departing a system. The difference was legible to anyone who had seen both.

The corruption lines were very visible.

Not in the sense of glowing decoratively... They glowed the way things glowed when they contained active energy and that energy was the kind that produced luminescence as a byproduct of existing, not as a deliberate signal. Lines radiating from the central opening, having advanced into the interior of the corpse over what must have been considerable time.

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