Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 1290

Chapter 1290: Chapter 1290 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction

Ren lowered his eyes back to the bottom half of Arturo’s report, his brow furrowing as a specific set of figures caught him off guard.

"She sent a detachment of her elite units into the mountains to force-breed Diamonds, using the exact cannibalization method Sirius and Liu witnessed in the southern cavern," Ren said, his finger tracing the column of numbers.

"At the same time, she sent the rest into the outer rings to mass-produce standard beasts. Looking at Arturo’s deductions here..." He paused, running the math in his head a second time in disbelief. "She went from two hundred and fifty Platinums back up to five hundred. She almost doubled her main army in less than a day. What has it been, sixteen hours?"

The room went quiet as the weight of that timeframe settled in.

Doubling a force of hundreds of Platinum horrors in two-thirds of a day was an absurd, unprecedented rate of production. Ren knew the grim arithmetic of the corruption’s food chain by heart.

Under the old baseline, it took two base Silver beasts devouring each other to birth a Silver 2, and four to make a Silver 3. Moving up the ladder required forty base units for a Gold 1, eighty for a Gold 2, and one hundred and twenty for a Gold 3. By the time a single mutant breached the Platinum 1 threshold, it had consumed the equivalent of one thousand two hundred base Silver creatures.

The corruption’s runic system had always traded energy efficiency for speed, and at the highest tiers, that conversion rate became downright gluttonous. Those twelve hundred base units doubled to twenty-four hundred for a Platinum 2, climbed to nearly five thousand for a Platinum 3, and then skyrocketed to almost fifty thousand for a single Diamond.

Fifty thousand original Silver mutants, ground down and compressed into a single walking mountain of flesh.

Ren knew the outer Platinum rings bypassed a huge chunk of that bottleneck; out in the deep wilds, devouring a single native Platinum beast was enough to spawn a mutant of the same rank... Even so, visualizing the sheer caloric and energetic equivalence required to push Selthia’s existing army up the ranks made his head spin.

Driving the growth limit of an ethereal network that massive seemingly required an ocean of mana.

’Wait a second,’ Ren thought, following the ecological implications of that hunger.

If Selthia had simply chosen to sit back for a while, letting her swarm graze on the outer Platinum rings to build an unstoppable tide, she would have sucked those territories completely dry in a matter of weeks.

No matter how vast the outer rings were, the natural world could not replenish beasts fast enough to feed a parasite scaling at this rate. The corruption had reached a stage of growth that the planet itself could not sustain indefinitely, making it an ecological dead end in the long run, yet a terrifyingly lethal threat in the immediate present.

Ren pieced together the mechanics behind this sudden acceleration.

This explosion in breeding speed had only become possible after Selthia’s beasts breached the Platinum threshold, a milestone she originally achieved by capturing the deep rune chambers inside the ancient ruins.

Now, by feeding the southern Shadow Core into her network, the entire ethereal grid had grown denser and more efficient. That single dark catalyst had pushed her production speed into another exponential leap.

Every single asset the corruption absorbed, whether it was an ancient ruin, a guardian’s core, or a new elemental affinity, triggered a dangerous surge in its overall capacity.

"That is why we cannot let her walk away with a single piece of the Light Dragons this time," Ren murmured, speaking mostly to himself as his grip tightened on the scroll. "Every prize she swallows widens the throat of the hive. It is like throwing dry timber into a furnace; the hotter her network burns, the faster it devours everything around it."

As he stared at the map, one final loose thread tied itself together in his mind.

The ancient rune chambers Selthia controlled inside the captured ruins were acting as signal amplifiers and incubators for the horde...

Holding those specific architectural nodes was likely what allowed her mutants to digest mana and scale their ranks so rapidly. Once Liora had a moment to breathe and recover her strength, sending her out to systematically incinerate those ruin chambers might be the key to crippling the swarm’s production line.

It was a solution for another day, as they had an incoming siege to survive first, so Ren filed the target away in the back of his mind.

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