Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 858

Chapter 858: Chapter 858 - Taming the Fifth Year - Pieces of the Board - 3

Yano’s approach had been incomplete.

Had stopped the exploration after the deaths, deciding the cost exceeded the likely benefit thinking only of the double potions.

A miscalculation, as it turned out.

The fundamental difference in Yino hadn’t been in raw power of their tamers or sophistication of techniques they employed.

It had been in willingness to sacrifice people with fewer scruples about the moral cost of actions deemed "necessary."

Yano was weaker there because it operated under restrictions that many noble families imposed collectively, concerns about lineages and inheritances that made sacrificing valuable Gold-rank members a decision requiring extensive debate and justification.

Family politics paralyzed action, every risk or sacrifice demanded approval, every death required throughout explanation to the families involved, compensation negotiations, political favors exchanged to smooth over grievances.

Cautious approach layered on top of cautious approach until the expeditions moved backwards or stopped based on the decision of the main family of the territory.

Yino under much more centralized leadership had none of those paralyzing restrictions. When a ruin with promise of power demanded sacrifice, that sacrifice was executed from the least important usable links without prolonged hesitation.

When the new cores required blood of certain caliber, it was provided without much consideration for political implications of who died in the process.

The ruins didn’t belong to any family owning a zone like in Yano... There was no bureaucracy, no permits required to access power that would have been family property.

They were attacked with the majority of Gold-rank tamers available working collectively, and the rewards belonged to the crown.

No debate about distribution, no negotiation about who deserved what.

Results went where centralized authority directed them.

That brutal pragmatism had allowed Yino to obtain the 3 ruins and the 3 cores necessary from the three runes, (cores that controlled final access to the central ruin) very quickly by comparison. A matter of a few years.

Dozens of high-rank tamers had overwhelmed the guardian beasts even if they were semi-dragons of Platinum rank, through pure numbers.

Not through superior tactics or more skilled individual combatants.

Through willingness to throw enough bodies at the problem until it stopped being a problem.

Even if 5 Gold 1 tamers out of the just above a hundred that Yino had died, it meant nothing when what waited on the other side justified the expenditure.

Yano would never have authorized those numbers even when they had 500. The political fallout alone would have destabilized the kingdom.

Yino didn’t care about political fallout.

Political fallout was a peacetime concern... And they were always, even if silently, at war.

And it also helped their decision that they had known exactly what reward waited beneath the last door long before opening it, information obtained from that crystalline invader, that entity that had deciphered and provided information about locations and rewards that Yano had never had access to outside of Ren’s mushroom’s head.

Yano’s exploration was mostly blind in contrast.

Each step forward was educated guesswork, researchers mapping as they went, sacrifices demanded unexpectedly by mechanisms they hadn’t anticipated.

Yino’s exploration was guided because the crystal entity had provided information and maps. Had identified which doors demanded what sacrifices and had even calculated optimal routes that minimized unnecessary losses while still moving forward.

It was the difference between navigating a minefield without a detector and walking through one with a perfect map.

They had arrived at developing sextuples very late in the process of the war.

But they had arrived.

The corruption delivered, and... The Brain, despite everything, had been an enormous reward and advantage.

But the Brain had two parts. That was a discovery that came after the initial analysis.

The entity understood there were references to a secondary component in the disconnected side of the earth, a complementary piece that would complete the system and unlock other capabilities remaining inactive without proper complete connection.

Two halves of something designed as a whole. Separated by a divided earth that didn’t let the system be fully functional.

Orion wanted to control that second part of the Brain and its intelligence too, an obsession that had grown during the last 3 years of studying what the first part revealed.

Because he had realized before others, before even Yino’s leadership that had originally discovered the Brain, that he needed the second part specifically to discover the true way to handle "the Crystal".

Not ordinary crystals that everyone used as currency.

Not corrupt crystals that pretended to be messiahs.

Not even cores or crystallized statues.

Although all were part of one same system, none represented the true "Crystal."

The Crystal with capital C was the fundamental system sustaining literally everything that existed in the known world.