NABC Chapter 1077 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins Entrance
Chapter 1077 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins Entrance
"I'm leaving before your friends completely break the siphon outside. It'll just be a headache to get out back to my net otherwise," she announced."Once you push past the halfway point, the energies are going to get violently chaotic. I'd rather not be here when that happens."
She took a deliberate step backward.
Then, she paused. She shot him one last look over her shoulder. The playful, coquettish smirk was back, but this time, the warmth behind her eyes was undeniably real.
"Take care of yourself. And maybe… See you soon!"
She offered a single, exaggerated wink.
And she vanished.
She was gone before Ren could even open his mouth to reply, which, knowing her, was exactly how she had scripted the exit.
Left alone in the silence, the inner space continued to flood with radiant blue light, expanding unchallenged into the dark.
♢♢♢♢
Chaos arrived exactly as Selthia had promised.
The inner space didn't just collapse; it shattered. The crystalline logic Ren had painstakingly mapped out over the last few minutes disintegrated without warning.
Predictable currents of mana turned into a violent, churning maelstrom. It was the terrifying, erratic movement of raw power abruptly stripped of the system that had bound it.
Ren pushed through the turbulence, desperately continuing the purification. He was reclaiming massive swathes of energy from the corruption, but the backlash was immediate.
This wasn't the familiar burn of physical combat, nor the dull ache of sustained concentration. It was a profound, systemic overload. His very being was processing volatile energy at a speed it was never designed to handle. Every phantom nerve in his projected consciousness screamed, an honest reflection of a vessel pushed past its breaking point.
He was anchored inside his own crystal on the left side of the massive door, the Mantis' one. With the Guardian's core sitting dead center, it was the first piece his purification could actively purge. But because of his position, Sirius's crystal, waiting on the right, remained heavily contaminated.
Then, the ancient door woke up.
It reacted the way ancient, non decaying mechanisms often do: functioning on a rigid, weirdly unflawed logic.
The conditions were met, even if imperfectly.
The Guardian's core and Sirius's crystal now held more than half, just enough of a pure imprint to push the system.
The threshold was crossed.
The door registered a "passable" compatibility in the 3 keys, completely ignoring the rot still clinging to the bottom half of 2 of the 3 crystals.
It initiated the sequence.
Ren scrambled to finish. He pushed his mana to its absolute limit, trying to buy just a few more seconds to cleanse the remaining fractions of corruption.
But the fractions were too large... The door was done waiting.
The mechanism violently severed his connection. His consciousness was forcefully expelled from the inner space, discarded with a mechanical indifference of a system that had completed its function and no longer needed its user.
Ren gasped, his vision swimming as he slammed back into his physical body. The damp, heavy air of the tenth chamber, actually just the starting point, the Guardian's lair, rushed into his lungs.
He immediately severed his fusion. Without the vast reservoir of the inner space's corrupted energy to fuel it, the cost of maintaining the form was rapidly eating into his own energy. The glowing aura around him flickered and died.
In the center of the chamber, the Guardian's massive core destabilized. It warped into blinding energy and vanished completely from its resting place.
Ren didn't know yet what shape it would take next. He didn't know it would condense into an egg, a vessel brimming with special potential, much like Luna's wolf, but burdened by a tragic flaw. Nearly half of its base system would be born corrupted.
It wasn't the victory Ren had fought for, nor the prize Selthia had sought. It was a messy, compromised reality dictated by a door that had run out of time.
A deep, grinding rumble vibrated through the stone floor. Sirius's statue began to sink into the ground. It descended with agonizing slowness, following an irreversible, automated sequence. It was exactly as Selphira had once described: the final chamber was preparing to receive its prize, swallowing the statue into the depths of the ruins.
Ren stepped forward toward the open doorway. He reached into the mechanism and retrieved the two remaining crystals: the Mantis and Sirius.
He stowed the Mantis quickly; its mysteries could wait. But Sirius's crystal... Ren lingered on it. Resting in his palm, it possessed an uncomfortable, anchoring weight. It felt exactly like the core of Luna's mother had felt when he first held it. It didn't look like a person, but it carried the undeniable gravity of a life, a life that meant the world to Luna. He held it with quiet reverence, since, despite wanting to secure it away he had to keep purifying it.
He turned around.
Umi's group was standing just behind him. They were perfectly composed, their eyes scanning him with the calm efficiency of a rear guard. They had monitored his physical body the entire time his mind was adrift, watching for any crystallization or vital signs slipping past acceptable parameters.
"No problems," one of them reported before Ren even had to ask.
Ren gave a curt nod.
A rush of displaced air heralded Liora's arrival. She dropped from Mayo's flying beast before the creature had even fully landed. She didn't use any mana to do something like a spatial jump; she simply didn't have the reserves left to burn.
She practically launched herself at Ren. It was the frantic, urgent movement of someone who had held their breath for far too long. She collided with him, her arms wrapping around his neck in a brief, punishingly tight embrace. Through her hug, Ren could feel the depth of her exhaustion. It was the bone-deep drain of maintaining a powerful fusion long enough to completely obliterate Selthia's densest rune node.
"Don't you ever do something that reckless again," Liora mumbled, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
Ren wrapped his arms around her, grounding her.
He didn't offer the easy, direct response. He couldn't promise her he wouldn't do it again, not with any real honesty, because they both knew he would inevitably break that promise. So, he gave her the only truth he could currently afford.
"Everything is fine now."