The entire, sprawling network of the ancient crystal brain unfolded directly inside Ren’s skull.

Countless layers of overlapping, hyper-dense information stretched outward in every conceivable direction, mapping a localized digital universe that his human perception was only just beginning to comprehend.

As he drowned in the vastness of the network, the very first thing to clearly emerge from the roaring static was a pair of system prompts.

They weren’t formulated in human words. They were delivered in the raw, instantaneous, conceptual language of the brain, ideas injected directly into the deepest, pre-linguistic processing centers of his brain.

The first message was an absolute confirmation of Selthia’s words: Biometric and mana signature recognized. Minimum elements for operational parameters met. Controller authority granted.

The ancient system fully recognized him. It formally acknowledged him as an entity possessing absolute, unquestionable command over its architecture.

The second message arrived immediately after, hanging in his mind as a pending query demanding an input: Do you wish to grant localized access permissions to the Light and Wind reformed core sacrifices (Lykea and Sirius)?

Ren was so utterly dazed that it took him a long, heavy moment to even formulate a reaction.

He was completely lost in the sheer vastness of the network. He was drowning in the intoxicating, god-like high of having the same brain clarity as when his fungus was perfectly synchronized, but with an ancient supercomputer whose processing power he couldn’t even begin to measure.

The query simply floated there in the void, patiently waiting for a command, while Ren desperately tried to orient himself inside a mental landscape that had just become many times larger than his own physical one.

A torrential downpour of classified knowledge began to rain into his mind. He saw the intricate, hidden routes of the Platinum ranks. He saw the blueprints for some higher-tier beast fusions. He saw the methodology for manipulating raw crystal.

But none of that incredible, world-altering intelligence hit him the hardest.

What truly shattered his understanding of reality were the fragmented, ancient historical records buried deep within the tide. It was the classified, forgotten truth regarding the true origin of the ruins’ system, and the terrifying, awe-inspiring reason they had been placed in this world in the first place.

♢♢♢♢

Sirius and Lykea felt each other in the dark.

By physically touching the ancient brain at opposite nodes, their minds were forcefully tethered. It was a localized, digital telepathy far deeper and vastly more intimate than any natural, biological bond could ever facilitate.

The connection was so absolute, so suffocatingly close, that Lykea finally stopped twisting her neck to hunt for her husband’s reflection in the crystalline facets. She didn’t need to see his face anymore; she could feel the exact texture of his thoughts thrumming inside her own skull.

But alongside that profound connection, they also felt the barrier.

It was a thin, localized ’firewall’ within the digital architecture. It prevented their minds from wandering deeper into the supercomputer’s vast labyrinth. They could feel a massive ocean of intelligence waiting just on the other side of that locked door, but it was a door they fundamentally lacked the administrative privileges to open.

Ren, completely lost in the roaring tidal wave of data flooding his own expanded consciousness, took several long seconds to orient himself. The query requesting localized access for the Light and Wind sacrifices was still floating patiently in his mind.

With a deliberate push of will, Ren finally stabilized and authorized the permission.

The ’firewall’ instantly dissolved.

Sirius and Lykea gasped in unison. They were completely overwhelmed as the data stream rushed in, marveling at the sheer, impossible magnitude of it. They were two mortals who had just accidentally discovered a hidden, infinite ocean of knowledge they never knew existed beneath their feet.

However, they were not experiencing the exact same tidal wave as Ren.

Their biological minds, though marked by the system’s residual branding, simply weren’t structurally designed to interface fully with the ruin’s core architecture. What they received was a heavily filtered, drastically diluted fraction of the intelligence, almost the same Orion had gotten but without Selthia’s traps.

The roaring main current had been artificially narrowed into a small, manageable tributary, ensuring their human minds could process the data without violently shattering under the weight of it.

Ren, possessing full administrative authority and the system bandwidth of the spore-network, received almost everything.

And with "almost everything" came the ultimate prize: the architectural map.

A flawless, three-dimensional schematic of the system unfurled across his expanded consciousness. Ren rapidly counted the glowing nodes: The primary ruin directly beneath the Starweaver castle. Three supplementary ruins forming a half circle around it, the ones for the main rings. The four massive, interconnected ruins comprising the brain network that he was currently interfacing with.

That was eight total ruins located in his side of the world.

And directly across the globe, mirroring the exact same architectural distribution beneath the eastern sister city of Yano, were eight more. That brought the grand total to sixteen ruins spanning the entire first half of the planet.

Sixteen ancient vaults.

But on Ren’s side of the map, two additional anomalies glowed brightly. Two highly specific ruins that were fundamentally younger than the original sixteen. They had been secretly constructed much later, designed with one singular, desperate purpose: to birth a specific, localized entity capable of hijacking the original sixteen ruins and stealing the absolute foundation of their growth.

To understand what that terrifying anomaly actually meant, the historical data thread violently rewound.

It pulled Ren back... Far back.

To the absolute, mythological beginning of the problem.

♢♢♢♢

The original sixteen ruins had been built by the primordial earth dragon... Not of its own volition.

Forced.

The Earth Dragon had been subjugated by a vastly superior entity: the colossal, world-spanning dragon that ruled the highest stratospheres. This ancient terror flew higher than the sky itself.

It was so impossibly old and horrifyingly massive that its coiled body literally eclipsed the horizon, physically blocking out more of the sun with every passing day.

But even an entity that massive was subject to the universal laws of the cosmos. The world-spanning dragon felt the inevitable turning of the cycle, the absolute, unforgiving law that mandated even the greatest beings must eventually surrender their place to the next era.

He was too old... About to die.

And yet the ancient terror absolutely refused to yield.

It wanted to reclaim the fiery vitality of its youth. It intended to cheat the cosmic cycle and remain being himself for all eternity.

So, it descended upon the small world like a living catastrophe.

The sheer, world breaking impact of its descent literally cracked the planet’s crust in half. The violent sundering completely shattered the original form of the elemental dragons managing the world.

In their worry to avoid world destruction by the impact, they used a massive amount of energy, but... Their original bodies were violently divided and the ancient terror could control them easier, now separately. The original seven elemental rulers were fractured into fourteen vastly smaller, drastically weakened entities.

Their elemental and physical forms were divided.

Standing over the bleeding, fractured world, the ancient terror forced the weakened elemental and physical dragons to construct a massive, subterranean system, the sixteen ruins.

A planetary engine designed explicitly to siphon the world’s vitality and restore the ancient terror to the absolute zenith of its power, granting it eternal life.