Sirius blinked, shaking his head as he pulled himself out of his own data trance.

"That isn’t how it happened," Sirius corrected, his voice raspy and grounded. He possessed the exact same filtered access as his wife, but his pragmatic, military mind clung to entirely different, conflicting details. "The Sun Dragon didn’t actually save us in the end. And it wasn’t seven dragons that helped build the ruins, it was..." He trailed off, a deep, frustrated scowl carving lines into his forehead. "No, wait. Was it seven?"

Ren stopped dead in his tracks.

He listened to the husband and wife bicker over conflicting, blurry historical details, and a chilling realization washed over him: they were missing massive chunks of the intelligence. They weren’t misremembering out of carelessness. They were operating with drastically less material than he possessed.

He immediately began interrogating them. He didn’t ask about the cosmic mythology, that was the least important part, and the easiest to embellish. He fired highly specific questions regarding the practical mechanics. The newly discovered techniques, the manufacturing methods, the exact systemic architecture.

His suspicion was instantly confirmed. They had received a pathetic fraction of the payload.

What Ren had downloaded as a flawless, hyper-detailed architectural manual, Sirius and Lykea had received as a vague, abstract impression. The absolute most detailed piece of intelligence they possessed was the rudimentary control mechanism for the sacrificial cores, and even that was vastly more of an intuitive "feeling" than concrete knowledge.

Ren mentally archived this revelation, assigning it a terrifying implication that interested him more than anyone else. If Orion Starweaver had received this exact same heavily filtered, fragmented data dump, or worse, a version deliberately corrupted and adulterated by Selthia before he even touched it, Ren could easily deduce exactly how blind the traitor had been.

The intelligence Sirius and Lykea possessed felt agonizingly vague, incomplete, and dangerously easy to misinterpret.

Anyone making massive, world-altering geopolitical decisions based on that blurry intelligence would basically just be guessing in the dark feeling like they know stuff.

"Everyone, touch the crystal," Ren commanded, his voice cutting through the chamber’s chatter.

He was still going to test his newly acquired techniques, but there was a critical diagnostic he needed to run first. He needed to map the exact access tiers the ancient supercomputer assigned to different individuals. To truly understand the system, he had to observe exactly how the system treated the people around him.

Wei didn’t hesitate for a single microsecond; he practically threw himself at the glowing brain. Zhao and Liora stepped forward with almost identical haste, their burning curiosity easily overriding any lingering reservations. The rest of the vanguard approached at a more measured pace, placing their hands flat against the massive, translucent facets one by one, until every single person in the room was physically connected to the structure.

Then, Ren placed his hand back onto the stone to grant them access.

The data tidal wave violently rushed back into his mind, but it lacked the terrifying, suffocating aggression of the first connection. Now that his brain had already downloaded and processed the heaviest, most crushing files, the cosmic mythos and the planetary cosmology, the flowing tide felt entirely manageable.

It almost feels light now...

And accompanying that data flow was the return of that staggering, god-like mental expansion. To Ren’s hyper-accelerated perception, real time began to physically crawl. The seconds stretched out, warping until they felt agonizingly slow, and even a little bit boring.

Ren’s mind was currently operating at a blistering, supercomputer velocity that the physical world simply lacked the biological capacity to keep up with.

He effortlessly concentrated, mentally waving his administrative hand to grant access to everyone touching the crystal.

As he quietly observed how the ancient network classified and interacted with each distinct biological signature, the puzzle pieces began to rapidly snap into place.

He noticed Luna first. Even before he had explicitly granted her administrative permission, the system had naturally afforded her a slightly higher degree of baseline access than the rest of the vanguard.

Armed with his newly downloaded framework, Ren finally understood the bizarre, localized anomaly he had always intuitively sensed within her shadow wolf, but had never possessed the vocabulary to name.

Luna’s wolf wasn’t a standard beast. It was a highly refined, manufactured byproduct of the ruins. It wasn’t a wild animal that a human had tamed by that lucky 0.01%; it was a biological asset forged by the ancient system itself. And because Luna was deeply, spiritually tethered to that specific creation, she possessed a native compatibility with the supercomputer that the other Tamers simply lacked.

And there was more.

With the complete, unadulterated blueprint of the global system finally resting in his head, two massive, seemingly unrelated mysteries clicked together.

The supposed "genetic key", that exceedingly rare, highly coveted aristocratic bloodline that all the high houses had ruthlessly hunted to breed, wasn’t a key at all.

It was food found in the first ruin. It was a highly specialized, cultivated nutrient explicitly designed to fuel the incubation and growth of the Sun Dragon.

And the priceless Double-Contract potions? The miraculous elixirs that forcefully tore open a secondary beast slot in a Tamer’s soul?

They were nothing more than tonics.

They were hyper-concentrated stimulants, engineered to artificially accelerate the development of the would-be Sun Dragon’s system.

But right there, buried in that truth, was the exact detail that forcefully resurrected Ren’s terrifying doubt regarding humanity.

These nutrients and steroids were explicitly designed for a mana body to carry a cosmic beast. For that Dragon.

They were absolutely not engineered for a fragile human body currently housing a tamed beast.

The miraculous, kingdom-building benefits that humanity had ruthlessly extracted from these items for generations... were they merely the result of blind, staggering luck?

Were they simply accidental, highly beneficial biological byproducts of scavenging food meant for an entirely different, vastly superior creature?

Or was there a deeper, invisible design buried in the code that wasn’t immediately obvious to the naked eye?

Then, a final puzzle piece fell into place regarding Ren himself.

Being the recognized administrative bearer of the system actually afforded him highly specific, unique advantages precisely because he was human. He hadn’t required the accelerating tonics, nor did he need the absolute totality of the planetary nodes to achieve a biological development that was vastly more complete and stable than what the wild Sun Dragon would have managed at this stage.

His human nature allowed him to ruthlessly exploit the supercomputer’s mechanics in ways that a wild beast alone would have severely struggled to execute.

Yet again, Selthia was hand picked too...

But every coin had two sides. That exact same human biology stripped him of the explosive, rapid-fire growth speed the original architectural design had guaranteed its intended cosmic host. In Selthia’s case the core did a better job...

So, he gained an incredible, stabilizing efficiency, but he paid for it by sacrificing size.

Yet, the creeping, terrifying doubt washed over him again. This delicate, perfect balance between human rigidity and draconic explosive power... this had to be on purpose.