As the diagnostic exercise concluded and the group severed their physical connections to the crystal brain, the ancient network’s hierarchy became glaringly obvious.

Aside from Luna, who possessed her own unique, systemic bypass, the Tamers bonded to the spore-fungus had received a noticeably higher volume of data, delivered with much sharper clarity than the rest of the vanguard.

And among them, Wei stood at the absolute apex.

His fungus was currently the most developed of the entire group, sitting proudly at the high Silver rank. The moment Wei pulled his ink-stained hands away from the glowing facets of the supercomputer, his eyes were wide, practically vibrating with a manic, scholarly euphoria.

He hadn’t possessed the administrative privileges to download the entire, unadulterated truth. But his enhanced connection had granted him just enough highly useful fragments to deeply suspect exactly how much Ren was getting.

"You got the entire thing, didn’t you?" Wei blurted out, unable to contain himself for a single second longer.

"I think I did," Ren replied. A small, knowing smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "And I know exactly why you are looking at me like that." He lowered his voice, delivering the exact reality Wei was desperately hoping for. "We are ’only’ going to need Platinum-tier crystals and beasts parts to grow the missing component. It works exactly how we suspected it would..."

Wei let out a massive, trembling breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

The implications were monumental. It meant the entire roster of new fungus users could finally breach the Gold rank earlier than any of them had originally calculated. For a while, they had been agonizingly stuck at a bottleneck. They had been forced to wait, assuming Ren needed to personally reach the Platinum rank with his own fungus to harvest the required materials and reconstruct the full methodology buried deep within his beast’s slumbering memory.

Now, the agonizing wait was over and there would be no more blind guessing. They now possessed the exact, flawless methodology.

But then, the manic euphoria vanished from Wei’s face, replaced by a deep, unsettling gravity.

"The history," Wei said. He consciously lowered his voice to a hushed whisper, an entirely futile gesture in a cavernous, echoing chamber where every single elite was already hanging onto their every word. "Ren. Tell me the truth. Are you... are you actually a dragon that lived inside the sun?"

"No," Ren said flatly.

Wei sagged, letting out a profound, heavy sigh of absolute relief.

Then, his brow furrowed, the gears of his brilliant mind aggressively grinding together again. "Then do you know exactly how your beast is connected to all of this?"

Hearing the question, Selphira immediately stepped forward from the edge of the circle. The intense curiosity was etched across her ageless face with a blazing clarity she rarely ever allowed the world to see.

♢♢♢♢

Ren took a long moment before speaking...

He needed to perfectly articulate his thoughts, because the answer he was about to provide was a terrifying, world-altering... ’hypothesis’, not an absolute certainty.

"I don’t believe my fungus is specifically the Sun Dragon they were desperately trying to nurture," Ren explained, his voice echoing cleanly off the ancient stone. "At least, not the original entity. I think it was originally just a beast designed to be the medium for the original. It was the biological anchor the Sun Dragon was intended to connect with in order to safely descend to this world."

He slowly paced in front of the massive crystal brain, organizing the chaotic, apocalyptic data threads in his head as he spoke.

"And they likely did not intend to use a single, solitary beast as the host. They were going to use thousands of them to shoulder the cosmic payload, because a single, isolated creature would have instantly incinerated itself trying to contain something that massive."

Saying it out loud finally crystallized a nagging, overarching mystery that Ren had never truly understood about the city’s economy.

"That is exactly why there have always been vastly more ’cheap’ gray eggs flooding the market than any other type," Ren continued, his eyes darkening with realization.

"The spore-fungus was incredibly common on purpose. And the fact that plant-type beasts are so staggeringly frequent was also a foundational part of the architectural design. The dragons needed beasts that possessed a massive, natural capacity to absorb sunlight with maximum biological efficiency. The entire, sprawling ecosystem of ’weak and common’ beasts that the aristocracy had despised for centuries... it was an intricate, global net specifically engineered to safely catch that ’falling sun’."

He paused, letting the sheer, terrifying scale of that ancient engineering settle over the silent room.

"The fact that this cosmic system ultimately activated within humans, rather than the wild beasts the dragons intended..." Ren gave a slight, helpless shrug. "I think that is either a massive, incredibly lucky coincidence... or we still don’t have the complete picture of what actually happened... It has to be one of the two."

Luna stepped forward.

She stopped right in front of him, looking into his eyes with that profound, unshakeable firmness she strictly reserved for the absolute truths she believed in with her entire soul.

"Whatever the reality of the situation is," Luna said, her voice steady and clear, "it is a profound stroke of luck that someone like you, no, specifically you, found the most important piece of the puzzle." She didn’t blink. "Because I don’t believe anyone else in this world could use it better."

Liora and Larissa nodded fast while smiling too.

Ren’s cheeks immediately flushed a warm, betraying pink.

And from across the chamber, his newly resurrected future mother-in-law, who absolutely had not stopped eavesdropping for a single second, violently seized the opportunity.

"OH MY GOD, LUNA IS ABSOLUTELY IN LOVE, WHAT A BLESSING!" Lykea shrieked at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing deafeningly off the vaulted ceiling. "HE MAKES HER TALK LIKE THAT SO HE IS THE PERFECT BOY FOR HER! MY DAUGHTER IS SO INCREDIBLY BLESSED TO HAVE FOUND REAL LOVE! A handsome, brilliant boy who saves the entire world and just happens to possess the perfect magical system? I CAN ALREADY HEAR THE WEDDING BELLS! SIRIUS, ARE YOU LISTENING TO HER?! AND LOOK AT OUR PERFECT, BLUSHING SON-IN-LAW!"

Mayo leaned casually against a nearby pillar, her eyes gleaming with wicked delight.

"Careful, Lady Lykea," Mayo called out smoothly, delivering the comedic kill-shot with precision. "If you compliment him any harder, he is going to spontaneously combust from sheer embarrassment, and then humanity will lose its only hope."

Ren’s face instantly burned a shade of red new to science.

Deciding that right now was the absolute perfect moment to violently change the subject before he ACTUALLY died of embarrassment, Ren reached into his shadow space.

He pulled out a raw, unrefined mana crystal.