Ren closed his eyes and aggressively focused his will, instantly deploying the techniques he had just downloaded from the ancient supercomputer.

The reaction was immediate and breathtaking. The hard, jagged surface of the raw crystal suddenly yielded to his mental command. It became as soft and malleable as wet clay.

The vanguard watched in absolute, stunned silence as the solid stone warped, twisted, and effortlessly changed shape in his bare hand.

Then, with a final, sharp mental adjustment, Ren completely dissolved it.

The crystal broke down converting back into the pure, glowing ether from which it had originally been formed. The radiant light slipped through his fingers, evaporating safely into the ambient atmosphere.

A heavy, collective murmur of awe rippled through the gathered elite guards. The ability to flawlessly mold solid crystal with a mere thought, and then safely break it down into pure energy, was not a minor parlor trick. It was a terrifying display of absolute dominance over mana.

"With these new techniques, we are going to be able to accomplish incredible things," Ren stated. He clung desperately to his cold, professional persona, entirely using it as a shield to block out Lykea’s continuing, loud commentary regarding his prowess. "Specifically, we will be able to cultivate more efficiently. And we can manufacture vastly more complex artifacts than our current technology allows."

He turned his back to the group and stared down the long, dark corridor leading toward the exit of the vault.

"The next thing I want to test requires a lot more room."

Without waiting for permission or offering any further explanation, he broke into a sprint, charging out of the central vault and heading straight for the colossal tenth outer chamber. The manic, buzzing energy of a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough radiated from his back.

’The three-way beast fusion...’

Driven by sheer, overwhelming curiosity, the entire vanguard immediately ran after him.

Ren decided to test the three-way fusion for just a single, brief moment.

He was running on fumes... Dragging Lykea back from the crystal had exacted a vastly heavier toll on his body than his stoic expression let on.

Even though the massive sixty-node spore network had perfectly distributed the catastrophic data load, the absolute bottom of his core’s mana reservoir was bone-dry. His system ached with a deep, hollow exhaustion.

But he desperately wanted to verify at least one of the two major combat techniques before the day ended, and this was the one he had been chasing for years.

In pure, theoretical terms of raw magical power, he had possessed the capacity to execute a three-way fusion for a long time. What he had crucially lacked was the real architectural comprehension. He simply hadn’t understood the processes well enough to execute the spell without it violently detonating in his hands.

But the ancient supercomputer had just handed him the flawless blueprint.

With the complete, unadulterated architectural framework currently burning in his mind, Ren saw the terrifying reality of the technique: the fusion absolutely did not stop at three.

Theoretically, he could fuse four beasts. Five.

Maybe even more...

The only genuine, unyielding requirement was that the beasts had to be relatively close to the same cultivation level so their combined energies wouldn’t cannibalize each other, and the resulting chaotic flow had to be securely tethered by specialized support runes.

Unlike a standard two-way fusion, where the flow of mana was a simple, linear tether between beasts, this advanced technique required the runes to operate in full by-dimensional space. The Tamer had to weave the volatile energies together into a complex, triangular flow rather than a straight line.

And the ancient data had provided a brilliant, highly efficient shortcut.

If a Tamer wanted to vastly simplify the mental processing load, or successfully integrate a beast that possessed a lower or higher rank than the others, they just needed to establish a primary host. By utilizing one beast as the foundational base, the Tamer could treat the other beasts as supplementary augmentation nodes.

It was a functional logic remarkably similar to how his own spore-fungus operated, a sprawling network of perception and support. But instead of networking human minds, this spell forcefully seized the biological systems of the other beasts and grafted them onto the primary host.

Ren rapidly evaluated his current options.

All three of his primary combat beasts were multi-elemental, and they all hovered around the exact same rank. It didn’t really matter which one he chose as the foundation.

But searching for every small tactical advantage, logic dictated he use the strongest, most physically versatile body available: the Hydra.

Its massive, serpentine anatomy and multiple heads were biologically engineered to effortlessly sustain multiple, conflicting currents of raw elemental power at the exact same time.

She would be the core. And practicing with her right now meant he would be battle-ready when he actually needed to deploy this nightmare in the field.

Ren took a deep breath, grounded his boots against the stone, and initiated the fusion.

The power slammed into the room, and with it, Ren finally grasped the terrifying, apocalyptic scale he had been blindly pursuing.

The two-headed, Gold-3 Hydra violently transformed. It didn’t just grow; it exponentially expanded. The beast swelled to the colossal dimensions of a Platinum-tier mutant. Its massive, armored mass ballooned outward, accompanied by a deafening, subsonic roar that physically vibrated the air inside the cavernous chamber.

And as the chaotic, overlapping elemental energies of the Wolverine and the Mantis flooded its system, the Hydra’s biology violently accelerated.

A third, fully-formed head tore its way out of the central torso, prematurely achieving an evolutionary milestone that, under normal conditions, would have needed to reach the next rank.

The aura bleeding off the colossal serpent was suffocating. It was the oppressive, gravity-crushing signature of an entity that simply no longer belonged to any category the vanguard was accustomed to fighting.

Everyone in the chamber froze, staring up at the monstrosity in absolute, breathless shock.

It possessed the sheer, mountainous size of the legendary Dragarion beasts, the apocalyptic monsters the city historically remembered as the absolute, undisputed standard of supreme power.

But even individually, those nightmare beasts from the past were mathematically weaker than this. This three-way fused Hydra completely eclipsed them.

And then, Ren experienced the true, elegant brutality of the ancient method firsthand. He felt it physically surge through his own veins as he held the tether.

A three-way fusion did not duplicate the beasts the way the priceless Double potions did. You didn’t get two beast bodies. Instead, the massive, overflowing kinetic and magical rebound of the combined beasts violently reversed course. It flooded directly back through the tether and pumped straight into the Tamer’s own biological system.

Ren’s muscles gorged with raw, unadulterated power and his body got covered in diamond armor. It granted him a localized, physical strength completely equivalent to being actively fused with a duplicate of the beast, but packed tightly into his human frame.

It was a drastically different tactical trade-off. It was vastly less versatile than having two separate, highly mobile instances operating independently on a battlefield.

But the sheer, concentrated density of the brute force generated by the rebound finally allowed a human body to directly, physically rival a Diamond-rank beast.