Ren gritted his teeth, holding the suffocating pressure for just a moment longer to map how the fusion’s energy responded to his will.

Then, he abruptly canceled it.

The towering Hydra dissolved back into him in two different rays, only the main body with 2 heads and much smaller stayed, and the crushing weight of his absolute exhaustion violently slammed back into him. It was vastly heavier than before.

Ren’s knees buckled a bit. He slapped his hands down onto his thighs, bending over and panting heavily as the sweat poured down his pale face, desperately trying to catch his breath.

"It’s... it’s a little difficult to control with my mana reserves this low," Ren admitted between ragged gasps. "Right now, my grip on the spell is sloppy. But I am going to practice it..."

He slowly forced his spine straight, his mind already spinning with the huge applications of such explosive, overwhelming force.

"This could be the absolute perfect solution for external, long-range missions where we can’t afford to send the entire vanguard," Ren reasoned aloud. "With this kind of power output, a single person could comfortably cover an objective that previously required an entire strike team."

Liora, Larissa, and Luna tensed simultaneously.

The air in the room instantly dropped ten degrees. The mere concept of Ren wandering off on highly dangerous, isolated solo missions, relying entirely on a volatile, explosive and mana expensive technique he could barely control while exhausted, did not sit well with them.

Not even a little bit.

Three identical, fiercely protective, downright murderous glares locked onto his face, communicating their absolute refusal without a single syllable being spoken.

Ren immediately threw his hands up in surrender, flawlessly reading the terrifying room.

"I am not going to run off alone without telling you guys!" Ren quickly backpedaled, his voice slightly higher than usual. "And I absolutely won’t do it without thoroughly mastering the runes and mana input in a controlled environment first!"

The three girls slowly, begrudgingly relaxed their postures... a little bit.

"Alright, that is absolutely enough for today. Everyone needs to go and rest," Selphira commanded, stepping forward and definitively closing the day’s operations with the unquestionable authority of a supreme commander.

"There is a massive amount of political work to be done, and we have to return to the surface immediately. Especially you, Ren. You need to get back to your side of the Great Wall... Remember, your learning quest isn’t over." Selphira shot him a sharp, highly pointed look. "Our convenient little excuse that you were ’assisting other sections of the Wall with an artifact installation’ after the first reinforce draft is barely holding together as it is. A few more days of absence, and the people you need to believe you are some normal tamer are going to start doing the math."

Ren gave a heavy nod. She was absolutely right.

The roadmap for the next few days was firmly set. Ren would sleep, meditate, and let his core fully replenish. Once he was back to absolute one hundred percent, he would return to the subterranean vault and reverse the crystallization of Luna’s aunt, Orion’s wife.

It was a direct, highly emotional request from both Lykea and Luna. Despite Orion’s horrific, unforgivable treason, the two women absolutely refused to leave their family member in a crystal tomb when they possessed the tangible power to pull her out and they’d vouch for her as a virtuous person for what they remember.

"WE CANNOT LEAVE HER IN THERE, PLEASE!" Lykea had shrieked earlier, her voice echoing off the stone. "She might have been married to a complete, treasonous idiot, BUT SHE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH CHOICE FOR HER FAMILY SIDE and is still my cousin..."

"AND I DESPERATELY NEED SOMEONE TO GOSSIP WITH WHO ACTUALLY UNDERSTANDS MY GENERATION!"

However, the sacrifices trapped in the Fire and Water sockets were a completely different story.

"This is not a good time for those two," Selphira had stated a while ago, coldly, her glacial tone leaving absolutely zero room for debate. "They have been frozen for far too long. Their respective places in this world have been completely overwritten so they will just suffer... Reversing them right now serves zero tactical utility, and we have vastly more pressing priorities for your energy reserves."

So, for now, Ren was only ’able’ to rescue one more person.

And looking at the ancient system, Ren was suddenly, painfully aware of the absolute limit the new intelligence had drawn for him.

The two kids, unintended victims who had been flash-frozen by Dragarion’s catastrophic strike years ago, existed in an entirely different level of magical density. Their crystallization was fundamentally deeper, heavier, and vastly more entrenched than the relatively easier petrification of Sirius or Lykea.

Thanks to the hyper-tuned sensitivity granted by the three-way fusion, Ren was only just now beginning to truly perceive the suffocating density of that dragon’s level of energy. Merely sensing it was one thing; actively reversing it was another nightmare entirely.

The sheer, astronomical volume of raw mana required to simultaneously maintain a perfect three-way fusion and execute the complex reversal transformation was, for the moment, completely outside of his system’s reach.

’Perhaps... when Moosh breaches Platinum.’

Ren quietly ran the calculations in his head as the exhausted vanguard began to organize themselves for the march back to the surface.

If his primary fungus awakened at the Platinum rank... if he permanently tethered vastly more human nodes to the super-network... and if he flawlessly mastered the three-way fusion instead of just barely holding it together... perhaps then, he could do it.

Perhaps then, the suffocating, impenetrable density of those ancient Dragarion made crystals would cease to be an impossible wall, and simply become another difficult problem he had the ability to solve.

Right now, it was a wall.

But Ren had learned a very specific, undeniable lesson throughout this entire, bloody journey:

Walls had a funny habit of turning into doors if you spent enough time ’staring’ at them.

He unsummoned the plain Gold 3 Hydra too, heavily shook the lingering exhaustion from his shoulders as best as he could, and quietly followed his new, chaotic family out of the ancient ruin.