The days settled into a steady, quiet and pleasant rhythm.

One after another, the autonomous towers began to sprout across the Great Wall’s vast perimeter. They rose from the blood-soaked dirt like a dotted line of carnivorous sentinels, blanketing a massive portion of the defensive line.

On the side, Ren tirelessly polished his three-way fusion. Every single time he summoned the colossal, Platinum-tier Hydra, the violent strain on his system lessened a bit.

The harsh spell that had initially brought him to his knees, rapidly hollowing out his core in minutes, was bending to his will. He could now sustain the beast’s mountainous mass with barely a spike in his heart rate.

Canceling the fusion soon also no longer left him gasping for air; the energetic rebound barely even moving his expanding system veins.

Meanwhile, on the surface, the towers proved so lethally productive that they fundamentally altered the way the enemy behaved.

Mutant attacks in the fortified zones dropped drastically. The relentless, screeching waves of Silver-tier beasts became more sporadic. It was as if the corrupted swarms were slowly, collectively learning a brutal lesson: violently throwing themselves against the wooden monoliths didn’t breach the Wall at all. It merely fed the structures, making the roots thicker and the automated defenses much more lethal.

So attacking those specific sectors had become an evolutionary dead end. As a result, massive stretches of the Great Wall fell into a strange, eerie lull that the grizzled veterans hadn’t experienced since the years preceding the recent wars.

There was barely any work...

The shifts grew incredibly long and mind-numbingly peaceful. A single, silent wooden tower was now effortlessly executing the exact same defensive quota that used to require dozens of tamers fighting for their turf.

It seemed to be the beginning of a new era.

♢♢♢♢

Ren didn’t restrict his fusion practice solely to the safe, subterranean confines of Selphira’s private vault after some time.

Occasionally, he started to take his experiments outside... Far outside.

His iron-clad alibi as the Vanguard’s premier "Installation Sergeant" afforded him the exact window of freedom he needed to execute two massive objectives simultaneously. He could practice his apocalyptic fusion miles away from prying eyes, and he could physically scout the Gold 3 zone for the final, missing Wood ruin.

He never ventured into the deep rings entirely alone. He was always flanked high above by either Zhao or Victor, hovering in the clouds. They served as both an elite escort and a crucial second pair of eyes sweeping the horizon.

Despite the backup, he remained completely out of luck.

The fundamental problem was the sheer, geographical scale. The concentric rings surrounding the city grew exponentially larger the further out they pushed, and the Gold 3 zone was simply gargantuan. It was one thing to fly across the zone in a straight line, at maximum velocity, that only took him less than an hour.

But systematically tracking a hidden ruin entrance across that entire, sprawling expanse was an entirely different nightmare.

And he wasn’t just scanning the surface. The ancient vault could be buried hundreds of feet underground, perfectly sealed for centuries, emitting absolutely zero visual or energetic signatures to the world above.

It made perfect logical sense, Ren thought, staring out over the endless, biting winds of the plains. With so few humans capable of safely surviving this deep in the wasteland, and such an astronomical amount of territory to meticulously sweep, it was no wonder the ruin had remained undiscovered just like the wind and earth one.

If only the downloaded map from the crystal brain hadn’t been so infuriatingly vague.

Yino’s Vanguard had possessed a vastly easier geographical hand to play. The architectural distribution of the main sixteen global ruins was relatively symmetrical between the two sister cities, but with one critical divergence: the ruins followed a sprawling spiral pattern, not a circle, and the tail end of that spiral terminated squarely in Yano territory.

Mathematically, that meant Yino’s two external ruins had been positioned on the tighter, inner coil of their spiral. It was located in their Gold 1 zone, a significantly smaller, far less dangerous ring where executing a grid search was many times easier.

For Yano, that exact same two ruins were seated at the absolute outer extreme of the spiral’s tail. It was buried somewhere in the suffocating immensity of the Gold 3 zone, a territory four times larger than Gold 1, completely overrun by highly complex ecosystems. Trying to locate a buried stone door out here was literally trying to find a needle in a field the size of a small country.

But Ren took it in stride. He remained completely calm.

There was no ticking, desperate clock driving him to madness this time... Moosh wasn’t scheduled to awaken for another four hundred and fifty days. Until the colossal yet small friend ended up ascending to the Platinum rank to face Dragarion, it simply wasn’t a huge change anyway.

With that massive buffer of time on his side, Ren knew that if he just swept the zone with cold, methodical patience, he would inevitably unearth the vault before the deadline arrived.

The search was a background logistical project, not a frantic emergency. Every single scouting trip chipped away a little more of the map. And the wasteland, no matter how impossibly vast it felt, was ultimately finite.

♢♢♢♢

Another month quietly slipped by.

One afternoon, Ren returned to the Wall from his deep-zone exploration, completely expecting another standard shift... Instead, he was met by Matilda.

She had been dispatched directly by Julius and Selphira. Flanking her was a small, crisp administrative detail and a formal secretary. They had arrived on the perimeter to collect the general performance reports regarding the new recruits and document the sector’s events for the quarter.

It was a perfectly routine, deeply boring piece of bureaucratic theater that occurred in every single sector of the Wall on a strict schedule.

The fact that the clipboard-holding secretary was Cassia Ashenway was, without a single doubt, not a coincidence.

And the fact that Cassia offered Ren a deeply subtle, barely perceptible nod of greeting as she walked past him certainly had everything to do with her inner circle of friends. The high-house girls remained intensely fascinated by the hyper-famous young Tamer who had violently derailed the suicidal political machinations of their own families to save them.