Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

The deepest main chamber of the ruins smelled the same as always. Ancient stone and the residual energy of the statues with their reinserted hearts, which now made the entire structure glow in a way that had no equivalent in standard crystal architecture. The two crystallized figures in their positions were exactly as they had been on every previous visit, with the difference that this time Ren hadn’t come to just practice mapping or evaluate.

He had come to attempt something larger.

That was what he had decided while walking here, with a certainty that had started developing cracks now that the chamber was in front of him and the two figures were in it and the width between the theory of what he could do and the practice of actually doing it had become so short.

He had to try if he ever wanted to resolve those deeper problems.

‘But if I manage to bring them back,’ he thought, ‘it might end being something bad regardless…’

That was the part he had been thinking subconsciously and had led to avoid trying and postpone for months… Fear leading to procrastination, because it was too uncomfortable to face the results of that possibility. If he succeeded in reversing the crystallization of these two statues, they would be people. But people who had been this way for too long. People who now might simply be bodies without life despite everything, the biological systems preserved in the crystal structure but no longer having whatever made a person a person.

It was a huge effort… And even then, he didn’t know what he would find on the other side of the finished work.

But he had to try…

He began.

The mapping starting from the little broken finger was always the first step. Not because it was the most important but because it was the point of lowest complexity in the system and the one he remembered best from previous attempts, it consumed less active memory than the rest, which left more available for what came after. It also served as a warm-up, the way reading the first page of a text calibrated the mind before committing to the full body of it.

The male statue was the natural first subject. The logic of saving women and children first was apparently something he still defaulted to without deciding to.

Ren continued. The little finger, the hand, the wrist, the forearm, the elbow with its articular complexity, a joint where multiple systems intersected and where the connections between bone and mana pathway were denser than in the straight sections. Then the full arm was finished.

If the elbow was a place where the density of connections increased in a way that required slightly more time than he had calculated… The shoulder was worse, the mana circulation system branched wildly toward the torso, but despite these added complexities he still felt like he had significant capacity remaining. The system was responding.

He kept going.

The neck, part of the head, the upper spine in its full complexity. Then the torso downward, ribs, sternum.

He had reached the sternum and stopped.

The weariness was real: the fatigue of fine control extended over too big and complex a target, the kind that arrived in the perception systems before it arrived in the physical ones and produced a fogging of precision that was exactly what he couldn’t afford here. Not exhaustion of the body, but the dulling of the mental edge that made the difference between correct and approximately correct at the level of detail this required.

But he had reached the sternum.

He had covered practically half of the most important systems in the body and he still felt capable of pushing a little more despite all the headache.

This mapping, being able to reach the sternum… told him something he hadn’t expected it to tell him: he wasn’t as far from the accomplishment as he had been afraid he was.

The lower half of the torso, the legs, the mana system in the lower body, these remained unmapped. But what he had read up to the sternum was sufficient to understand the complete structure of the system. The full complexity was approximately double his current effort, and the complete structure told him that with the beasts he had now, pushed to the limit of their capacity, he could cover somewhere between fifty-five and sixty percent of the body. A little more than half.

It was good… It wasn’t enough.

‘Unless…’

Ren looked at the statue. Looked at the arm and the half of the quadriceps he had mapped.

Looked at the other appendages.

‘The legs and arms can be reattached by a healer.’

If he transformed now only the parts that mattered, the organs, the central mana system, the neurological systems, and left the extremities outside the transformation to be reconnected afterward when he had recovered some energy, then perhaps…

But he would have to heal the damage after the attempt. He would need to keep enough mana in reserve for that, and maybe he would also have to reopen the sealed wound to reconnect the extremities…

The idea arrived with that strange discomfort that ideas had when they appeared at the exact moment the system that normally filtered them was too turbid and tired to operate correctly. Brilliant in the way that ideas felt brilliant when the person evaluating them was already past the edge of clean thinking.

It was risky. But these statues were…

The origins of the figures were Goldcrest and Yino. If the result wasn’t perfect, the personal cost of that imperfection was lower than if it had been someone he was more directly interested in saving.

With the desperation and the heat of the moment, that was enough for Ren to try it.

♢♢♢♢

The error arrived when it was already too late to stop it completely.

The first phase of mapping was deceptive in small but hypercomplex areas, nodes of the nervous system and the mana system, dense junctions where the circuit density exceeded what the surface area suggested. Ren had understood most of it, but there were always small details that were difficult to retain at that level of granularity.

He had generalized his remaining mental capacity in a way that turned out to be incorrect. The complexity of the system didn’t scale linearly with the size of the area.

He wouldn’t have enough to heal it afterward. He wouldn’t even have enough to save everything important.