Chapter 672: Chapter 672 - Taming the Fifth Year: 1st Gathering Exam - End

"Not bad, right?" Taro smiled, pointing at his mountain of treasures with confidence, though there was tiredness in his eyes. "Unfortunately we couldn’t make two trips like you suggested. The Tunnel can carry tons on a huge rock plate on its back like you taught me. But it’s... well, slow." Taro rubbed the back of his neck. "Not as fast and practical as your Wolverine, obviously. But it’s still constant..."

The tortoise approach...

"Impressive amount of materials for a single trip," Ren said honestly, genuine appreciation in his voice. "Gold 1?"

"Silver 3 mainly. A bit of Gold 1 when we felt brave."

Levels comparable to Larissa and Liora, Ren estimated. Maybe slightly less... Collection speed mattered as much as carrying capacity.

Time was a resource like any other.

Min appeared behind Taro, his enormous water serpent gleaming with moisture on its scales. He also looked exhausted but satisfied. The kind of tiredness that came with accomplishment.

"My team too... Silver 3 and Gold 1," he announced without anyone asking. Pride evident despite the fatigue. "I kept that team of randoms I got paired with fighting, healing them every time something went wrong. They were like zombie warriors, brother. They’d get hit, I’d heal them, they’d go back to fighting."

"Sounds brutal," Liu commented.

"It was." Min smiled, but the expression carried weight. Memory of close calls. "But it worked. Though..." he looked toward where Taro supervised his Tunnel’s unloading, "cargo was the problem. Without dimensional space or specialized beasts, we were limited to what we could physically carry even with two trips."

A bit below Taro, Ren calculated. Solid performance but constrained by logistics.

"And you know who..." Min whispered, his voice dropping conspiratorially.

"Luna?" Liu whispered back, looking around, searching the crowd.

They found her near the back of the building, surrounded by shadows that shouldn’t exist under so many lights.

Her enormous Elemental Devourer Wolf was partially materialized from the floor’s shadows, and from the shadows it projected...

Materials emerged.

Not a space in the stomach like Ren’s Wolverine.

A dimensional space in the shadows themselves.

Different approach... Same principle. Innovation born from necessity and unique ability.

"What th..." Min whispered.

The quantity was enormous. Not as much as what Ren had brought, but...

Almost a third, maybe.

Considering Luna didn’t have the advantage of perfect ecosystem knowledge that Ren possessed, nor his "ability" to "negotiate" with wild beasts...

It was extraordinary.

"Looks like she made two trips too," Taro murmured. "Must have pushed her team to the limit."

Luna didn’t look at them. Her attention was completely on the evaluators, verifying each weight, each classification. Her expression was unreadable.

Distant.

As she’d been for months.

A wall built from necessity and pain.

Ren looked away before she could feel his eyes on her.

"Jin?" Liu asked to change the subject, sensing the tension.

"Over there." Min pointed toward a table where Jin was clearly dissatisfied with his results. His collection was... mediocre. Respectable for an average student, perhaps, but nothing remarkable.

Nothing that justified his constant bragging.

"Klein didn’t do badly," Taro added. "He was lucky to have a team member with a Wolverine. But..." he shrugged.

Didn’t surpass Taro and Min.

"Team 15, leader Ren," one of the original evaluators called, the one who’d been there since their first return. His face was pale. "Please tell me you’re not bringing an equally big mountain."

"Equally?" Ren asked.

The evaluator closed his eyes as if praying.

"Of course we did," Ren responded.

Ren’s Wolverine materialized completely, opening its jaws wide.

And the avalanche began.

Materials.

More materials.

An amount that made nearby conversations stop. That made heads turn. That transformed the building’s noise into gradual, growing silence as more and more students realized what they were witnessing.

History being made as records were being shattered.

"It’s double the princesses’," someone whispered, the words carrying through the hush.

"Impossible."

"You’re seeing the same thing I am?"

The evaluators worked in silence now, their expressions oscillating between forced professionalism and exhaustion.

The figures grew.

And grew.

And kept growing.

Larissa and Liora had approached without Ren noticing, observing more closely.

"It’s obscene," Liora murmured, but she didn’t sound upset. Just... impressed, awed even. "How the hell did you have time to...?"

"Knowledge is power," Larissa responded softly. "Ren understands his environment too well. Sees things others don’t even know exist."

"Still..."

"I know."

Luna was watching now too. Her expression remained unreadable, but her hands closed at her sides... Fists clenching.

"First position without any doubt," the head evaluator finally announced, his voice resonating in the now-silent building. Authority and disbelief mixing. "By... by a margin that frankly defies all logic. Mister Patinder, you and your team have collected more than the next three top teams combined... Almost 4."

Murmurs.

Some of admiration... Respect earned through undeniable achievement.

Others of resentment... Jealousy poorly disguised as skepticism.

Ren barely heard them.

Because in that moment, something changed in his vision.

His left eye.

Where the illusion fragment floated almost invisible.

The perspective shifted. He no longer saw the evaluation building. He saw...

Darkness.

But not complete darkness.

There was light. Dim. Phosphorescent. The kind of bioluminescence that only existed in that cave.

And the walls...

The walls of the tunnel the Mantis had been descending.

They weren’t natural.

They were carved...

Runes.

The chaotic lines he’d seen when he activated the ancestral golden spores. These were... different, dormant? It seemed the mutants hadn’t destroyed these.

"So it’s one of those ruins," Ren whispered, so low that nobody around him heard over the noise of his team’s celebration.

It was like the tunnel he’d found years ago. The one with golden spores at the end. The one that had given him his initial power.

But this was different.

Bigger.

Much bigger.

The tunnel didn’t narrow toward a small cave. It expanded. Opening toward something... vast.

The same writings covered the walls, but there was much more here. More complexity. More layers of meaning carved in ancient stone.

History written by hands long dead. Knowledge preserved in permanent form.

And at the tunnel’s end...

A door.

Open.

As if someone had passed through it.

Ren’s heart beat faster. Adrenaline spiking despite the distance, despite the safety of his physical body.

"Ren?" Liu’s voice pulled him partially from his trance, concern evident. "Are you okay? You look..."

"Distracted," Fan 1 completed.

"I’m fine," Ren lied, forcing his attention back to the building. To the celebrations and Liu patting his back. To Zhao watching him with a smile...

But part of his mind remained there.

In the darkness.

Watching through his Mantis’s mirrors as the creature approached that ancient door.

Toward answers.

Toward truth.

Toward whatever had happened to Sirius Starweaver.

And Ren could do nothing except watch.

And wait.

And pray that his smallest mana projection was strong enough to survive whatever waited on the other side of that door.

Whatever secrets had been buried beneath the forest.

"Ren!" Min shook him gently. "Seriously, brother... You seem to be in another world."

Accurate. More accurate than Min could possibly know.

"Just tired," Ren said, smiling in a way he hoped was convincing. "It was two intense trips."

"Then let’s celebrate before you pass out," Liu declared, dragging him toward where the rest of the group was already planning how to spend a small portion of their projected earnings.

And Ren let them.

Let them celebrate.

Let them talk and laugh and make plans.

While his left eye saw things nobody else could see.

Things maybe nobody else should see.

But that he needed to see anyway.

Because some truths couldn’t remain buried.

Not when the door was open.

Not when answers were so close.