Lingkaran Gold 3, yang terletak paling dekat dengan celah kosong, menandai titik asal mutlak bagi garis evolusi Naga Hitam.
Di sisi lain benua, di seberang celah tersebut, Naga Bayangan milik Yino berbagi elemen primordial yang persis sama. Namun, naga khusus ini—yang lahir dari tanah Yano—berbeda, dan akar penyebab perbedaan itu sepenuhnya terletak pada geografi elemen yang kontras di lingkaran-lingkaran tinggi kedua kota bersaudara tersebut.
Di Yino, lima elemen alami tidak disusun dalam urutan yang sama seperti di Yano. Light dan Darkness masih berbagi ruang cermin yang bertetangga di seberang celah, mempertahankan keseimbangan yang berbeda. Namun, elemen alami lainnya tampak teracak, tetapi disusun secara khusus agar setiap elemen berhadapan langsung dengan kutub negatifnya.
Karena tata letak geografis ini, zona gelap Yano berbatasan dengan wilayah Water yang berat, alih-alih zona Fire yang mudah menguap seperti di Yino. Pergeseran mendasar pada eter sekitar ini memaksa ekosistem lokal untuk beradaptasi dengan cara yang jauh berbeda dari kembarannya. Akibatnya, naga penjaga di zona khusus ini, yang lahir setiap seratus tahun, memiliki massa yang jauh lebih fisik dan padat secara mengerikan dibandingkan naga energi milik Yino.
Alih-alih ditenun dari bayangan etereal yang tak berwujud dan berkedip seperti api gelap, naga Yano memiliki konsistensi cairan. Namun, itu bukanlah cairan bening yang mengalir seperti sungai. Itu adalah lumpur kental, pekat, dan berjamur secara agresif. Itu tampak seperti puncak dari pembusukan biologis, mana bayangan fisik murni yang tidak tercemar, yang dipaksa memadat menjadi materi yang membusuk dan terurai.
Black Swamp adalah rahim luas yang membusuk, yang melahirkan naga yang diasosiasikan dengan akhir mutlak dari semua makhluk hidup.
Selama yang ia ingat, Ren sangat terpesona oleh naga khusus ini, semata-mata karena satu ilustrasi yang hidup.
Dalam buku masa kecil favoritnya, anatomi Naga Hitam adalah yang paling aneh dan memikat dari semuanya. Naga itu tidak digambarkan sebagai beast menjulang yang dibalut sisik berkilau yang tak tertembus. Sebaliknya, ia digambarkan sebagai entitas kolosal yang seluruhnya ditenun dari benang-benang organik tebal, tampak persis seperti miliaran hifa jamur dan kompos busuk yang menyatu membentuk gunung hidup.
Makhluk yang dijahit hingga ada, alih-alih dipahat.
Tentu saja, jika menengok ke belakang sekarang dengan kecerdasan dingin dan tajam seorang arsitek mana-biologis, Ren menyadari buku cerita kesayangannya itu...
Sepenuhnya salah.
Pertama dan terutama, Naga Hitam yang sebenarnya dan telah matang sepenuhnya—hasil akhir apokaliptik dari evolusi tersebut—sama sekali tidak terlihat seperti ilustrasi itu. Gambar terkenal tersebut adalah hasil dari kesalahpahaman biologis yang masif. Para cendekiawan kuno ini telah sepenuhnya mengacaukan ekosistem lingkaran Platinum yang sangat kompleks dengan naga penjaga asli yang coba diinkubasi oleh ekosistem tersebut.
Pada dasarnya, para naturalis terhebat di kerajaan telah melihat kepompong yang luas dan aneh, lalu dengan percaya diri mendokumentasikannya sebagai kupu-kupu.
Namun, meskipun buku itu secara faktual tidak benar, dan Ren kini memahami mekanisme biologis di balik kesalahan tersebut, ia masih merasa bahwa ekosistem yang saling terhubung dan aneh ini adalah mahakarya rekayasa alam yang layak didokumentasikan dengan benar untuk publik. Itulah tepatnya mengapa ia ingin menyaksikannya dengan mata kepalanya sendiri sebelum membuat interpretasi versinya sendiri yang 'akurat secara ilmiah'.
Beast-beast Black adalah flora elemen Dark yang mendasar di rawa tersebut, membentuk sebagian besar biomassa.
Pada dasarnya, mereka adalah jaring hidup raksasa yang tergantung di atas rawa. Mereka berlabuh pada bola-bola besar yang menjulang tinggi, ditopang oleh beberapa kaki panjang yang kurus, tampak sangat mirip dengan Golden Noses yang ditemui Zhao di masa lalu, tetapi ini lebih tipis dan meneteskan lendir hitam pekat yang lengket. Dan tepat di puncak bola-bola besar itu, jamur bioluminesen yang bersinar tumbuh seperti mahkota.
Jamur bersinar yang memahkotai puncak itu tampak sangat familier. Mereka mencerminkan karpet jamur yang dulu pernah ada di kepala Ren sendiri, sebelum ia melukai intinya, saat itu menjadi tampilan khasnya yang paling ikonik.
Dan kemiripan visual yang mencolok itulah alasan historis yang tepat mengapa, beberapa dekade lalu, kaum aristokrat benar-benar percaya bahwa beast-beast ini adalah cabang evolusi tingkat tinggi yang belum ditemukan dari garis Spore-Fungus.
Asumsi itu dan fakta bahwa beast dengan peluang rendah selalu menjadi
The Gold 3 ring, positioned closest to the empty fissure, marked the absolute genesis point for the Black Dragon’s evolutionary line.
On the opposite side of the continent, across the fissure, Yino’s Shadow Dragon shared this exact same primordial element. But this specific dragon, the one birthed from Yano’s soil, was different, and the root cause of that divergence lay entirely in the contrasting elemental geography of the two sister cities’ higher rings.
In Yino, the five natural elements were not organized in the same order as they were in Yano. Light and Darkness still shared their neighboring, mirrored spaces across the fissure, maintaining a different balance. But the remaining natural elements were seemingly scrambled, but specifically arranged so that every single element directly faced its polarizing negative.
Because of this geographic layout, Yano’s dark zone bordered the heavy Water territory instead of the volatile Fire zone like Yino’s. This fundamental shift in ambient ether forced the local ecosystem to adapt in radically different ways than its twin. Consequently, the guardian dragon of this specific zone, birthed every hundred years, possessed a drastically more physical, terrifyingly solid mass than Yino’s energy one.
Instead of being woven from ethereal, intangible shadows that flickered like dark fire, the Yano dragon possessed the consistency of a liquid. But it wasn’t the clean, flowing liquid of a river. It was a thick, viscous, aggressively moldy sludge. It looked like the absolute culmination of biological decay, pure, unadulterated physical shadow mana forcefully condensed into rotting, decomposing matter.
The Black Swamp was the sprawling, festering womb that gave birth to the dragon associated with the absolute end of all living things.
For as long as he could remember, Ren had been deeply fascinated by this specific dragon, entirely because of a single, vivid illustration.
In his favorite childhood book, the Black Dragon’s anatomy had been the most bizarre and captivating of them all. It wasn’t depicted as a towering beast clad in impenetrable, glittering scales. Instead, it was drawn as a colossal entity entirely woven from thick, organic threads, looking exactly as if a billion fungi hyphae and rotting compost had fused together to form a living mountain.
A creature stitched into existence, rather than sculpted.
Of course, looking back now with the cold, hard intelligence of a mana-biological architect, Ren realized his beloved storybook was...
Completely wrong.
First and foremost, the actual, fully matured Black Dragon, the final, apocalyptic result of the evolution, looked absolutely nothing like the illustration. That famous drawing was the result of a massive biological misunderstanding. These ancient scholars had entirely confused the highly complex ecosystem of the Platinum ring for the actual guardian dragon that the ecosystem was trying to incubate.
Basically, the kingdom’s greatest naturalists had looked at a sprawling, grotesque chrysalis and confidently documented it as the butterfly.
But even though the book was factually incorrect, and Ren now perfectly understood the biological mechanics behind the error, he still felt that this bizarre, interconnected ecosystem was a masterpiece of natural engineering that deserved to be properly documented for the public. That was exactly why he had wanted to witness it with his own eyes before sketching his own, ’scientifically accurate’ interpretation.
The Black beasts were the foundational, Dark-elemental flora of the swamp, forming the overwhelming majority of the biomass.
They were essentially gargantuan, living nets hanging suspended over the swamp. They were anchored to massive, towering spheres supported by several long, spindly legs, looking strikingly similar to the Golden Noses Zhao had encountered first in the past, but these were thinner, dripping with a thick, pitch-black, sticky slime. And right at the absolute apex of the big spheres, glowing, bioluminescent mushrooms sprouted like a crown.
Those glowing mushrooms crowning the apex looked very familiar. They perfectly mirrored the mushroom carpet that used to sit on Ren’s own head, back before he had hurt his core when it had been his signature, most iconic look.
And that striking visual similarity was the exact historical reason why, decades ago, the aristocracy had genuinely believed these beasts were an undiscovered, high-tier evolutionary offshoot of the Spore-Fungus line.
That assumption and the low chance beasts being always "strong ones" had triggered a massive, kingdom-wide investment. The high houses had aggressively poured astronomical resources into harvesting and cultivating them, only to meet with a crushing, absolute failure. All of what had happened long before Ren was even born to empirically prove, to a now disappointed of the spores world, that the Spore-Fungus path was actually viable.
The truth was, these dark, hanging beasts had absolutely nothing to do with the Spore-Fungus. They were simply an evolutionary variant of a much more common plant beast common in Yino.
That entire ecosystem, the massive "pupa" that had fooled the historians, was an intricate, terrifyingly efficient web of mana-biological mutualism, functioning very much like the Giant Forest in the Platinum rings.
The moldy, black plant beasts actively merged with serpentine Water-element monsters. These serpents were variants of Min’s primary beast, the ones Ren actually wanted for Min instead of his chaos one. They existed in staggering abundance here due to the geographic proximity of the Heavy Lake. They deliberately migrated into the Black Swamp right before breaching the Platinum rank, utilizing the change of environment to hide from the predators that normally hunted their evolutionary line in the higher rings.
And living in perfect, symbiotic harmony with the plants and the serpents were massive Earth-element beasts that populated the shallow mud. They were essentially gargantuan, armored slugs boasting inverted mineral shells (on their feet). These massive snails evolved by feeding exclusively on the bioluminescent mushrooms growing atop the Black beasts.
But they didn’t chew them with a standard jaw. They consumed them using a massive, highly specialized biological mantle that looked like a dense, tightly woven net. And as the slugs happily grazed on the glowing fungi, those massive, net-like lips draped over the Black beasts, physically protecting the moisture-dependent flora and snakes from drying out.
They were all deeply gregarious, entirely co-dependent species. They physically clumped together in staggering, monolithic formations, burying the Water-element serpents deep in the absolute center. The serpents generated the localized humidity the entire collective desperately required to survive. Meanwhile, the outer layers of the formation were intentionally left to dry in the wind, leaving the massive, net-like mantles of the slugs, (basically their giant dried-out lips), exposed to the elements.
When completely dried, those massive, interwoven lines looked exactly like thick, organic threads.
It looked exactly like the skin of the fungal dragon from Ren’s childhood book.
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