Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 671

Chapter 671: Chapter 671 - Taming the Fifth Year: 1st Gathering Exam - 9

The Bear Cat’s massive head tilted.

Its eyes, each one larger than the Mantis’s entire body, scanned the trunk. Looking for what had made that sound.

Time stretched, seconds becoming eternities.

And through the crystal fragment floating before Ren’s eye, hundreds of kilometers away...

He watched.

Held his breath alongside his beast.

Shared the fear and tension. The desperate hope for survival.

The Bear Cat’s nose moved closer... Sniffing.

Closer.

Closer.

So close the Mantis could see its individual whiskers. Could count the patterns in its fur. Could smell the mana-rich breath.

The Cat breathed strongly...

And then the Mantis made a mistake.

It jumped.

The terror impulse was too strong, panic overriding patience.

The mana interfered with its camouflage.

Its landing on the next branch produced no sound. But it didn’t matter...

Now it was visible.

Revealed... Vulnerable.

The Bear Cat’s massive head turned with impossible speed.

Its eyes, which had been glassy and unfocused, sharpened with the perception only a Gold 3 beast could possess. Huge, despite not being a detection oriented beast.

It saw something small.

Not a substantial or important meal.

But something shiny for a cat...

The kind of beast full of curiosity and hunting instinct. The worst possible combination.

The paw moved.

Faster than lightning for something so large. It crushed the Mantis against the trunk with force sufficient to pulverize iron, with pressure enough to eliminate the poor thing ten times over and break the mana bond.

Absolute annihilation.

The Bear Cat lifted its paw.

There was nothing left of the mana protected beast.

It blinked, confused.

It had felt something... seen something. The cat was certain of it.

It sniffed the air, then sniffed the bark where its paw had crushed. Searching for confirmation of what its senses had registered.

Nothing.

Maybe it had been its imagination?

Maybe hunger was making it see things. The mana fruits were very well-guarded and dangerous this Dragon Tree evolution season, after all.

It moved away, losing interest, its eyes already seeking the glowing spheres that really mattered above. Real substantial meals.

Twenty meters below the impact point, completely motionless, camouflaged against a knot in the bark...

The Mantis waited.

Heart racing, if it had possessed such an organ. Every instinct screaming to flee.

But it held.

The illusion had worked.

It had projected a copy of itself exactly where the Cat expected to find it. Sufficiently bright in appearance to satisfy the massive beast senses for a fraction of a second.

The perfect deception... Misdirection at its finest.

Just enough time for the true body to jump camouflaged downward and hide.

Projections were its most developed ability.

Illusions from a creature that was already almost an illusion itself.

It waited thirty more seconds.

Then moved again.

More careful now.

Slower.

The environmental mana continued interfering, but the Mantis learned, adapted. Each jump was smoother than the previous, each landing more silent.

And finally...

Finally it reached the clearing.

It wasn’t really a clearing. More like a wound in the forest.

A fallen tree.

But not a normal ’tree’.

This had been one of the largest. A giant among giants that had been ready to evolve, whose fall had created a space where sunlight actually touched the ground.

A scar in the canopy. An anomaly in the green darkness.

The claw Zhao had mentioned wasn’t there.

The corrupt beasts had moved it, had corrupted it to attack the city and used it as a weapon in their assault.

But the fallen tree was there, covered in anti-mana grass that was losing quality.

And in its center...

A hole.

Enormous and dark. Descending toward depths that sunlight never reached.

That was the path.

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