Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 322

The first gold ring stretched before Zhao like a landscape of intermingled dreams and nightmares. Undulating hills covered in luminescent vegetation contrasted with abrupt cliffs where creatures of enormous power made their homes.

The air shimmered with concentrated mana, dense enough to be visible even to the untrained eye.

Zhao advanced with caution, his Mist Owl fused with him, granting the ability to move through the air with stealth. His Camouflage Raptor remained materialized at his side, ready to conceal him further from immediate threats.

'This route is much riskier than the previous one,' he thought, remembering the relatively safe path he had followed on his prior visit.

Every step here required constant vigilance; a moment's lapse could mean death.

According to Victor's predictions, King Dragarion should be in his resting place after another exhausting battle against the Dragon Tree. After prolonged incursions into the platinum ring, even the monarch needed to recover from the accumulated excess mana.

Of course, his Qilin and Azure Dragon were beasts especially gifted for mana purification, but even these legendary creatures had their limits. And if Victor's calculations were correct, Dragarion would now be in the final phase of his recovery.

The problem was the territory Zhao had to cross to reach him.

Zhao stopped at the edge of a clearing, observing carefully. The trees ahead were formed of several, impossibly thin for their height, trunks grouped together… But they weren't really trees at all.

"Golden Noses," he murmured to himself, studying the vertical forms that remained disturbingly motionless. His Mist Owl's enhanced vision allowed him to discern details that would be invisible to others.

Strange creatures with fifteen legs arranged in a circle that, when joined together, mimicked the appearance of an odd trunk. A very fluffy one.

Their furry, elongated bodies rose dozens of meters, culminating in two long golden protrusions, one pointing up and the other down, hence their name.

The upper one was a horn and the lower one a long snout of which only a small part was the mouth and everything else was what gave it its name, which was actually an olfactory organ of extraordinary sensitivity.

They weren't particularly aggressive by nature, preferring to form small patches of hundreds of individuals and remain still like small forests absorbing mana from the environment, which explained why Dragarion liked to rest with them around him...

Their mouths, though elongated, were found only at the end of the proboscis and were small, incapable of penetrating the King's armor while he rested. Their legs, though extraordinarily hard and long, were also soft and covered with abundant hair, designed more to withstand great weight together than to attack.

They were harmless creatures for Dragarion, but ultimately, they were Gold 1 rank. What made them truly dangerous for someone like Zhao, who didn't have armor that completely negated their attacks, was their ability to detect intruders.

His stealth, perfected over years and improved with the new creature that Ren had suggested, was practically useless against these creatures' sense of smell.

Being crushed by hundreds of legs and bitten by dozens of small mouths tearing at his skin wasn't something Zhao was eager to experience.

They weren't the strongest creatures in the area; on the contrary, they were quite weak in comparison to other creatures of the same rank. To make matters worse, their anatomy didn't allow them to use their horn, their best weapon, below their heads.

But when they felt threatened...

Zhao had heard Victor's explanation, and even Ren's curiously more detailed one. A herd of Golden Noses could form a defensive dome with their horns, creating a virtually impenetrable pointed fortress from which they could impale any of the enormous predatory beasts in the area with their horns.