Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1248  Advantage

"Here."

The Hollow Wing came to an abrupt stop high in the air that almost threw Alex and Jala off. Only Sylas, who had raised himself with his telekinesis, didn't seem entirely foolish.

Down below, there was a mountain range of black. Even from their vantage point high in the skies, they still seemed small before it. There were still clouds of black and dense energy flashing with bolts of silver above them, while down below there was an expanse of rock that extended so far the base of the mountains couldn't be seen at all.

Unfortunately, the Hollow Wing couldn't fly any higher than this without its speed and control beginning to falter. If they pushed it, the Hollow Wing might pass out, and then they'd have another problem on their hands.

As things stood now, Sylas could control his telekinesis much further from the earth than the Hollow Wing could fly…

For now.

As far as Sylas could tell, this mountain range had the largest concentration of Serpentes on the continent. There were quite a number of powerhouses here. They ranged from Level 51 all the way up to Level 100.

However, one thing that Jala had made clear was that not all of them were… "real."

Sylas had come to understand that the Demons he had been interacting with, for the most part, were likely the Demons that were locked away here. Or, rather, the loops they suffered from were very different from the loops the common Demons suffered from.

The curious part about all of this was that in her tirade against the Golden Champion, the Duchess had also

mentioned loops and being trapped.

Sylas had thought it was a figure of speech back then, until he put two and two together with Jala's testament.

The question was, why had he not noticed the loops if they were so obvious?

Split Realm.

The moment Alex mentioned the Mountains of Giza, Sylas understood.

The Demons here—at least the common ones—weren't real.

The loops that Jala had observed were likely the Split Realm maintaining its energy, or limiting the consumption of it, while the loops that the Duchess was referring to were likely tied to the failure of the Split Realm and its resetting.

The Noble Demons, for the most part, should be participants of the Split Realms, while the common Demons were just here for the upkeep, to make this feel like a real world.

This seemed like an obvious conclusion. So why was it that Sylas, of all people, hadn't thought of it already? He had been in a Split Realm before, after all.

The problem was that this place was completely unlike a real Split Realm.

For one, a Split Realm could indeed trap people upon failure.

But the Split Realm was a remnant of the former system.

Back on Earth, the appearance of the Split Realm was facilitated by the current system. Sylas had gotten notifications, he had seen status screens, he had had missions to complete.

This Split Realm had none of those, and on top of that, it was protected by a layer of mutated Dungeons.

On top of that, Demons weren't supposed to appear in Dungeons created by the system. It had to be remembered that Demons and the systems were entirely incompatible. A system wouldn't create a Demon because it was akin to creating something antithetical to it.

If Sylas thought it was the "obvious" answer, he instead wouldn't be as smart as he seemed at all.

The only way for a Split Realm like this to exist was if something even more shocking than any of them thought was happening.

The only way was if… the Gold Lineage had once reached a height where they were capable of forming their own quasi-system—a closed system formed just for themselves, and purely for the purpose of trapping Demons here and forcing them into this loop wherein their descendants—that being those of the Gold Lineage—could put themselves through the trial of destroying them.

This was huge.

Just being an S-Grade Race wasn't enough to mean you could do such a thing. The systems themselves were there to help raise more S-Grade Races to begin with. Creating a system required something beyond that.

Of course, this system was far from perfect. The fact it had to use loops in the first place was proof of that. It had many flaws, and it was struggling to keep up.

The more you pushed against it, the more flaws it would show. And Sylas had a feeling that the fact it was supporting his improvement was the real reason Jala had picked up on so many of those flaws so easily.

So what did this mean?

The first thing was that this new loop was almost certainly triggered by the appearance of Megean. That meant that the deciding battle of this realm would be what decided if they could get out of here or not. In fact, the Noble Demons were probably always designed to converge their efforts onto the Golden Battlefield.

But what did this mean for Sylas? What would he do?

This Split Realm was flawed. As powerful as the Gold Lineage was, the fact that they had to seal the Demons here instead of outright killing them all should mean that they weren't powerful enough to truly suppress them all.

Though Sylas was still unsatisfied with this explanation, it was the only one he had for now, so he had to accept it.

This was to say that expecting a single Golden Champion, especially one that had already had their bloodline diluted to such a large extent, was ridiculous.

And yet, this closed-system world began to show so many flaws after just three entries. How could it possibly expect to both sustain enough Golden Champions to put up a real fight, and yet display so many flaws at the same time nonetheless?

The answer was that it couldn't. In fact, if Sylas was correct, the reason the Thryskai feather had appeared here in the first place was due to them taking advantage of a flaw in this closed system, slipping it through.

Unfortunately, whatever plan the Thryskai had had failed, causing it to lose this precious feather. A feather that was now in Sylas' hand.

Now, wouldn't Sylas be remiss to not take advantage of all of this?