Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1768: Omnimous (2) [Bonus]

Sylas arose in the sea of warm blue light. The floor beneath him was a calming grey that reminded him essentially of an off-shade of granite. The color palette was soothing to the soul.

Soon, however, it was interrupted by flickering screens.

[Please assign these words to their best definitions]

Sylas blinked at the screen for a moment. A language test?

But it was also a language test in a language he didn't recognize. He had never seen these characters before.

Not that it mattered.

Sylas's fingers flickered. In a few seconds, it was done.

[Complete. Please proceed]

The system didn't say anything about whether he was successful or not, but Sylas continued on ahead anyway.

A new screen appeared. On one side, there were a few pictures of animals-if a "few" could be used for a hundred or two of them.

On the other side, there was a series of words.

[Please assign the animal to the most appropriate word]

The words weren't the names of these animals. They were random words. Sylas was sure he had just seen one that was quite literally best translated as the word "pot"—as in pots and pans.

'This is an IQ test? Or something of the sort?'

Sylas scanned down the whole list and closed his eyes. A few seconds later, his eyes shot open and his fingers sped past, connecting one to the next in a wild flurry.

Then he was done.

[Complete. Please proceed]

Sylas continued forward with a calm gait, and a new screen flickering to life stopped him in his tracks.

A blooming flower appeared before him. Well, it appeared virtually. Its petals folded in on one another in a complex spiraling pattern, radiating the most gorgeous shade of pink.

There was nothing else. Just the flower, and no instructions at all. Sylas's eyes were already pinging back and forth between the petals, though. It was like he was capable of seeing things others couldn't-magical patterns reflecting in his eyes.

His finger raised up, but then he paused. He shook his head and then changed his mind about something.

'All the way.'

His finger opened into a palm, and he smacked down.

A complex Rune with 73 Foundations appeared-one for every single petal of the flower before him.

The lips of the flower trembled, and then it spiraled into a closed loop before vanishing into the screen.

[Complete. Please proceed]

Sylas continued forward. He honestly didn't know how many tests he went through. That was because, by the fifth one... he just started having fun.

He felt like a kid playing with Legos again. He couldn't remember the last time he had fun with puzzles-the last time he had even been challenged by a puzzle.

Yet, he had to start thinking on the third test, and by the fifth one, his eyes were radiating a dense light.

By the seventh test, he was spending several minutes on a problem, and by the seventeenth, there was the slightest quirk of a smile on his face.

'More.' he thought to himself.

Sylas forgot he was taking an exam at all. In fact, the looser he got, the less time he seemed to take. As though a muscle he hadn't been flexing in his mind for the longest time was finally awakening, something clicked after the 21st test.

By the 20th, Sylas was already taking upwards of an hour to finish. But the 21st only took three-quarters of that. The 22nd only took half. The 23rd took a quarter.

Sylas had really only been taking so long on the first few tests because he insisted on using Rune Mastery to solve them even for ones where there was no obvious Runic answer.

But after the 21st, he seemed to have crossed some sort of threshold.

He shifted entirely from thinking in Ancient Ithkuil to seeing and thinking in Runes, and suddenly it was like his intelligence had taken another massive leap.

Sylas's first bottleneck had been the language of Earth. But soon after, the bottleneck had become Ancient Ithkuil. He just hadn't had the time nor the care to change it... but now... He thought in F-tier Runes.

At first, it was laborious. It took much longer to form things into meaning. There were too many things F-tier Runes couldn't cover that he had to use Ancient Ithkuil to make up for.

But he only got better with every passing moment.

By the 56th test, he was back to taking just several seconds. Before, it should have taken him days to pass these

tests.

But he just kept going.

And going.

And going.

The Omnimous's core thrummed.

It had to be said that passing the first test was enough for Class 1 status. The ancient language of the Omnimous wasn't something that had appeared in the world in so very long that the difficulty had already been adjusted.

Normally, it would have taken passing the third test to be Class 1, but the Omnimous-while it wasn't a living, autonomous creature-understood adaptation.

By the usual metric, it would have assigned Sylas as a Class 4 F-tier. But by the time Sylas had cleared the 20th test, before he even made his shocking change, it realized it was wrong about something.

It just couldn't put its finger on how it had misconstrued Sylas's level of intelligence by so much.

When Sylas shifted his method after the 21st test, the Omnimous stopped thinking entirely. It felt as though it was witnessing something that needed to be documented, so it did exactly that.

The problem was...

If the first test was enough for Class 1, the third test was already enough for Class 3. If you passed the fifth, you received Class 4, and the seventh, you received Class 5. By the tenth, you received Class 6, and the fifteenth, you received Class 7. When you finished the twenty-first, you were already granted Class 8 privileges... Thirtieth was

Class 9.

Fortieth was Class 10.

In reality, even in the original ranking system, fortieth was still Class 10.

Sylas was only on test 63 right now.