Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1773: Limits

The Omnimous wasn't just teaching. It could feel Sylas' thoughts. It was changing and adjusting what it was saying, shifting its forward path based on connections Sylas had made and failed to make.

At some point, it felt like its teaching style had become a sparring match with Sylas himself, and every arc and curriculum they passed through seemed to come with a leap it didn't expect.

It was forced to adjust again, and then again, quickly stepping up to explain things at a pace that was just ahead of Sylas. It realized quickly that this wouldn't have been possible if not for the fact it could read Sylas' mind. Otherwise, Sylas would have long become bored, cutting it off continuously.

However, the Omnimous didn't feel stretched thin. In fact, it had such a long runway before it that Sylas couldn't be considered to have taken up even a single fraction of its total capacity.

The problem was that the Omnimous was optimized for efficiency. Whenever it made a leap, it did so only as much as it thought necessary. And yet, every time, it was forced to adjust and reassess.

Sylas wasn't growing linearly, and even if it took into account an exponential increase caused by knowledge stacking atop knowledge, it still wasn't enough.

Saying that Sylas was growing exponentially was still doing his progress a disservice. No matter how the Omnimous adjusted, it found itself adjusting too soon.

It realized after the third time this happened that there was something that it was mis-assessing about Sylas. But much like during the testing event, it couldn't pinpoint exactly what that was.

But by the fourth, the fifth... the seventh, the ninth... the sixteenth, the twenty-first...

It began to slowly understand why it was that it couldn't logically pin down Sylas' progression.

It had yet to see Sylas' baseline even a single time.

Sylas wasn't improving... he was waking up.

The tests had stimulated something in Sylas, so he seemed to rise up to the occasion, his improvement not logical because he had never been displaying his true capacity in the first place.

However, even after waking up, the tests in the end seemed to bore him, so he shut back down, but only in part. It wasn't enough that he had completely reverted, but it was enough that it had made a difference.

Here, it was happening again. Every time the Omnimous accelerated, Sylas rushed to catch up as though he had felt something challenging him. But then he slowed down again as he realized he was surpassing the Omnimous too quickly... Then the Omnimous would adjust once again, and Sylas found himself racing once more.

The game of cat and mouse felt continuous, and the Omnimous-if it could have felt an emotion like solemnity- was quickly realizing that if Sylas did have a limit... It wasn't anywhere close to where they were now.

It wondered... if it randomly gave Sylas a concept of the Class 8 of the B-tier, would Sylas react like other F-tiers? Would he feel like it was a hopeless task he couldn't even begin to chip at?

Or would he treat it like every other taller mountain he had ever seen and slowly climb it nonetheless?

The Omnimous—if it could have felt curiosity-really wanted to test this out. But its program didn't allow it to.

All it could do was slowly and incrementally increase the difficulty just like this.

It was no wonder it couldn't understand before. Sylas wasn't logical.

Wasn't he racing against time? Didn't he have enemies far beyond his imagination coming soon? Didn't he have a goal that he was aiming toward?

Then why was he so... lazy?

No, it wasn't laziness, it was practically a protective mechanism. In fact, it was the exact opposite.

The one thing Sylas didn't want in life was boredom. He didn't want to sit atop a mountain and watch the world pass him by without being able to understand anything.

He constantly chased after what was difficult, what could strain his mind and test his limits, because he didn't want this kind of bland, foolish life for himself.

On Earth, the world had nothing for him. He had no choice but to shut down. The ceiling was all too obvious and all too clear. If he went all out, how long would it take him to conquer such a world and be left with nothing at all?

He had even chosen a doctoral path that was insignificant and useless in the eyes of most for that exact reason. He strived to handicap himself. Was it just subconsciously? Most probably. But it protected him nonetheless.

When he saw that screen pop up in front of him, asking if he wanted to join the Tutorial, a bit of that veneer cracked.

That day in the volcano when he faced the end of his life, it had cracked maybe more in a single sitting than it ever had before. But it seemed that even Sylas himself didn't realize that what he had felt that day wasn't fear of death, but fear of his own miscalculation... He had limited himself too much, underestimating the world around him, and had nearly suffered the worst fate because of it.

If that had happened, he would have been like any other fool overestimating themselves and what they were capable of just for the sake of their ego.

Much the same as always, Sylas feared his own views of himself over anything else. Death that day would have meant that everything that came before was nothing more than a personal fantasy on his part... And then he finally saw the true ceiling of the world, and that was the third time the veneer had cracked. It had cracked so thoroughly that Sylas' progression skyrocketed right after, and it was still settling into its new assessment of what was necessary even now.

This Sylas Grimblade... he wasn't measurable because he had subconsciously suppressed himself in a way the Omnimous had not ever experienced before.

Just where did his limits lie?

Sylas' eyes snapped open.