Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1804: Why? [Bonus]

"I will give you two choices," Sylas said calmly, looking past the Duchess and toward the expansive city below. "You can either do as I say calmly and without hassle, and I can give you a way out of here. Or, you can die here, and then wait for me to kill every iteration of you that exists. Make your choice."

The Duchess frowned.

Every iteration of her?

She was still trying hard to reconcile memories of herself that she didn't quite understand. They were prisoners here; they weren't meant to understand what would be happening to them in the first place. The fact that the Duchess even had an inkling was because of Sylas.

The last time Sylas had seen her, she had been nothing more than a pool of blood, her Will barely holding on. However, it also had to be remembered that at the time, even with the difficulty of regeneration in the volatile time and space of the Golden Battlefield, Sylas had still predicted that it would have taken her only about three hours to be back to full health.

Granted, following this, Sylas destroyed her body even more. But even then, her Will had never been fully extinguished.

That was all to say that if not for Sylas, she wouldn't even recall what happened back then at all.

However, there were plenty of people in the E-tier Dungeon that Sylas didn't kill. He hadn't gone through every location, wiping out everyone he could find. So why did he assume they would all have their memories as well?

The difference was precisely the state that he had left the Duchess in-that being a state of plodding regeneration.

What was clear and obvious to Sylas the first time he had entered was that the Golden Battlefield had many problems. It was breaking at the seams, and it was no longer the perfect prison it had once been. Its system was even more imperfect and had many loopholes and weaknesses to take advantage of.

If the impotent system was, well, impotent, then the system of this world wasn't worse than a toddler trying to figure out how to fit shapes into spaces.

Sylas was aware of this and took advantage, choosing to terminate the Dungeon while the Duchess was still in the process of regeneration. He bet that due to this, the system would be imperfect in wiping her memories clean, or even struggle with resetting things the way it had once been.

Not only was the Duchess' body incredibly scattered and decomposed, but her True Blood was far more powerful than anything this Secret Realm had ever thought it would have to reconstruct in the first place.

To make matters worse, the entire Blazara Clan had committed suicide, and aside from the Sanguara, they were the second most powerful group of Demons in here, right alongside the Ghorath.

So, while this broken system was doing its best to reconstruct the Duchess, it also had to reform an entire clan of ultra-powerful Demons on top of that.

While it seemed easy to dismiss the Blazara, especially considering how they ended themselves, there were two factors to take into great importance.

For one... Sylas had never, not once, run into anyone who recognized the flames of the Scorned Wraps. In fact, no one had ever even raised an eyebrow at them aside from those who were already tied to the Madness Disciples in the first place.

He had already lost count of the number of times he had used these flames to kill people. And yet the Blazara were the only kind to not only recognize them but to do so with enough conviction to directly kill themselves over it.

And second, Sylas had already said it before... but if not for suppression and whatever restrictions these people had been put under—whether it was the Sanguara, the Blazara, or the Ghorath—every single one was a member of an S-grade Race.

These Demons were true monsters.

This was all to say that reconstructing them was incredibly difficult for a system already limping to the finish line. So when the Duchess' remains were given to it to reconstruct, it was imperfect with wiping everything clean.

And most importantly, the Will Sylas himself had left behind while controlling the Spacetime of the Golden Battlefield to destroy and kill the Duchess had also lingered.

This led to a result where many, if not all, of the Duchess' memories of the last iteration remained. Not only that, but she maintained her True Blood, as the system wasn't able to suppress her back to her original state. This was because in order to succeed in reviving everyone it needed to, the Secret Realm's system had had no choice but to rely on the Duchess' recovery abilities.

Sylas had not planned to pluck this fruit from its tree for a very long while. But with the current circumstances... there was really no other choice.

The Runes he was forming at the palm of his hand came to a stop, and he looked toward the Duchess. He didn't say anything more, but his meaning was already clear.

He didn't plan on giving her time to think about it.

"Will you ever treat me like a true wife?" she asked.

"No," Sylas replied.

The Duchess didn't seem as emotional about this as she did before. While she had never been married before, as one might expect, marriage worked exceptionally differently in the Demon World than it did in the Real World.

Though, that said, there were plenty of Real World marriages that might have reflected similarities with the Demon World. The difference was that they were hidden beneath a veneer of hypocrisy.

"Like a concubine?"

"Also no."

"Then what will you treat me as?" the Duchess asked.

"A soldier. An ally. Someone to be rewarded when something is done right, and punished when something is done wrong."

"Why?"

"Because my wife would be very unhappy otherwise."

The Duchess nodded. "Okay."

The Rune in Sylas' palm bloomed, and in a flash, a City Stele appeared in his hand.

[Gene Class Upgrade Quest <Chaotic Menace> Cleared]