Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1907: Petty

Sylas' foot pressed down, and a rush of might bombarded his Will.

His expression hardly changed at all. In fact, he hardly paused on the first step, leaving his foot on its golden foundation no longer than it took to raise his second foot to the next stair.

And then he took a third step.

Then a fourth.

A golden light rushed in all directions. The energy kept pouring into Sylas as though it was looking for a bottom, but it couldn't find one at all.

Every time Sylas seemed to reach his limit, the energy split off as it filled up a new foundation, and then another, and then another following it.

Sylas' Will seemed absolutely endless. The temple couldn't find purchase to target him at all. It was like it was constantly being parried away, and as it was, Sylas only continued to move.

Every one of the 713th Cycle of Emperors stood in silence. Their hearts stopped beating, their neurons failing to fire. It was like they were watching something that had completely short-circuited their brains.

Climbing the temple steps required two things regardless of where you were climbing them, whether it was the Branch or the main Sanctum.

You needed a powerful Will and a beast Will.

A beast Will needed to be formed in order to be acknowledged by the stairs. Otherwise, you would be faced with every one there was. Unless you forced the hand of the temple to choose one of the beasts, it would simply send everything it had at you without parsing it apart. This would essentially mean that you would have to face the Will of every Spirit Beast Lineage there was.

And second... you needed a strong Will to resist the bombarding waves. Only by doing so could you continue to move forward step by step.

Spirit Beasts had a great advantage when climbing the stairs because the Spirits of Beasts they were born with often had power beyond what their current Tiers suggested, carrying power within them that could grow all the way to the A-tier, and even in some cases beyond.

That wasn't to say that a Spirit Beast with the Spirit of a Beast capable of reaching that level of talent would ever reach that level. In fact, there had never been a single S-tier in the history of the Emperor Sanctum.

What it did mean, though, was that if they had a Spirit that powerful within them, they would be able to better force the temple to focus on a single type, and their Will would go a longer way.

That was because when the temple was forced to specialize in a single type of Will, those who reflected that Will back at it could better resist it.

This was because this Will wasn't just an enemy, but also a tonic to such people.

However...

Sylas neither projected any one particular Will, nor was he a Spirit Beast.

He walked forward, facing all of the power the temple had to offer without even flinching. Even as he climbed higher, he didn't falter in the slightest. He neither got any faster nor any slower, as though he were proving a point.

He was impossibly far beyond anything they could imagine right now.

The God Beasts of the Spirit Beast Clan were an almost silent legend. What gave them their strength was the potential to withstand more than one Spirit within them.

Every Spirit Beast was born with multiple Spirits. Often, the strongest of them would have multiple of the same Spirit, like Gralith. Before he was expelled, Gralith had had three exceptionally powerful Scorpion Spirits within him. One became the Spirit of the 001 Sanctum, one of the 007 Sanctum, and the last of the former 073 Sanctum.

However, a step beyond Gralith would be a God Beast, a Spirit Beast descendant capable of growing a Spirit of more than one Lineage to that same level of power.

When such existences faced the temple, they had the hardest time, facing two, even three Lineage pressures at the same time.

And yet...

It sensed like Sylas was pissing all over their Pride, looking down upon it from a lofty perch.

He didn't have to do this. He could have made it extremely easy on himself and projected the aura of a Scorpion. In fact, if he wanted to, he could have easily copied an even weaker Lineage with even less history.

Even if he wanted to prove a point, he could have just projected the Ape Lineage and shown that he could climb the steps while withstanding the aura of one of the four main Lineages.

Or, he could have just projected his Monkey King Lineage. While it didn't have the history the other Lineages did, there was no denying where its mountain had risen from.

It was now among the core five Lineages of the Emperor Sanctum, whether they liked it or not.

Not a single one of them believed that Sylas wasn't smart enough to figure this out. He was sharp enough to decipher such a weakness in their own Rules before anyone else did. He was someone who understood their Rules maybe even better than the greatest geniuses of the Enforcement Wing, while also having more power than anyone in the Enforcement Claw.

And yet, he hadn't chosen to do any of that.

As though he were ignorant of it all, he simply took his first step with the same casualness he had looked toward Maldrith with just moments ago.

Fanelei, from down below, almost wanted to laugh as she repeated something Cassarae had said too many times before.

"He's so petty."

The pettiest man in the world.

As Sylas reached the top of the temple stairs, he stood there, basking in the pressure of every Lineage Will, the accumulation of generations of effort, the oppression of Ancestors, of Emperors, of their children and their children's children.

And he crushed them all nonetheless.

Sylas stepped forward one more time and vanished into the temple.