Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2060: Runes and Wil

Leia seemed to not know anything happening around her. Confusion colored her features as she wondered what she was thinking.

Had she really liked food that much? That didn't sound right.

Where had those thoughts come from?

She loved her grandmother's cooking, but ever since Fanelei was forced into seclusion, that part of herself had seemingly gone into seclusion as well.

What she wanted most wasn't food. She was an Analei.

What she strove for the most was something beyond that, something that only extra lives could possibly give her.

Perfection.

She had wanted that for so long, but she had wanted it her own way.

She loved her grandmother, but what she realized after Fanelei left her alone was that she had grown too reliant on her.

The curse of the Analei was that they often looked so much younger than they actually were. By the time Fanelei was forced into seclusion, Leia had already lived quite some years, a time frame that humans on Earth could have never fathomed.

And yet she felt like she had never truly been herself. Her path was chosen for her, the Guild gave her anything she wanted at any moment, and everything just felt like it was aligning... These sorts of things would have put someone who had never had any of it at ease, but to Leia who had never been without, it felt almost suffocating, as though she was living all of these lives just to never truly know who Leia Analei was.

That was what she wanted. She wanted perfection, but a perfection that was her own. Maybe that was the real reason she had gravitated toward the Lion Lineage in the first place, she was trying to manifest that pride she had within herself and project it to the outside world.

But the path of the Lion Lineage was warped and broken. It relied too much on external factors, and the irony in that was that as a result, she began to try to fill in the gaps of what she was missing with others... Creating emotions she inevitably mistook for love.

Failure. Nothing but failure.

It was the first time she had truly admitted that to herself, truly come to understand things as they were instead of filtering it through a rage she couldn't quite control.

She saw herself with clarity, that part of herself that yearned for perfection, but wanted to do it by her own terms, to do it with her own hands... But did this even count?

Yes. It could count. So long as she did something with it, so long as she took this hunger trying to twist her past memories and gaslight her into feeling as though she had always had a love for food... And made that hunger her own.

A hunger to consume power, to surpass those around her, to forge herself into the strongest Analei there had ever been.

Large amounts of Aether rushed toward Leia in a torrent, Madness Comprehension rippling out from her in waves. Sylas took a step back as the Madness Key swirled into being around Leia's neck. He had done enough for now, the rest would be up to her.

"... How...?" Fanelei asked softly. "... How is that even possible...?"

"Runes are the Will of the universe."

Sylas didn't say anything more, but Fanelei felt as though something in her mind had cracked.

"Runes are the Will of the universe..." her fingers trembled at her side.

Every Rune had a Will of its own. The very first thing Sylas learned when drawing the Scorpion Warlord Armor was about its Strokes and embodying the Will they had.

But the dividing line between what was a Rune and what was Will was drawn in sharpie far too bold.

The closer you reached the peak of Rune Mastery, the more you would understand that much like language was simply comprehensible sound waves, Runes were simply comprehensible Will.

This was what the First Race had grasped, what Sylas had spent the last several weeks immersing himself in.

Spark Mastery... was it really just spontaneous Rune Creation?

Or was it the threshold one crossed whereupon they would finally be able to touch the faintest edge of what it meant to morph Will into Runes?

And when one stepped beyond, when one finally touched the pinnacle...

You would realize that they had always been one and the same.

To play God. To treat both the world and the minds of people as though putty in your palms.

That was what lay at the limits of Rune Creation.

Fanelei stood at the bottom of that cliff. She looked straight up and could finally see the barest hint of its peak for the first time, something about Sylas' words peeling it back and open for her.

But was task so daunting she didn't know if it would even be possible.

Could she ever climb up that high? Could she ever truly reach such a pinnacle?

Malikhi stood to the side, his eyes glowing with such a fierce light of enlightenment his irises had practically become torches within the room.

Hoffman was no unique.

Not a single one of them was poor Rune practitioner. Fanelei had managed to reach Spark Mastery even at the C-tier. Malikhi felt like he would certainly succeed in reaching Spark Mastery of the C-tier in this life as well, and he had hopes of doing the same for the B-tier by his sixth life.

But now, a simple few words from Sylas appeared to turn their worlds on their heads, enlightenment flooding their hearts.

It was only then that they truly understood what gap lay between them.

"Yamero." Sylas said calmly.

A snake popped up from nowhere, catching the others so off guard they almost slipped out of enlightenment.

Where had Sylas been hiding an A-tier beast? Was that the reason he didn't care for Nobel's threats?

"We're going hunting."

"Where to?"

"No need. Just send me there. I have a debt to repay."