Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2228: Creation Tower

Sylas' eyes narrowed. He could feel something scanning him, but it wasn't quite moving with the shape and precision it should, almost like these guards hadn't been properly maintained in so very long.

This left Sylas feeling even more odd.

He had come here for some of the most comprehensive guidance and information he had ever received. But everywhere he went, he just found things in foolish disrepair. Depending on the situation, either one of those descriptors could be applied alone as well.

Especially the foolish part.

It wasn't obvious on first sight, but to Sylas it might as well have been a glaring reality.

The guards finished their scan and stepped aside with hard, fast steps. The large doors behind them slowly swung open.

"HEY!"

One of the Rune Masters loitering around immediately looked toward the gates. Sylas and his grandfather were already stepping inside, but there was a sudden mad rush of Rune Masters who charged for the tower.

"Let me in!" the man roared at Sylas. "You're taking someone in with you! Take me instead! I can reward you!"

When he realized Sylas was actually ignoring him, the man's temper immediately flared. Whatever fuse he did have to work with must have been short, because it couldn't have been more than a second later that he went from pleading to furious.

The doors slammed shut.

BOOM.

The man slammed into the crossed spears of the twin guards, rebounding away so fast he tumbled into the surging crowd. They were all knocked away like a bunch of bowling pins in an alley, a swath of falling dominoes for as far as the eye could see.

They had certainly reacted quickly, but not quickly enough, it would seem.

Sylas gazed back, his eyes sparking in a sort of subtle contemplation. The Rune Masters out there weren't exactly terrible.

The man who had shouted the most clamorously was definitely an A-tier, and he was wearing robes that suggested he had stepped into Rune Creation of the F-tier.

Yet, he was stuck outside the rotating tower of gears as well. Why was that?

Sylas looked up and it felt like he was looking at the internal mechanisms of a watch again.

There were glass floors beneath him and glass floors above him. But each one of these glass floors encased complex mechanisms of rotating gears within themselves.

This made it so that it was possible to see through several floors at once, but after a certain point, the layered mechanisms became too numerous.

If Sylas found the right angle, he could probably see through three floors at a single time.

'It's just my own bias.' Sylas concluded for the time being.

He kept likening these to watch complications, but there weren't any actual clocks around here. They might have looked like that, but there was no aura of time around here, nor did it seem like they were trying to keep time.

But he also left room for the possibility that he had simply not seen a large enough piece of the tower in a single viewing just yet.

The moment the echoing sound of the doors slamming shut slowly calmed, nothing but silence was left behind until there was the clicking of shoes.

"Welcome, welcome." An old man with pale blue hair striped in greys and whites appeared. He wore a robe similar to the ones Sylas had seen on the outside, but it was a much darker hue.

The Creator Robes Sylas had seen already had a washed out white to them underlying their patterns. Then the Hell ones would have accents of black-gold, the Heaven ones would have accents of white-gold, while the Fathomless ones would be simply straight gold.

However, rather than a washed out white, this old man had an underlying color of deep, rich blue, an almost royal sort of blue. Then came the swimming lines and current of gold patterning on top of that that labeled him as just one sort… Fathomless.

"Oh?" The old man looked at Sylas and Magnus, not quite sure what to make of them. Their auras were… weak. But their Wills, well… especially that of Sylas'… That was very different.

They had been watching the tower intently ever since the Creation of Key appeared. Some known characters had appeared already, like the top 10 of the C-tier. But unless one of them managed to stumble onto a long-lost key, it probably wasn't them.

But no one else who entered quite made sense either.

The old man wanted to dismiss Sylas outright as well. He was too weak to have gotten his hands on something like that. But… Now he wasn't so sure.

"The sticklers for rules call me Fathomless Creator Shah, but you may simply call me Old Man Shah if you would like," he continued with a smile. "Our records say that this is your first time in the Creation Tower, so I will give you a little spiel first.

"All the knowledge of Rune Mastery ever formed, created, or manifested on the Mortal and Demi-God Planes are in this tower and readily accessible to you should you be able to claim it for yourselves.

"However, in order to do this, you must first pass the Creation Exam. This exam comes in many tiers, and I would hope that you would take it as seriously as possible.

"This is because your performance on the exam will dictate how much honor and how much time the Creation Tower can allocate to you. Even if you reach the standard of Creator, if your standard is too poor, maybe the Creation Tower may never allow you to enter again lest you receive an invitation from another.

"Now, knowing this information, are there any questions you would like to ask? Or would you like to delay your exam until you feel you are more prepared?"

"What do you think, grandfather? Do you want to wait or do you want to take the exam now?" Sylas asked Magnus.

Old Man Shah's eyes narrowed. Grandfather?