Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2291: Demon Queen

Sylas already knew that what happened to the Duchess was a plot of Thessa, a woman he thought he had killed long ago. It was hard for Thessa to stoke Nosphaleen's Envy any more than she already had, but this was certainly a method.

It didn't take a genius to realize how Nosphaleen would react to finding out that not only had Sylas taken another woman, but said woman was also pregnant with his child. After everything she had gone through with Cassarae, it was only natural.

Listening to the Duchess' story, Sylas didn't learn anything he didn't already know. Although the Duchess didn't seem to have any idea who Thessa was, Sylas could just tell by the undercurrents of the story alone that someone was stirring things in the background.

They had been planning out all of this for a very long while, and Sylas couldn't help but wonder if he was responsible for the start of Legacy as it existed today…

He wasn't 100% sure. But what he did know was that it couldn't have been a coincidence that he received the Legacy of Key from the Split Realm like he had.

He recalled how he felt about Legacy of Key's name and felt that there was something he was still missing here. It was almost like Legacy of Key and Legacy itself were one and the same…

A Split Realm could be cleared more than once. There was a reason why they had ranking systems. In fact, this was what Sylas had relied on to make sure that the Duchess and her brother survived—something he would have succeeded in if not for the interference. So… who was to say whether or not more than one Legacy of Key had been handed out…?

Still…

The Duchess' life was filled with hardship. She suffered through a great deal after she awoke in the Split Realm. Because of the outside interferences, the difficulty of the Split Realm increased by an unexpected margin.

"… I barely survived the Split Realm. I have to thank you for your training, otherwise I wouldn't have been good enough. But when I exited, my brother's name was not on the list. I waited, and waited, but he did not appear even after a new batch.

"There was only so long I could spend in the reward screen. I was forcefully expelled after the Split Realm shut down, but I had waited so long that the war was already over and I could not find my Clan any longer.

"The path to the Demon World had been sealed and closed. I couldn't find an easy way back, and the world around me rejected my existence, so I had no choice but to hide and bide my time.

"Luckily for me, I managed to accidentally stumble onto a world before its Summoning. I waited patiently, and when its Summoning began, but when I thought I could find a gate to the Demon World to take advantage of, the system triggered a rare event for them.

"I became tied down and was forced to become their final boss like some sort of odd game.

"It took me 1700 years before I could escape that fate. They called me the Demon Queen for years. My progress was extremely slow in that time. The system didn't allow me to improve as quickly as I could, constantly capping me so that they'd have a chance.

"In the end, I managed to finally win, destroying their so-called hero. But when I finally entered the Demon World, I found it in complete shambles.

"Nothing was right. The laws weren't right. And I couldn't find any of the powerful Clans that should have been there. The world had become fragmented and broken into countless smaller tribes, and the noble bloodlines seemed to have been completely wiped out.

"Our entire world had become fodder for the Real World. We were plucked away at the system's leisure to be bosses and challenges for humanoids and beasts alike. We hardly had our own autonomy."

Sylas' eyes narrowed. Something about this was off.

The entire Demon World was like this?

"Because of the broken laws, my progress remained slow and fragmented. I tried to find my family to see if I could learn what happened when I was stuck in the Split Realm, but the only people I found were those with incredibly diluted bloodlines. It was like all time had accelerated in the Demon World until there was nothing but atrophy and ash left.

"At some point, I managed to find another portal to the human world. I thought that since I hadn't managed to find anything substantial from the Demon World, that I might be able to find something there.

"But I ended up getting bound into another long term quest for yet another human. It was better than the monotony of my life before, I thought that the worst case scenario was that I would just die, so I embraced it this time.

"This time, I was trapped for over 20,000 years. But the ending was still the same. I won in the end and was set free with no better answer to my questions.

"Even after all this time, I had only managed to make it to the limits of the B-tier. It took me three more such cycles and another 100,000 years before I managed to make a path to A-tier. It took me seven more and over 10,000,000 years before I managed to make it to the S-tier.

"It was during my 12th time being used as a pawn by the system that I was trapped in the Golden Battlefield. I thought I was given the task of acting as Demon Queen once again, and I didn't recognize who you were at the time, so I was simply waiting until you finally made it to the last level… "Until you did and I remembered everything."

Sylas' eyes narrowed. Something was very wrong with the Duchess' timeline of events.

She had only accounted for what must have been tens of millions of years. But it should have been billions of years since the Split Realm.

So what happened to the rest of the time?