Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2306: Three

Sylas stared past the message and into the distance. For a moment, there was a flicker in his eyes.

He didn't fail to understand what Rhykan wanted, that part was simple enough. Even though, even by Sylas' standards, it was ridiculous. But impossible tasks had stopped meaning much to him a long time ago.

What bothered Sylas was something else entirely.

Why had Rhykan told him?

Sylas' gaze lowered back to the hovering message.

There was no world in which Rhykan Purvon handed him something like this for free.

Maybe Rhykan truly did need his help, Sylas could accept that much. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. Bringing an entire galaxy up clearly wasn't something Rhykan could casually accomplish himself, otherwise this conversation would never have happened.

More importantly, it wasn't something he had the opportunity to do.

Still, somewhere inside this plan, buried beneath the obvious benefits, there was another layer--maybe ten. Sylas could feel the shape of it without seeing the details.

Rhykan was too clever for this to be the end of it.

The last time Sylas had crossed paths with him, Rhykan had already shown a willingness to let other people create chaos while he positioned himself to benefit from the outcome. Now he had appeared again at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right information, offering exactly enough to make refusing him foolish.

The perfect plan was always the one where a person would have no choice but to jump in both feet bare, and Rhykan expected Sylas to follow his suggestions despite their history because it was too good an opportunity.

Sylas' eyes narrowed.

If he tried to beat Rhykan by thinking further ahead, he would only be accepting the battlefield Rhykan had chosen.

That was stupid.

If someone was capable of calculating ten moves ahead, the answer wasn't necessarily to calculate eleven, especially not when said person had more information at their fingertips than you did.

The answer was to overturn the board and force Rhykan onto a battlefield he didn't quite understand fully either.

Sylas slowly closed the Nexis window.

The void became still around him once more, distant stars hanging in the darkness like dust scattered across black nothingness.

There were three things in Sylas' possession that he didn't believe Rhykan could properly account for.

The first was the Golden Grove. The nuance of that one was quite delicate, and even Sylas didn't have a fully fleshed out plan for how he'd use it if it came to it.

Sylas' gaze flickered.

The Monkey King Mountain had been destroyed. He had erased it with his own hands, but destruction didn't change what it had once been: a focal point.

That mountain had formed the anchor Sylas used to close the time loop and avoid the paradox with the Monkey King. Without it, the events surrounding that absurd bastard's attempt at revenge would never have resolved cleanly enough for Sylas to return to the present.

The Monkey King had laid a foundation that Sylas might be able to take advantage of if he played his cards right.

In fact, Sylas had found the entire situation amusing in hindsight. The man had constructed an elaborate path through time, created the circumstances necessary to reach Sylas, and built a closed loop around his own revenge… Only for Sylas to use the very same loop to kill him.

But the important part wasn't the Monkey King.

It was that the Golden Grove had been connected to something that existed outside the normal progression of cause and effect, it still had the Golden Battlefield, and for some reason, whoever had targeted him after the Monkey King lost, had still chosen to chain Xarvenya in its depths.

What Rhykan could account for was power. He could account for Karma, politics, the system, the Thryskai, Legacy, the Beast Sanctum, maybe even Gentrixaul if he had enough information. But Sylas didn't believe he could account for a plot that stretched across billions of years. If he could, he would have never needed to trap Earth in that time dilation.

Sylas' gaze shifted once before becoming still again.

The second pawn he had away from Rhykan's prying eyes was Earth. Not the Earth that had entered the Summoning, maybe few understood that Earth better than Rhykan.

The Earth of now.

The effects of the fusion would still take more time to appear, but Sylas had noticed them. Old aspects of Earth were beginning to bloom again, pieces of a world that should have vanished beneath the system slowly resurfacing through its newly mended laws.

Alex had noticed it too. Sylas hadn't spoken to him in some time, but that wasn't because Alex had become useless. Alex and Nathan had practically buried themselves in their work, tapping into long forgotten laws of Earth through the help of a certain AI.

They wouldn't create the crude machines Earth had relied upon before the Summoning, but bloom through the principles beneath them, grasping the very laws that made them possible. With Earth healing, doors that should have remained closed had begun opening one after another.

Earth was rare, a world capable of walking both paths of the universe. And now it had evolved into something even beyond that. Sylas still didn't understand everything that meant, but neither would Rhykan.

Then there was the third pawn Sylas had. He reached behind himself and his fingers wrapped around a shaft far thicker than any normal calligraphy brush, and he slowly pulled it free.

The brush rested across his palm, its bristles dancing freely in the void as though catching upon its mysteries and riding its history.

It might have been the gift of a truly shameless disciple, but Sylas had already benefitted greatly from it once, and he had a feeling that it had many more secrets to benefit from.

It was so light compared to what it truly was, and if Sylas was correct, he could most definitely find things within it that Rhykan could never hope to prepare for.

The question was... with path forward should he take?