Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2309: A Bloody Word

Sylas looked up.

Something in the laws of the galaxy had shifted.

Beacon was still functioning. He could feel every thread of Will spreading outward, slipping through the void and reaching across distances the ability should never have been able to cross. Nothing had been severed, nothing had been suppressed, and the amount of power he was spending remained almost exactly the same. Yet the result had changed.

Sylas watched another wave of Serpentes pour toward him and his eyes narrowed, not because any of them were particularly weak, nor because Beacon had suddenly begun calling the wrong species. There had always been variety. That was unavoidable when he was dragging creatures toward himself from across an entire galaxy.

The problem was how that variety was being arranged.

A group of fire-aligned Serpentes appeared first, scales glowing red and orange as heat distorted the void around their bodies. Almost at the same moment, a wave of ice-aligned Serpentes emerged beside them. Frost spread into flame, heat devoured cold, and before either group had even reached the battlefield several of the beasts were already bucking against one another, their instincts reacting to the incompatible auras surrounding them.

Sylas watched without moving as the next wave arrived. Earth Serpentes this time, heavy bodies built around stability and crushing force, only for wind-aligned bloodlines to sweep in alongside them, shredding apart the terrain and formations the earth types naturally preferred to create.

It would have been easy to dismiss the first few examples as coincidence, but the pattern became more obvious the longer he watched.

The cleverer pairings were what made the interference undeniable. A large group of Charisma-focused Serpentes descended on one of the worlds below, but their abilities had been divided almost perfectly.

Half pushed lust outward, turning defenders toward desire and weakening their focus, while the other half drove those same minds toward fury and violence. One influence urged them to abandon combat and lose themselves in pleasure, the other demanded blood. The end result was neither.

Their enemies staggered between impulses, confused rather than controlled, and the two groups of Serpentes weakened one another more effectively than the defenders ever could have.

Someone was tweaking Beacon, shifting and changing its harmony. Rather that abruptly stopping it, they were directing it.

Sylas was still spending the same amount of Will, still drawing roughly the same number of Serpentes toward himself, but whoever was interfering had arranged for them to arrive in combinations that reduced their effectiveness. He was paying the same price for a weaker army.

Sylas slid his hands into his pockets and continued to observe.

It wasn't impossible.

Beacon had never been designed to cover a galaxy. Sylas had forced it to do so by using his Void Path as an intermediary, letting the call seep through gaps in reality and treating the emptiness between distant regions as his own personal canvas, the power of his Void Path shining through.

It was a cheat, but there had been no other practical solution. If he wanted enough Serpentes to wash through an entire galaxy, he needed the range. Compressing Beacon into something more secure would also mean shrinking its reach, and that defeated the purpose.

Sylas' perception spread outward, following the distortions rather than Beacon itself. He expected to find a formation, perhaps a network of Runes spread across several systems, or at least some powerful Will continuously pressing against his own.

Instead, he found nothing. No enormous structure, no sea of Rune Mastery. Not even an elaborate mechanism holding everything together.

Then he saw it: a word.

It floated within one of the gaps Beacon used to cross space, written in dark crimson strokes that seemed to sink into reality, changing it rather than rest upon it. Sylas' gaze sharpened and he followed the path further, finding another identical word, then another, then dozens more. They had been written throughout the folds his Beacon was travelling through, each one influencing the call without ever directly touching it.

Blood. The words had been written in blood.

Sylas had never seen the language before, but the meaning reached him almost immediately. His mind translated it instinctively.

Opposites attract.

That wasn't quite right.

The phrase was too simple, yet somehow also too long.

The single word carried the concept of opposition, attraction, incompatibility, contrast, and the tendency for two conflicting things to be drawn together because of that conflict. None of those meanings stood separately within it, they were all intertwined.

Sylas' gaze lingered on the script... so these were the rulers of this galaxy.

He could erase the words. His Will had already found them, and they had been placed within the void. But the effort it would take would be tremendous. It was to intertwined with Beacon that he would have to dismiss and then recast it. But then they could simply write again.

So, for a moment, he just studied them.

Sylas had changed the language of his thoughts more than once. He had begun with the language he was born speaking, then eventually moved to Ancient Ithkuil when ordinary language became too slow and wasteful. Ancient Ithkuil compressed meaning far more efficiently, usually taking more words, and yet making up for it with clearer truths spoken. When even that became insufficient, and Sylas had learned to think directly in Runes.

That transition had been the greatest leap.

Runes represented reality itself. There was no need to describe fire when the concept of fire could be held directly. No need to explain force, space, distance, death, or life through words when their Runes carried the underlying laws. His Intelligence had become far more efficient every time his thought language improved, not because his intelligence itself was truly evolving, but because there was less of a barrier between his subconscious and his consciousnesses ability to understand it.

Sylas had assumed thinking in Runes was the pinnacle. What could exist beyond the language of reality?

Now he had his answer.

Runes still had gaps.

To express the meaning contained within this single bloody word, Sylas would have needed several Runes arranged into a relationship. Opposition. Attraction. Direction. Interaction. Even if he processed those Runes almost instantly, they remained separate pieces that had to be assembled.

Runes had too many forms, too many variations, and honestly, the more complicated the concept, the more Runes you needed to convey it. Its problem was often the same as Ancient Ithkuil. The question was... how exactly had the Vosskarr overcome this weakness? Was their language really so perfect?

Sylas reached behind himself and wrapped a hand around the shaft of his calligraphy brush, pulling the human-sized weapon free. The crimson hairs at its end swayed lightly through the void as he brought it forward.

He continued staring at the blood-written word.

Then his thoughts began to flow.