Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2310: Dividing Will

Sylas continued to stare at the blood-written word.

The more he looked at it, the more something bothered him. It wasn't the sophistication of the language itself, nor the ease with which the Vosskarr had slipped their influence into Beacon. Those things were impressive, but not impressive enough. He had dealt with far greater existences already.

Sylas had simply seen too much of the world already. The Vosskarr ruled a galaxy, but that didn't mean much by itself.

From what Sylas could sense, their bloodline wasn't extraordinary enough to justify his reaction. Their Race Grade should only be somewhere around the B-tier, perhaps a little better depending on the purity of the main line. Strong, certainly, but nothing that should have made his thoughts stop like this. There was something else hidden inside their Path.

Sylas slowly traced the bloody word with his eyes again. He had already understood the basic mechanism. Their blood carried their Will, and they used it to concentrate their meaning until their writing could impose itself onto the world.

That was exceptional, but still not enough. Plenty of Races had strange biological methods of interacting with laws. The universe was too large for something like that to be unique. Yet Sylas kept returning to one piece of it, as though his mind refused to let go.

The blood.

Why blood?

The easy answer was Blood Essence. Blood carried lineage, and lineage carried the biological foundation necessary to express their abilities. But that explanation felt incomplete.

If blood were only a convenient medium, the Vosskarr shouldn't have cared so much about using their own. Or, they could have stored Aether, Will, or some other substance instead. There were countless ways to make a Rune brush. Yet their entire Race had evolved around using their own precious Blood Essence.

'... Leave a mark of Will that would be remembered.'

Sylas' gaze sharpened.

His thoughts drifted to Sarethvane.

That strange bastard had loved cemeteries.

At first, Sylas had thought it was simply an eccentricity born from Sarethvane's Path. The Serpentes had surrounded himself with the dead, collected their lingering Wills, studied what remained after their lives had ended, then used those remnants as though they belonged to him.

What made Sarethvane interesting wasn't that he could control dead Will. Plenty of abilities could manipulate remnants, souls, or lingering intent. What had caught Sylas' attention was Sarethvane's reasoning.

The dead didn't lie.

At least, that was what Sarethvane believed.

A living person could distort the image they projected. They could convince themselves they were kinder than they were, stronger than they were, humbler than they were. They could spend their entire lives cultivating a version of themselves that existed more in their minds than in reality.

Death stripped that away. Afterward, all that remained was the influence they had actually left behind. Their children, their enemies, their accomplishments, their failures, the memories others carried of them.

The world they had changed.

Sarethvane believed that was their truest Will.

Sylas had accepted the logic at the time because it suited what he was seeing, but now the bloody Vosskarr word made him question the foundation of it.

What was the difference between a living Will and a dead Will?

Sylas' brows slowly furrowed.

Will was life.

That had always seemed obvious. Without Will, there was no real person left. A body could remain intact, blood could still be warm, Genes could still exist, and every Rune necessary to describe its flesh could remain exactly where it belonged. But once the Will disappeared, there was only a corpse.

That was precisely why Sylas couldn't truly clone another person. He could only reproduce their body.

He could understand their Runes, recreate their Genes, copy the structure of their organs and even imitate the mechanisms of their abilities if he understood them deeply enough. But he couldn't create them.

He couldn't make their Will.

Without that, all he had was a husk.

His own clones were different because they were extensions of himself. His Will filled them. Their identity came from him because there was no separation to begin with.

So if Will was the difference between a living being and a corpse, what exactly was Sarethvane reading after death?

The person was gone, their Will should have vanished. Yet something remained.

Sylas' eyes slowly narrowed.

Was that truly their Will? Or was it something else?

He looked at the bloody script again.

The Vosskarr didn't merely write commands. Their entire culture revolved around preserving words left behind by their ancestors. Their Reader existed for that purpose. Ancient words could survive for millions of years, gathering weight until a single character could influence worlds long after the person who wrote it died.

That sounded like Will.

But it also sounded like Karma.

Sylas went still.

Where was the line?

Will was supposedly the imprint a person imposed upon reality through their existence. Charisma extended that Will outward, allowing it to influence the world. Karma, meanwhile, measured relationships, consequences, the connections between actions and what followed from them.

But if a person's Will continued through the effects they left behind after death, how was that different from Karma?

If an ancestor wrote a word that generations remembered, worshipped, feared, and obeyed, was the growing weight behind that word still the ancestor's Will?

The ancestor wasn't there anymore.

Their Will had vanished.

Or had it?

Sylas' thoughts accelerated, but instead of answers, more contradictions appeared. The deeper he reached, the less certain the foundation became. He had treated Will as something he understood because he was exceptionally talented at using it. He had forged it, shaped it, broken it, rebuilt it, reached Infinity, and learned to impose it upon realities far beyond what his Tier should allow.

But using something wasn't the same as understanding it.

He knew how Will behaved, he knew how to strengthen it, he also knew how to crush another person's Will.

Yet when he asked the simplest question—

What was Will?

—he didn't have an answer.

Sylas stared at the blood-written word for a long time.

Then something old surfaced from the depths of his memory, a sensation he had nearly forgotten beneath all the progress that came afterward.

In the earliest days, before he understood Runes properly. Before they became structures, laws, and language... when they had seemed almost alive.

Sylas' grip tightened around the calligraphy brush.

"Runes... their emotions... they spoke to me..."