Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2322: Swallowing

The Milky Way had reached a state of true peace.

It was difficult for it to become anything else when Earth existed at its center and Sylas Grimblade existed at all. Sylas had never bothered declaring himself ruler of the galaxy, never marched armies from world to world demanding oaths, nor had he cared enough about the Nexus to watch the countless discussions surrounding his name.

His influence had spread anyway.

From the moment he killed the C-tier of that four-armed, red-skinned Race--the Trakar--meaningful resistance had already begun to collapse, not because every faction suddenly loved Earth, but because the distance between what they could accomplish and what Sylas could do had become too large to ignore.

The Thryskai, once the most feared Race in the Milky Way, had been utterly neutered, while the Kaelthar had learned the lesson from another direction. After Sylas' actions nearly killed their Matriarch, their Patriarch had considered revenge, only for the target of that revenge to grow beyond anything he could understand before he could even act.

In the end, much of the Kaelthar quietly withdrew from the Milky Way entirely. Ironically, had they swallowed their pride and remained, they would now have possessed a path into the Demi-God Plane. Instead, their departure became a warning to everyone else. The Grimblades were not to be trifled with, and if the sky ever needed holding up, Sylas would use his own palm.

He didn't need allies or the help of a family's foundation.

They had all watched him grow. Some had seen the period when he could lose to a ranked genius on a Rune Mastery leaderboard that meant almost nothing to the Skai Heaven. Then watched that same man rise until he was, by speculation if not absolute proof, the greatest Rune Master in the entire Mortal Plane.

That sort of change didn't happen quietly even when Sylas made no effort to advertise it. Stories spread through the Nexus, defeats became rumors, rumors became legends, and eventually the behavior of entire factions began adjusting... even when Sylas didn't speak a single word on the matter.

It could be said that the Karma of the Milky Way had been bending toward Sylas long before he realized it.

Had Sylas paid more attention to the Nexus, he might have understood the process much earlier, but he hadn't needed to. He had felt it instead, a faint pull at the edge of his senses, weak enough to ignore and yet always gathering momentum as more lives, worlds, Races, and futures adjusted themselves around his existence.

Then that momentum reached its threshold.

BOOM.

The entire galaxy rocked.

A wound tore open across the canopy of stars, so vast that from the perspective of any single world it seemed as though heaven itself had split apart. Yet on the scale of the universe, even a galaxy was little more than a thin disk of matter suspended inside an expanse that made its greatest distances insignificant.

Compared to something larger still, it wasn't even that. A drop in a bucket. A grain caught inside an ocean with no visible shore.

And at that moment, as the passage between the Mortal and Demi-God Planes ripped itself open, every world in the Milky Way felt smaller than it ever had before.

The Skai Heaven shook.

Space cracked along invisible seams as the Milky Way forced its way upward, and the galaxy already occupying this region buckled beneath the sudden intrusion.

Destructive Wills clashed before most of the worlds had even properly manifested, laws scraping against laws while celestial bodies appeared where no celestial bodies had existed moments before.

Fortunately, space was vast enough that direct collisions were rare. Planets could be separated by distances so absurd that even throwing another galaxy across the same region wouldn't guarantee two worlds touched.

Gravity was another matter, though.

Orbits screamed out of alignment. Moons lurched from their paths, stars dragged at unfamiliar stars, and entire planetary systems began accelerating toward configurations that would eventually tear them apart. Sylas stood above it all with his gaze narrowed, both arms rising as he felt the newborn Milky Way shudder under pressures it had never needed to withstand before.

He could have allowed it.

For Earth, there might even have been benefits. Let enough worlds collide and the surrounding region would become a sea of molten matter, broken World Spirits, shattered laws, and condensed energies, exactly the sort of chaos he felt that he could benefit from and take advantage of.

But Earth wasn't the only thing that mattered, and there were tradeoffs to all of these sorts and kinds of powers.

Sylas needed the worlds around it. They would be a buffer between Earth and every power that might eventually come looking for him. But more importantly, if Earth became the only surviving World Spirit inside the Milky Way, then the galaxy itself would weaken.

Its worlds weren't merely pieces of rock orbiting stars, they formed part of the living structure of the whole. Strip everything away until only Earth remained and Sylas' status as Progenitor of the Milky Way would become little more than a grand title attached to an empty shell.

So he refused and his Will spread.

Sylas reached through his connection to the Milky Way, not as the Progenitor of Earth, but as something broader, something the galaxy itself had already begun acknowledging long before he consciously used it. The pressure flooding through him was immense, countless celestial bodies pulling in conflicting directions, every star and planet demanding its own space.

He pushed outward.

The Milky Way expanded.

Distances stretched as though the galaxy had inhaled. Planetary systems that had been threatening to collapse into one another were dragged apart, stars sliding across dimensions of space that should have required millions of years to cross.

The entire structure bloomed beneath Sylas' Will, widening until gravitational catastrophes became manageable, then widening further as he used the Milky Way's own momentum rather than trying to overpower it.

And in that instant, something clicked.

Sylas froze.

The Will of the Milky Way roared.

It surged outward with him, vast and hungry, swallowing every bit of space Sylas forced beneath its influence. Nearby territories shuddered as boundaries that should have belonged to other Sectors and Horizons blurred, then folded beneath the expanding identity of the galaxy.

Sylas' eyes flashed.

So that was how it happened.

The Milky Way hadn't simply been named alongside the surrounding Sectors and Horizons.

It had been eating them.

The names vanished because the galaxy itself had swallowed what they once belonged to.

This was why they feared the First Race so much. The Milky Way was the name of a galaxy... it was the name of a world. It was the name of Earth itself.

Why else would you name a world after dirt? It had never been its name at all.

And from the very beginning, "Earth" had been forcefully spreading its Will far and wide.