Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2373: The Board

The Pride Seed could shatter the Wills of others, and Sylas had already started applying that principle to Rune casting without consciously framing it that way. Every time the projection of Sky Roaming appeared behind him in battle, every time his crown pressed its authority outward and forced the surrounding laws to acknowledge him, his Pride was doing more than suppressing another person. It was pressing against the world itself and demanding that reality accept his interpretation over whatever had existed there before.

Once Sylas started with the Seed he understood best, the rest began falling into place with almost insulting ease.

Gluttony and Lust were two sides of the same coin, both tied directly to telekinesis, though one made the weight of his Will heavier while the other extended the reach and pull of his Charisma. Sylas had already seen what happened when those two worked in concert through ordinary telekinesis.

If that same relationship was turned toward Telekinetic Martial Arts, then the implications became much greater. Gluttony could increase the pressure his Will exerted upon the Core Stat Runes woven through his Genes, while Lust could increase how deeply his Charisma reached into those structures and how much response it drew out of them.

The two working together could push every movement, every physical output, and every internal Rune toward a level of precision and force that neither Seed could have reached alone.

Greed and Sloth formed another pair, though their relationship was expressed in opposite directions. Greed reached outward and snatched from the world, taking Life, opportunity, energy, or whatever else could be claimed and turning it toward Sylas’ own desires, while Sloth drew from that same surrounding world in a way that weakened others instead.

One accumulated for the self, the other leached from the enemy, but both were methods of changing the balance between an individual and the environment around them.

The application to Rune Mastery became obvious once he viewed them through that lens. Greed could seize favorable conditions from the world and feed them into a Rune formation, taking Aether, momentum, compatible Laws, or whatever else his comprehension allowed him to target, while Sloth could do the reverse to an opponent by making every Rune they formed more costly and less effective.

Wrath and Envy were no different, though their relationship was less obvious at first glance. Wrath allowed an immediate burst of overwhelming Strength, concentrating everything into a narrow and violent moment, while Envy shattered the limits of one’s body and forced it to improve over a longer span. One broke through a boundary for an instant, while the other widened that boundary until what had once been impossible became the new normal.

That realization brought Sylas back to the Classes he had created through Rune Mastery, and for the first time he saw them from a different angle.

Selfwrought Emperor rebuilt him toward the perfection of what he already possessed, Void Sovereign created the room required to exceed that perfection, and Willborne Crown directed the process so that his growth didn’t collapse into uncontrolled excess.

Taken together, they were already recreating fragments of concepts that the Seeds expressed through a different structure.

The resemblance wasn’t perfect, but that hardly mattered. What mattered was that Sylas had independently used Rune Mastery to create mechanisms that broke limits, amplified output, redirected Will, and forced the body to become something beyond what it should have been.

Somewhere, long before he had ever started down this road, someone else had built a much larger and much more complete framework around the same ideas.

That thought didn’t frustrate Sylas as much as it should have.

His mind no longer needed to move from one conclusion to the next in a straight line, carefully comparing each piece before taking another step forward. The moment he brushed against one edge of a truth, the rest of it unfolded before him almost at once, connections revealing themselves like a tapestry pulled tight until every thread could be seen at the same time.

Pride connected to the world through authority, Lust and Gluttony strengthened telekinesis, Greed and Sloth manipulated the exchange between self and environment, while Wrath and Envy altered the limits of the body.

His Classes mirrored parts of those functions, his Rune Mastery gave them structure, and Telekinetic Martial Arts had already begun blending all of them together without Sylas realizing just how much of someone else’s framework he was retracing.

He had thought he was carving out something entirely his own, and in many ways he still was, but there was now a real possibility that he had been moving within the outline of a path someone else had already laid down ages ago.

Even when he rejected the obvious routes, changed the relationship between his Seeds, or refused to use the reservoirs they offered him, he might still have been operating inside a structure that had been designed long before his birth.

Sylas only needed a casual thought to bring that possibility into focus, and once he saw it, he didn’t feel threatened by it.

He had said something similar many times before on smaller scales, and the principle hadn’t changed simply because the board had become larger. Once Sylas could see the entire board, the amount of time his opponent had been planning stopped mattering.

He didn’t care whether the minds behind these Seeds had begun moving pieces before humanity existed, before Earth formed, or before the current structure of the universe had even settled into place.

More importantly, they had used Nosphaleen. That made the matter personal in a way all of their grand design never could have anticipated.

They could call these things Virtues and Sins, they could manipulate Beasts through bloodline and instinct, and they could guide humanoids through Rune Mastery while convincing both sides that they were choosing their own paths. None of that changed the price Sylas intended to collect now that their scheme had reached into something that belonged to him.

His thoughts returned to the Beast Emperor Sanctum.

When Sylas first realized that it was hiding something, his immediate instinct had been that the secret sat on the same level as the Madness Keys. At the time, he hadn’t possessed enough information to justify that feeling, but now that Madness, Beasts, Seeds, Rune Mastery, the Fate Dragon, and the Phoenix were beginning to overlap, that old instinct no longer looked arbitrary.

Sylas’ eyes narrowed as the final connection settled into place.

He had a feeling he knew what the Beast Emperor Sanctum was hiding.