Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2446: Two

Sylas continued looking into the skies long after the answer came to him, the Scorpion heart beating steadily above his palm while his thoughts moved far beyond it. If he was going to rebuild the foundation of his Race rather than merely improve what he already possessed, there were only two concepts he had encountered that felt worthy of becoming the pillars of that path.

Dragon and Phoenix.

The choice was so ridiculous that Sylas almost dismissed it on principle, not because either concept lacked power, but because he understood their problems better than most. Rhykan had already crippled portions of his future by building too deeply into paths with restrictions he couldn’t simply ignore, yet Sylas was considering shackling himself to two things that might be worse.

Dragons weren’t real in the ordinary sense. They were products of Dead Will and collective belief, a ceiling given shape by generations of minds that could continuously move the instant anyone approached it.

A Serpentes could grow large enough to consume worlds and the Dragon would simply become something capable of consuming galaxies. It could develop venom capable of killing Gods, master every law available to it, or reach some impossible purity of bloodline, but none of that mattered when the opponent was a concept without a fixed body to restrain its limits.

That was why the Fate Dragon existed in the first place.

Someone had attempted to gather enough Karma into a living existence that reality itself would be forced to accept it as standing beside the myth. It wasn’t enough to create the strongest Dragon-like Beast in existence; they needed to create something carrying enough weight that the Dead Will of countless lives couldn’t simply shift the finish line again.

The Phoenix was less understood, but Sylas no longer believed it was fundamentally different. The Fate Dragon seemed to act most directly upon Beasts and bloodlines, while everything Sylas had seen of the Phoenix seemed tied to evolution, Spark Seeds, Rune Mastery, and the ability of humanoids to change what they had been born as.

One created a ceiling that strength could never naturally surpass, while the other might very well govern the road used to approach that ceiling in the first place.

Choosing both should have been idiotic. But Cassarae had ruined the simplicity of that conclusion.

The Demon World and the Real World weren’t necessarily two halves of one natural whole, and the Madness System itself had once apparently tried to force those divisions together. Once Cassarae questioned what that actually meant, the possibility of more than one universe stopped being some useless philosophical exercise.

More importantly, the question didn’t end there.

If another universe had developed in isolation from this one and still possessed concepts recognizable as Dragons and Phoenixes, then neither could be explained away as the product of one civilization, one history, or even one universe’s accumulated Dead Will. If multiple universes were suppressed beneath the same two broad concepts, then whatever Dragons and Phoenixes had become was far larger than the local myths Sylas had originally assumed them to be.

That made tying himself to them more dangerous, not less.

But... it also made them worth taking.

Sylas lowered his gaze toward the heart again.

The Scorpion had already shown him the first step.

The Spirit Beast Race was only an A-Grade Mortal Race, but it possessed a characteristic Sylas had found ridiculous even when he first learned of it. Spirit Beasts were born capable of holding countless Wills within themselves, yet almost all of them selected a single Beast Will to truly follow.

At the time, Sylas had accepted the explanation as another racial oddity. Now that he intended to place two concepts as incompatible and overwhelming as Dragon and Phoenix inside one Race, understanding how the Spirit Beasts accomplished something even remotely similar became considerably more important.

His Runeweaver Eyes activated.

The heart changed beneath his perception as flesh became layers of structure, then Genes, then the Runes those Genes expressed. Sylas didn’t focus on the Greed Will itself this time and instead followed what happened around it whenever the heart contracted.

Blood Essence had always acted as a bridge for Rune Mastery. Gralith had taught him that long ago, and Sylas himself had used the Blood Essence of Beasts as catalysts because the blood carried more than nutrients and energy; it carried a partial answer, giving the body a structure to imitate rather than forcing a Rune Master to create everything from nothing.

The original Scorpion’s blood carried an answer far older than the Spirit Beast Race.

Sylas watched the same set of foundational Runes shift every time the Greed Will passed through them. They didn’t change enough to become different Runes, but their relationships did, some bonds strengthening while others weakened as the structure settled into a slightly different arrangement.

His eyes narrowed.

It reminded him of protein folding.

Two structures could contain the exact same components and still behave completely differently depending on how those components folded into one another. The information didn’t only exist in what pieces were present, but also in which surfaces touched, which sections remained exposed, and what shape the whole adopted when outside pressure acted upon it.

The Spirit Beast Race seemed to have stumbled onto a Will equivalent of the same principle.

Their bodies didn’t need a completely separate set of Genes for every Beast Will they carried. Instead, the foundational Runes of their Race were capable of settling into multiple stable configurations, each arrangement exposing different portions of their inherited structure to the world.

That explained why they could contain countless Wills without immediately tearing themselves apart.

The Wills weren’t all shouting through the same pathway at once. Most remained latent.

A Spirit Beast following the Scorpion didn’t erase whatever traces of Ape, Serpent, Lion, Dove, or countless other ancestral Wills existed inside them. Their Race simply folded itself into the configuration that gave the Scorpion the clearest route outward while the other structures remained present but mechanically muted.

It was less like holding ten people inside one room and asking nine of them to remain silent, and more like owning a building with ten separate rooms while opening only one door.

God Beasts were the exception.

Sylas remembered Kalem awakening several Spirits, and others succeeding with combinations their ancestors would have considered impossible. Those Spirit Beasts hadn’t somehow developed the Willpower to endure several complete personalities fighting for control of the same body. They had learned to maintain more than one stable configuration at once.

That shouldn’t have been possible under ordinary circumstances.

A molecular structure couldn’t fold into two incompatible shapes simultaneously without deforming, but Will wasn’t matter, and Rune structures weren’t limited to three dimensions. If separate Layers of the body could occupy different configurations while remaining linked through the same foundational Race Runes, several Beast Wills could be expressed without requiring them to directly overlap.

Sylas’ attention sharpened.

The Spirit Beast Race wasn’t special because it could survive many Wills. It was special because its Race acted as a neutral substrate beneath them.

The Beast Wills sat above. The Race sat below.

That separation allowed a Spirit Beast to change which Will it followed without needing to become an entirely new Race every time, while the rare monsters capable of following multiple Wills simply opened several pathways through the same underlying structure.

Sylas looked at the Scorpion heart for a long moment.

The Spirit Beast Race’s solution was crude. Useful, but crude.

They allowed inherited Wills to settle into spaces their Race had evolved to accommodate, then selected among those inherited possibilities. Sylas had no intention of waiting for thousands of generations to accidentally produce a body capable of doing what he wanted.

He had Fathomless Rune Creation. More importantly, he could already reconstruct his body from its foundational Runes.

Selfwrought Emperor could recreate the best version of whatever structure he understood, Void Sovereign could ensure that structure never became so perfect that it lost room to change, and Willborne Crown could keep every process beneath a single controlling authority. Sylas had unknowingly built three Classes that already solved separate pieces of the problem.

The Scorpion heart, and more importantly the Greed Seed that reflected its influence within him, would provide the missing blueprint.

He didn’t need its form, and he didn’t particularly care for its Greed.

He needed to learn how its blood encoded multiple valid expressions without allowing those expressions to destroy the foundation carrying them, then improve that architecture until Dragon and Phoenix could both exist within him without either becoming his identity.

Dragon would not own him.

Phoenix would not define his evolution.

They would be Wills his Race was capable of carrying, no different in principle from the countless Beast Wills buried inside a Spirit Beast, except Sylas had no intention of copying the pathetic scale of the original solution.

His Race would be the substrate. His Will would decide which doors opened.

Sylas’ emerald eyes reflected the beating Scorpion heart while countless Rune structures began unfolding through his mind, separating, recombining, and collapsing as quickly as he could reject them. By the time the first viable framework appeared, he finally understood exactly what he had to build.

Now he only had to tear himself apart and make it real.