Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 1063

Sylas immediately felt pain. Visceral, unrelenting pain that sank to the deepest depths of his body. It tore into his psyche, his Will, and made him feel as though he was right back in the Slithering Madness Dungeon.

It had been a very long time since he had felt something like this, but there was something particularly dark and sinister about the lineage of the Thryskai that he had simply not been prepared for.

It was either this, or he had underestimated the Thryskai by a large margin. It wasn’t just their Genes that came with sturdy protections, but how could they not protect their eyes as well?

It wasn’t that Sylas hadn’t thought of this possibility, but instead that he had no way of knowing ahead of time that this would be the case.

For their Genes, he could just use Extricate to check and see if he could take them or not. But their eyes… honestly, Sylas still wasn’t all that sure how such a thing fit into the lexicon of Genes and abilities. The best he could tell was that they were related to Blood and Bone Essence, somewhere in that level, while also having tidbits and strands related to Race Quintessence.

But other than that, the only other way to check was by doing exactly this…

Testing it.

’These… aren’t protections…’

Sylas winced and wheezed, an aura drilling into the depths of his psyche and battering against it. It was trying to take hold of his body in ways he couldn’t quite understand. On the one hand, it seemed quite hostile, but on the other it seemed almost… childish. Not in an innocent way, but more so in a naïve, psychopathic way.

When Sylas sensed it clearly, it felt like he was watching a toddler sitting before a kitten, slowly dissecting it and pulling out a new organ one by one. Then the child would turn its head to the kitten’s own, as though trying to see how many it could take out before it finally died.

The child’s actions were slow and meticulous, careful to the point of being anal in their focus, and each eerie glance was only colder and colder than the last, their chubby little hands coated in blood — but not flesh.

Sylas didn’t know why the visual was so clear in his mind until the child suddenly looked up at him.

His heart stopped.

That child… that child was him.

Sylas felt his mind freeze over. He had never done such a thing before, he was certain. His memory was impeccable. If he ever had, he would remember. His earliest memories were when he was one or two years old, and this child was older than that, being at least four or five.

But he could recognize his own face when he saw it. Why was he being shown this illusion? Where was it coming from? Why did it feel so targeted at him?

Why did he suddenly feel so Hungry? So, so… so very Hungry.

For food… for power… for understanding…

What made that cat tick? Which of its organs were vital? How many of them could it live without, and how long could it live on?

He wanted to know. He wanted to know everything.

So very Hungry… so Hungry…