Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2309

Sylas looked up.

Something in the laws of the galaxy had shifted.

Beacon was still functioning. He could feel every thread of Will spreading outward, slipping through the void and reaching across distances the ability should never have been able to cross. Nothing had been severed, nothing had been suppressed, and the amount of power he was spending remained almost exactly the same. Yet the result had changed.

Sylas watched another wave of Serpentes pour toward him and his eyes narrowed, not because any of them were particularly weak, nor because Beacon had suddenly begun calling the wrong species. There had always been variety. That was unavoidable when he was dragging creatures toward himself from across an entire galaxy.

The problem was how that variety was being arranged.

A group of fire-aligned Serpentes appeared first, scales glowing red and orange as heat distorted the void around their bodies. Almost at the same moment, a wave of ice-aligned Serpentes emerged beside them. Frost spread into flame, heat devoured cold, and before either group had even reached the battlefield several of the beasts were already bucking against one another, their instincts reacting to the incompatible auras surrounding them.

Sylas watched without moving as the next wave arrived. Earth Serpentes this time, heavy bodies built around stability and crushing force, only for wind-aligned bloodlines to sweep in alongside them, shredding apart the terrain and formations the earth types naturally preferred to create.

It would have been easy to dismiss the first few examples as coincidence, but the pattern became more obvious the longer he watched.

The cleverer pairings were what made the interference undeniable. A large group of Charisma-focused Serpentes descended on one of the worlds below, but their abilities had been divided almost perfectly.

Half pushed lust outward, turning defenders toward desire and weakening their focus, while the other half drove those same minds toward fury and violence. One influence urged them to abandon combat and lose themselves in pleasure, the other demanded blood. The end result was neither.

Their enemies staggered between impulses, confused rather than controlled, and the two groups of Serpentes weakened one another more effectively than the defenders ever could have.

Someone was tweaking Beacon, shifting and changing its harmony. Rather that abruptly stopping it, they were directing it.

Sylas was still spending the same amount of Will, still drawing roughly the same number of Serpentes toward himself, but whoever was interfering had arranged for them to arrive in combinations that reduced their effectiveness. He was paying the same price for a weaker army.

Sylas slid his hands into his pockets and continued to observe.

It wasn't impossible.

Beacon had never been designed to cover a galaxy. Sylas had forced it to do so by using his Void Path as an intermediary, letting the call seep through gaps in reality and treating the emptiness between distant regions as his own personal canvas, the power of his Void Path shining through.

It was a cheat, but there had been no other practical solution. If he wanted enough Serpentes to wash through an entire galaxy, he needed the range. Compressing Beacon into something more secure would also mean shrinking its reach, and that defeated the purpose.

Sylas' perception spread outward, following the distortions rather than Beacon itself. He expected to find a formation, perhaps a network of Runes spread across several systems, or at least some powerful Will continuously pressing against his own.

Instead, he found nothing. No enormous structure, no sea of Rune Mastery. Not even an elaborate mechanism holding everything together.

Then he saw it: a word.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify