Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2310

Sylas continued to stare at the blood-written word.

The more he looked at it, the more something bothered him. It wasn't the sophistication of the language itself, nor the ease with which the Vosskarr had slipped their influence into Beacon. Those things were impressive, but not impressive enough. He had dealt with far greater existences already.

Sylas had simply seen too much of the world already. The Vosskarr ruled a galaxy, but that didn't mean much by itself.

From what Sylas could sense, their bloodline wasn't extraordinary enough to justify his reaction. Their Race Grade should only be somewhere around the B-tier, perhaps a little better depending on the purity of the main line. Strong, certainly, but nothing that should have made his thoughts stop like this. There was something else hidden inside their Path.

Sylas slowly traced the bloody word with his eyes again. He had already understood the basic mechanism. Their blood carried their Will, and they used it to concentrate their meaning until their writing could impose itself onto the world.

That was exceptional, but still not enough. Plenty of Races had strange biological methods of interacting with laws. The universe was too large for something like that to be unique. Yet Sylas kept returning to one piece of it, as though his mind refused to let go.

The blood.

Why blood?

The easy answer was Blood Essence. Blood carried lineage, and lineage carried the biological foundation necessary to express their abilities. But that explanation felt incomplete.

If blood were only a convenient medium, the Vosskarr shouldn't have cared so much about using their own. Or, they could have stored Aether, Will, or some other substance instead. There were countless ways to make a Rune brush. Yet their entire Race had evolved around using their own precious Blood Essence.

'... Leave a mark of Will that would be remembered.'

Sylas' gaze sharpened.

His thoughts drifted to Sarethvane.

That strange bastard had loved cemeteries.

At first, Sylas had thought it was simply an eccentricity born from Sarethvane's Path. The Serpentes had surrounded himself with the dead, collected their lingering Wills, studied what remained after their lives had ended, then used those remnants as though they belonged to him.

What made Sarethvane interesting wasn't that he could control dead Will. Plenty of abilities could manipulate remnants, souls, or lingering intent. What had caught Sylas' attention was Sarethvane's reasoning.

The dead didn't lie.

At least, that was what Sarethvane believed.

A living person could distort the image they projected. They could convince themselves they were kinder than they were, stronger than they were, humbler than they were. They could spend their entire lives cultivating a version of themselves that existed more in their minds than in reality.

Death stripped that away. Afterward, all that remained was the influence they had actually left behind. Their children, their enemies, their accomplishments, their failures, the memories others carried of them.

The world they had changed.

Sarethvane believed that was their truest Will.

Sylas had accepted the logic at the time because it suited what he was seeing, but now the bloody Vosskarr word made him question the foundation of it.

What was the difference between a living Will and a dead Will?

Sylas' brows slowly furrowed.

Will was life.

That had always seemed obvious. Without Will, there was no real person left. A body could remain intact, blood could still be warm, Genes could still exist, and every Rune necessary to describe its flesh could remain exactly where it belonged. But once the Will disappeared, there was only a corpse.

That was precisely why Sylas couldn't truly clone another person. He could only reproduce their body.

He could understand their Runes, recreate their Genes, copy the structure of their organs and even imitate the mechanisms of their abilities if he understood them deeply enough. But he couldn't create them.

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