Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2313

The moment Sylas' word descended, the world came alive.

At first it was only a small patch of Runes responding beneath his outstretched palm, a thin bloom of light suspended above the atmosphere like a fracturing pane of glass. And then it rapidly spread.

It crawled outward in all directions, not with the ugliness of decay, but with a cancerous sort of beauty. It was like if ruin learned elegance, or plague blossomed instead of rot. Just maybe... it might have looked something like this.

Runes unfolded across the sky in layered strokes, each line birthing another before the last had even finished settling into place.

Sylas was no longer forcing every structure into existence by completing it in his mind and then stamping it onto reality with a Spark. That had been his old method, powerful enough that it had carried him farther than it should have, but still wasteful in ways he had only just begun to understand.

Now he only needed to light the flint. He sketched the idea of a Rune, not always the entire thing, sometimes only a segment or a directional intent. The rest formed a bridge to itself like pieces of a puzzle marrying themselves to one another.

The universe responded in kind. It was less like constructing a perfect machine and more like jotting notes in a shorthand only reality and Sylas himself could read. Every loose implication, every unfinished curve, every suggestive pressure inside his Will spilling outward until the world completed the thought with him.

In the past, when he used Spark Mastery to spontaneously form Runes, he still thought of the completed Rune. Because his thoughts already moved in Runes, the process had been faster than it ought to be.

The result had always been clean, potent, terrifying to anyone forced to stand in front of it. Yet all of that looked clumsy now.

If that old style of casting had once cost him ten units of effort, this cost him less than a gasp by comparison, not even a fraction of one unit. What he received in return was not a weaker imitation born of cutting corners, but something somehow cleaner. In fact, it even felt... more obedient.

The network grew so fast even Sylas' eye struggled to follow it. But that hardly mattered when his heart and his mind could.

Small clusters of light fused into larger meshes. Those meshes connected into chains. The chains overlapped, folded, doubled back, and then expanded again until the entire planet below him looked as though a living, breathing organism was forming over it and climbing toward infinity.

A bloom no larger than his palm became a shell wrapped around the world in less than three seconds. Space bowed beneath it and time itself gave a faint, keening resistance in the undercurrents of the void. Not enough to stop him, only enough to let him know the scale he was working on was starting to make the universe buck back against him... a scale that it had begun to notice.

Sylas watched the completed formation with a steady gaze, then raised his fingers and snapped.

The world vanished.

It was simply there one instant and absent the next. Or, rather, the life it had once had, that is.

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