Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2409

Chapter 2409: Cheat

The voice that reached Sylas was clipped enough that he couldn’t make out more than fragments, and even those pieces seemed to break apart before they properly formed. What did come through clearly was the Will behind them, and that alone carried enough intent that Sylas didn’t need the exact words to understand what Slithering Madness wanted from him.

He wanted help.

Sylas had been to Hell once before when he went after Fanelei, but that didn’t mean he had some open doorway waiting for him whenever he felt like returning. He had taken advantage of a very specific set of circumstances back then, and unless he suddenly decided to sabotage his own path on purpose, there was no reason to believe he could reproduce that route casually.

Just opening a path to Hell would already be a tall mountain to climb, and whatever waited on the other side would almost certainly make that look like the easy part. If Slithering Madness had reached the point where he was asking Sylas for help, then whatever problem had appeared wasn’t something Sylas could treat lightly.

Fortunately, figuring out where the problem came from didn’t require much thought.

It almost certainly had something to do with Rhykan. More specifically, Slovenly Madness.

That was also one of the reasons Sylas hadn’t seriously considered what Rhykan had done to be cheating in the first place. Whatever method he had used to appropriate Slovenly Madness, force its path into the Beast Sanctum, and have the system acknowledge him as Progenitor couldn’t possibly have been something thrown together on the spot. It was too layered for that.

Rhykan must have been preparing for this long before Sylas ever began considering the Beast Sanctum seriously, building one piece after another until he had enough control over the situation to force everything into place. Rhykan called it cheating since he had started planning much earlier, but Sylas didn’t see the relevance of that distinction.

A loss was a loss. He didn’t need an excuse to make it prettier.

What was becoming clearer now, though, was that Rhykan either hadn’t cared what happened to Hell afterward or had considered whatever damage followed an acceptable price. If Sylas was right about how deeply Slovenly Madness had been tied into the Beast Sanctum, ripping that path away and redefining its origin couldn’t have left the place it came from untouched.

Slithering Madness’ Will faded before Sylas could probe any deeper, leaving behind only the impression of urgency. He had probably known from the beginning that his words wouldn’t come through properly and had simply trusted that the Will behind them would be enough.

If Sylas still possessed the Gluttony Madness Key, perhaps that connection would have been clearer. Unfortunately, he didn’t.

That didn’t mean he had no connection to Madness anymore, though.

Sylas still held three Madness Keys of Virtue, and if he counted Nosphaleen herself as an extension of that system, then there were effectively four separate points of contact within reach. His gaze flickered slightly as he considered several possible routes into Hell, discarding each one as he thought through the risks and requirements.

The Creation Tower made the most sense. It was already capable of connecting across Planes and Heavens, and its structure ignored many of the boundaries that would normally make this problem impossible. If there was any place Sylas could use as an anchor to force open a route into another Plane entirely, then the Creation Tower was the obvious starting point.

That left a much simpler question, then. Should he go?

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