Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2431

Chapter 2431: Collector

Caelum’s Order shattered, but Sylas didn’t immediately press forward. The golden formations collapsed in layers around them as their relationships came apart, yet Caelum remained standing with blood at the corner of his mouth and both mechanical eyes slipping in and out of rhythm.

What interested Sylas was that none of the exhilaration had left him. If anything, Caelum seemed even more invested now than he had been before his breakthrough. He had spent years searching for a weakness in his Path, and Sylas had not only exposed one, but had then broken apart the answer Caelum formed almost immediately afterward.

For someone who valued his own evolution above most things, humiliation and opportunity could easily become the same thing. Caelum had finally found something capable of forcing him forward, and from the way his gaze remained fixed on Sylas, it was obvious he hadn’t reached the point where fear outweighed ambition.

His hand moved toward his waist.

Sylas’ attention shifted with it as Caelum removed a narrow black cylinder no longer than his forearm, several metallic rings fitted around its surface. There were Runes carved into it, but the moment Sylas’ Runeweaver Eyes traced beneath the outer shell, his expression became more serious.

The treasure wasn’t built from Runes and Aether alone.

Thin metallic pathways ran through the interior in patterns that reminded Sylas far more of circuitry than Rune Foundations, while several internal mechanisms moved without any visible Aether interaction at all. Current passed through some of those channels in a form that behaved like electricity, yet other sections linked directly into Rune structures as though the two systems had been designed together from the beginning.

Technology, but not technology imitating the system, nor some crude attempt to strap machinery onto a treasure. Whoever had built this understood both.

Sylas had seen enough of Legacy to know that its relationship with technology ran deeper than most organizations. Germaine had practically turned portions of her body into machinery, while even the Silvers behind Caelum carried replacements and augmentations that looked less like prosthetics and more like pieces of whatever evolutionary Paths they had chosen.

Caelum twisted one of the outer rings, and the cylinder unfolded as space compressed around its frame. Black panels separated from one another while the interior expanded far beyond what its physical size should have allowed, and Sylas prepared several layers of Spacetime Runes before the first body dropped out, but then another followed. Then another.

Five Fallen Madness Disciples struck the obsidian ground in total, each twisted by Hell in a different way and carrying the same fractured look Sylas had already seen countless times since arriving. The similarity ended there, though, because their Wills were so dense that his Greed Seed stirred before any of them had even managed to stand.

Sylas’ gaze sharpened. These weren’t ordinary failures.

Every one of them was close to forming something that felt disturbingly similar to a Virtue of Greed, which made almost no sense when the entire reason they had been dragged into Hell was that they had already failed their Madness Paths. If anything, their Wills should have been further from balance now than when they first arrived.

Caelum didn’t give Sylas time to study them for long.

Golden mechanisms flooded back into the battlefield as he stepped into the center of the group, temporal formations expanding outward to cover all five Fallen Disciples. His newly reached B-tier Rune Mastery still gave him an enormous advantage in raw quality even after Sylas shattered his Order, forcing Sylas to answer each golden construction with several emerald layers of his own.

Sylas drew a single Stroke and split its meaning across six formations.

Caelum shifted two of the Fallen Disciples several seconds forward while leaving the others where they were, forcing Sylas to fold the relationship between their moments rather than attack them directly. The instant that fold formed, Caelum inserted another temporal mechanism into the gap and redirected the collapse away from the group.

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