Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2446

Chapter 2446: Two

Sylas continued looking into the skies long after the answer came to him, the Scorpion heart beating steadily above his palm while his thoughts moved far beyond it. If he was going to rebuild the foundation of his Race rather than merely improve what he already possessed, there were only two concepts he had encountered that felt worthy of becoming the pillars of that path.

Dragon and Phoenix.

The choice was so ridiculous that Sylas almost dismissed it on principle, not because either concept lacked power, but because he understood their problems better than most. Rhykan had already crippled portions of his future by building too deeply into paths with restrictions he couldn’t simply ignore, yet Sylas was considering shackling himself to two things that might be worse.

Dragons weren’t real in the ordinary sense. They were products of Dead Will and collective belief, a ceiling given shape by generations of minds that could continuously move the instant anyone approached it.

A Serpentes could grow large enough to consume worlds and the Dragon would simply become something capable of consuming galaxies. It could develop venom capable of killing Gods, master every law available to it, or reach some impossible purity of bloodline, but none of that mattered when the opponent was a concept without a fixed body to restrain its limits.

That was why the Fate Dragon existed in the first place.

Someone had attempted to gather enough Karma into a living existence that reality itself would be forced to accept it as standing beside the myth. It wasn’t enough to create the strongest Dragon-like Beast in existence; they needed to create something carrying enough weight that the Dead Will of countless lives couldn’t simply shift the finish line again.

The Phoenix was less understood, but Sylas no longer believed it was fundamentally different. The Fate Dragon seemed to act most directly upon Beasts and bloodlines, while everything Sylas had seen of the Phoenix seemed tied to evolution, Spark Seeds, Rune Mastery, and the ability of humanoids to change what they had been born as.

One created a ceiling that strength could never naturally surpass, while the other might very well govern the road used to approach that ceiling in the first place.

Choosing both should have been idiotic. But Cassarae had ruined the simplicity of that conclusion.

The Demon World and the Real World weren’t necessarily two halves of one natural whole, and the Madness System itself had once apparently tried to force those divisions together. Once Cassarae questioned what that actually meant, the possibility of more than one universe stopped being some useless philosophical exercise.

More importantly, the question didn’t end there.

If another universe had developed in isolation from this one and still possessed concepts recognizable as Dragons and Phoenixes, then neither could be explained away as the product of one civilization, one history, or even one universe’s accumulated Dead Will. If multiple universes were suppressed beneath the same two broad concepts, then whatever Dragons and Phoenixes had become was far larger than the local myths Sylas had originally assumed them to be.

That made tying himself to them more dangerous, not less.

But... it also made them worth taking.

Sylas lowered his gaze toward the heart again.

The Scorpion had already shown him the first step.

The Spirit Beast Race was only an A-Grade Mortal Race, but it possessed a characteristic Sylas had found ridiculous even when he first learned of it. Spirit Beasts were born capable of holding countless Wills within themselves, yet almost all of them selected a single Beast Will to truly follow.

At the time, Sylas had accepted the explanation as another racial oddity. Now that he intended to place two concepts as incompatible and overwhelming as Dragon and Phoenix inside one Race, understanding how the Spirit Beasts accomplished something even remotely similar became considerably more important.

His Runeweaver Eyes activated.

The heart changed beneath his perception as flesh became layers of structure, then Genes, then the Runes those Genes expressed. Sylas didn’t focus on the Greed Will itself this time and instead followed what happened around it whenever the heart contracted.

Blood Essence had always acted as a bridge for Rune Mastery. Gralith had taught him that long ago, and Sylas himself had used the Blood Essence of Beasts as catalysts because the blood carried more than nutrients and energy; it carried a partial answer, giving the body a structure to imitate rather than forcing a Rune Master to create everything from nothing.

The original Scorpion’s blood carried an answer far older than the Spirit Beast Race.

Sylas watched the same set of foundational Runes shift every time the Greed Will passed through them. They didn’t change enough to become different Runes, but their relationships did, some bonds strengthening while others weakened as the structure settled into a slightly different arrangement.

His eyes narrowed.

It reminded him of protein folding.

Two structures could contain the exact same components and still behave completely differently depending on how those components folded into one another. The information didn’t only exist in what pieces were present, but also in which surfaces touched, which sections remained exposed, and what shape the whole adopted when outside pressure acted upon it.

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