Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1158: Pride

The voice was so loud it felt like the only thing Sylas could sense. His sense of touch, smell, even sight was blurred by the blaring whining in his ears.

It really did feel like a little girl was crying in the middle of a grocery store and no one could do what they needed to do until she was satiated or satisfied in some way.

BANG!

Sylas landed on the ground, skidding across it and leaving a long trench in his wake. But he couldn’t really feel that either. It was like all his senses were muted.

But then he realized that it wasn’t just because of this voice. It was something else.

The formation of the True Pride Seed.

Whether it was the Lust or Gluttony Seed, both of them felt to Sylas like vague, amorphous concepts in his mind. Even when he focused, he couldn’t quite find their exact locations in his body; he could just feel them out to a minor extent.

But this one—it might as well have been a blaring siren and flashing lights on the highway in the middle of the night. It made itself known, forming at the center of Sylas’ mind and weaving out with its tendrils.

As though it was no longer just a Seed, but the roots and growing ecosystem that came with it, it dug into the folds of Sylas’ brain and into his body in ways he had simply never sensed before.

Sylas was taken aback, not because this was so fresh and unique, but because he could vaguely sense that this was probably why it was so difficult to point out the other Seeds as well.

Even after they took shape, they melded into all the layers of his body, burying themselves deep and whole until they were so ubiquitous with him that he couldn’t sense them clearly at all.

But the Pride Seed was different. Not only was it the Sin Seed that aligned with him the very most, but it was also the one that he had formed through the most unique method.

He didn’t know what the difference between a True Seed and a normal one was… but he could feel the difference.

It took him quite a long time before the Gluttony Seed started manifesting some useful abilities. In fact, even when the Gluttony Seed became quite useful to him, it took a great deal of effort just to use it for more than a few minutes.

The fatigue that came with relying on it was so heavy that Sylas had gotten into the habit of ignoring it.

But this Pride Seed… it was completely different. Not only could he feel it and sense it so completely and wholly, but it almost felt as though using it was akin to breathing for him—so easy and natural that—

“STOP! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOUR MIND, LISTEN TO SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOURSELF FOR ONCE!”

The voice this time was even sharper and more panicked than before. Sylas could practically see the sight of a little girl pacing back and forth with a ruffled mess of hair on top of her slightly-too-large-for-her-body head.

She was adorable in all the right ways. Small frame, big eyes, a pouting pinkness on her lips and a frustrated pull at her brows. Her skin was a little too golden—whereas one might think she had a little bronze tan to her, a second look might make one raise an eyebrow.

And then there was her aura. It seemed to form a dress of more obvious gold over her little body, her small arms flailing about in their arm sockets with the frustration of a middle-aged housewife that quite outsized the little one.

Her head snapped back and Sylas met her gaze for the first time, a gaze that seemed to carry with it the depths of the world—full and all-encompassing. They were eyes that couldn’t have possibly come from a little girl, eyes that had long withstood the test of time in ways that Sylas couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around.

She gave Sylas a frustrated look, pulled down one of the lower lids of her eye, and stuck her tongue out. It was a completely silly expression when matched with eyes that carried the secrets of the universe, and yet it only seemed to fit.

Maybe the only way to live for so long was precisely to stop taking everything so seriously, or else maybe you would have tried to end your own existence long ago.

Even this “fury” the little girl was pacing around with carried an air of nonchalance to it—more like she was watching her favorite character in a reality TV show do something stupid rather than truly facing existential dread.

That was what Sylas was to her, probably.

Entertainment.

One cog in an endless wheel and cycle that would probably end up being replaced at some point before they even managed to reach the final leg of their journey.

However, this distraction—and all those thoughts—finally seemed to snap Sylas out of it. The shock of the True Pride Seed’s formation almost sank him into a depraved state, but the problem was that… Sylas didn’t feel that way.

The other Sins, he had always had the discipline to control. He didn’t allow himself to be lost to Lust (aside from when Demonic Will directed him). He didn’t allow Wrath to dictate his actions either. He had always been anything but Sloth, while Gluttony and Greed were never driving factors for him.

As for Envy… the people he compared himself to more than anyone else… were none other than himself and the versions of himself he aspired to be. It simply wasn’t a Sin that aligned with him in times not steeped in frustration.

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But even Wrath, which was probably his greatest pitfall right now, had been greatly muted because his Will had grown so powerful that Demonic Will hadn’t been capable of directing his actions in a very long while.

Pride, however…

He had never had any resistance against it because he never saw a problem with it.