Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1180: Angry

The shaking immediately caught Sylas’ attention, and his mind shot into the jade that stored them. After what happened with the Scorned Wraps, he didn’t want to accidentally miss the chance to observe this as well, so he didn’t even take the jade out of the Madness Key, instead shooting through two layers—first the Madness Key itself, and then the jade—with his Will.

When he got there, he realized that maybe he didn’t need to rush at all.

The three obelisks, now fused into one, stood taller than ever, looming over him with Runic patterns that were just as complicated as always.

Sylas no longer felt any pressure from them at all, but there was a certain weight they carried nonetheless—a weight that he planned to take advantage of to allow his family to likewise upgrade themselves to D-Grade.

Normally, one could only experience a single tempering a day, while the rest of the time was spent recovering and readying the body for the next tempering. It had even taken Sylas an entire six months before he could reach D-Grade. If not for sacrificing his Time Lock treasure, he would have never finished in time.

And, quite frankly, he would have never been able to defeat the geniuses of the Milky Way—let alone Israeal—so easily without having this as his foundation.

If he were still an E-Grade Human Simioid, the odds that he would still be here in one piece were quite low, and that was just the harsh truth of the matter.

But now, the obelisks he was planning on storing for his family were experiencing something quite odd… they kept shaking, their Runes dancing between dimming and glowing in a furious light.

The oscillations were hard to track and even harder to actually analyze.

Sylas was trying to find some sort of pattern to them—something he could take advantage of, or maybe just something to explain to him what was going on.

Was it a coincidence that this obelisk had suddenly started pulsing? He doubted it. But why would a map trigger the obelisks? Unless it really was a coincidence?

Occam’s razor suggested that the simplest available answer to him was the most likely—but what about when that answer made no sense whatsoever?

If he were given a normal treasure, that would be acceptable. But a map? Shouldn’t whatever would happen to the obelisks be triggered after he found whatever was at the end of this treasure hunt? Why was it happening now?

Sylas could only stand there, his mind running through countless possibilities, but none of them seemed logical—and they all looped back to the same thing.

In the end, he could only conclude that this was either truly related to the map, or it was related to something that he had no current knowledge of.

There were certainly a lot of secrets on Earth that he hadn’t uncovered.

For example, that first mysterious Race. Who were they? The Silver City… if it wasn’t conquered, then how was it possible for the final obelisk to be hidden within it? Who had bypassed the system to place it inside, and yet didn’t just take the obelisk for themselves? Who forged the obelisk, and how powerful did you have to be to allow a weak F-Grade Race to temper themselves to D-Grade?

The difference was substantial. Every step was more than just a watershed—it was like Sylas was becoming an entirely new person. You couldn’t just casually give someone such a new lease on life.

‘Could it be?’

Sylas frowned. He stopped looking at the obelisk like he was trying to analyze it logically, and instead looked at it from a new perspective, allowing the Mesh of Reality to speak to him—to whisper its thoughts to his soul.

Then he sensed it.

Resistance.

The obelisk was resisting what was happening to it right now, as though it had been pricked by something it wanted no part of. There was a menacing edge—bared teeth hardly hidden within a snarling maw. They glistened like a cornered beast, saliva dripping and ready to tear into anything that dared encroach on what it had built.

‘What is this…?’

Sylas thought back to the Mountain of Giza, the first place he was handed the piece of the obelisk. In that Split Realm, what had been the goal again? To save Earth?

That was also the place his Time Lineage Tome came from as well…

A realization was blooming in Sylas’ heart.

‘Those rewards… that manipulation of time…’

What was a Split Realm? Wasn’t it a relic from the past? Before the current impotent system, the Legendary System used to form Dungeons based on trials and tribulations of the past.

Say, theoretically, you were a Race of geniuses facing off against masters of time that wanted to control you… a certain Demi-God Race of Thryskai, perhaps, that had your world wrapped around its finger.

What would you do?

Maybe, you just might try to learn how to use time even better than they could. Maybe you would realize that this was your only option.

And then, using bits and pieces of a system lost to time—a system that your captors didn’t have great understanding of—you took advantage of the time lock you were trapped within to leave clues for your descendants to take advantage of in the future, and a lineage for them to grasp.

You meticulously set up everything to find someone worthy, even leaving behind a lineage of the Throne of Glass, hoping they would make the choice to protect the people of Earth as you once did.

But you made a mistake in the end. You didn’t think that someone who wasn’t your descendant would get their hands on what you had so carefully left behind.

And now that person not only had the pinnacle of your achievement in their hands, but they were also about to manipulate and change it in ways you hadn’t planned—ways that would expose the rest of your plan to weaknesses to be exploited by the enemy you did all of this to fight against.

Wouldn’t you be angry?