Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2370: A Single Word

Even with the speed his thoughts moved at now, Sylas didn’t have an answer.

The more he considered the boundary between Virtue and Sin, the more the entire thing started to feel... vapid.

Virtue, Sin, Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, they were names attached to concepts that existed whether someone bothered to categorize them or not, and Sylas had never needed a title floating above his head to tell him that he was Prideful.

Did he need some outside directive to decide what that Pride meant? Did he need a Seed to tell him how his Pride should manifest in the world?

Sylas’ gaze remained on Nosphaleen, but his focus had long since shifted elsewhere, the implications of what he had just realized spreading through his mind. There was something useful about the Seeds, certainly, but most of that usefulness had already become irrelevant to him, especially when he considered how he had structured the three Virtues inside his own body.

His Pride Seed stood at the center of everything.

Greed and Lust existed beneath it, their growth shaped by Pride and their manifestations naturally following whatever direction Pride chose to take. Sylas had deliberately designed himself that way, and by the very definition of the relationship he had created, neither Greed nor Lust had much of a choice in the matter.

If his Pride moved, they followed. So why did he care what someone had decided to call any of them?

Sylas almost dismissed the entire line of thought there, but something stopped him.

It wasn’t an answer to what had been done to Nosphaleen, nor did it explain what existed beyond the extreme of a Virtue, but it pulled his thoughts back toward a choice he had made months ago, one that had seemed far more important at the time than it did now.

When Sylas formed his Pride Seed, he had refused to take the obvious path.

There was an enormous reservoir of Pride Will spread throughout the universe, accumulated from countless existences across an impossible amount of time, and his Seed should have connected him to it. Sylas had rejected that route, choosing to fuel his Pride with himself rather than rely on the Pride of others, and even now he didn’t regret that decision in the slightest.

The thought of relying on such a thing still felt empty to him.

What did the Pride of some dead emperor have to do with his own? Why should the arrogance of some ancient genius, king, Beast, or God become fuel for Sylas Grimblade?

His Pride was his.

That conclusion hadn’t changed, but for the first time Sylas realized that he had stopped asking questions too early.

He had questioned why his Pride needed to rely on the reservoir, then refused that connection and considered the matter settled. He had been so focused on rejecting the path placed before him that he had never bothered to question the structure of the path itself.

Why was his Pride a Seed at all?

Sylas slowly stood from his squat before Nosphaleen, his eyes narrowing as the thought settled in. There were supposedly seven paths through which these Seeds could form, seven great concepts that could take root inside a person and eventually bloom, but who had decided that those seven paths existed in the first place?

More importantly, who had decided that they needed Seeds?

Sylas looked down at his hand and slowly turned his palm over, his gaze piercing beyond skin, blood, and bone.

He could practically see them now.

The Seeds had long since bloomed, their roots spreading through his body like an impossibly complicated system of branching veins. They weren’t concentrated in one organ or Layer either, their influence reaching from his Genes through deeper foundations, intertwining with the Layers that made Sylas who he was until they reached his Potential and extended beyond even that.

They were entrenched.

Far more deeply than Sylas had once realized.

Had he accepted the universal reservoir of Pride, those roots would have stretched even farther, linking him into something so broad that separating himself from it later might have been almost impossible. That had always been part of why Sylas disliked the path, even if he hadn’t understood the full extent of it at the time.

But now...

His refusal hadn’t solved the problem, it had only delayed it.

The realization settled over Sylas with a strange sort of calm.

Whether he tapped into the reservoir of Pride Will or not didn’t fundamentally matter, at least not in the way he had once believed. The Seed was still inside him, its roots were still spreading, and every advancement only allowed those roots to dig more deeply into the foundation of his existence.

Eventually, whoever had created this path would get what they wanted anyway.

Sylas’ gaze became colder.

He had spent so much time thinking that he was forging his own road simply because he refused the obvious choices placed in front of him. He rejected the reservoir, altered the relationship between his Virtue Seeds, separated himself from the system as much as he could manage, and continuously rebuilt his foundations whenever they failed to meet his standards.

But what if all of that was still happening inside someone else’s framework? The thought irritated him more than the threat of any God ever had.

He had been questioning the walls of the cage while accepting the floor beneath his feet as something natural.

Why should Pride form a Seed?

Why should there be seven?

Why should Sin become Virtue, or Virtue become anything else?

Why should these concepts bury themselves into his Genes and Potential at all?

Sylas’ mind moved faster and faster, taking everything he knew about Seeds and stripping away the assumptions one after another. Once the names were removed, once Virtue and Sin stopped mattering, once the supposed seven paths were treated as nothing more than labels someone had chosen to give them, what was actually left?

Power tied to instinct. Power tied to behavior. Power that dug into the deepest Layers of the body, shaped Genes, altered Will, and connected an existence to reservoirs formed from others who shared the same fundamental nature.

Sylas’ pupils narrowed.

Something about that description was familiar.

He had seen systems of power built around Genes from the very beginning, watched bloodlines carry instincts that their owners had never learned, seen Races inherit abilities so naturally that they treated comprehension itself as unnecessary.

He had watched Serpentes, Dragons, Thryskai, and countless others express concepts through their bodies simply because something had been engraved deeply enough into their ancestry.

His thoughts stopped.

’Beasts...’

The single word appeared in Sylas’ mind, and then, one after another, everything clicked into perfect place.