Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1021  UniForge

Uniforge? Cockpit? Affinity?

The words stood out to Sylas immediately, and his confusion was coloring through. He took a glance toward Lorien, but she seemed just as lost as he was. As for Megean, she was still lost in her own world, trying to figure out if she had anything on hand to memory wipe Sylas.

But then she started to consider if memory wiping Sylas might ruin her plans for the cockpit. And at that point, she began to weigh her options as though something like a memory wipe was really possible.

She was sure that there were some organizations out there that had some method of memory wiping, and she might be able to find a way to get her hands on it… but if it wasnʼt targeted and she accidentally ended up wiping Sylasʼ memory completely, she would just feel bad…

Especially if that ruined everything else.

As for Sylas, he watched the back of this frivolous almost little girl silently. She seemed… carefree. Carefree in a way he didnʼt think was even possible for this world.

ʼI see… so it ends up being pretty much the same out here, huh…?ʼ

Suddenly, Sylas felt a bit bored again. It happened silently, and he almost didnʼt notice his ambition slipping away.

If at some point everything returned to level waters and things ended up being just as boring as it had been back on Earth, just with some extra flashy colors, what good was it? That sort of thing didnʼt excite him at all?

Who cared if there were battles? He was sure that there were battles back on Earth too. He had learned enough about enough wars in their history to know that this had to be the case.

But that didnʼt excite him either.

It was the process of looking for something new, of challenging himself in new and unique ways, of being in true control of his life that excited him the most.

When he could already see the end of the road, and he knew exactly what it took to get there… the fascination wore off quickly.

There was something about seeing the stability of the Golden Grove that reminded him exactly of that… that very same, boring, monotonous feel of moving through the laboratories back at his university.

There was nothing fun about this at all.

Ironically enough, it was then Megean led him into a very laboratory-like room—if you could call it that.

The room definitely had the stainless steel, fluorescent light components down to a T. But the main differences were the mess of wires that hung from every which way, plugging into sockets, while some of them just randomly vanished into the ceilings to connect to who knows where.

Then at the center of it all, there was a… cockpit. Sylas could see it now, and he understood why Megean would call it that.

It was an arrangement of dozens of miniature screens, some attached to metallic arms, and some not obviously attached anywhere. There was a silvery chair that looked formed of the most uncomfortable metals ever, carrying bumps that aligned with what must have been the spine.

The trouble was that the spine was obviously designed for someone of the Unitaur Race and not the Human Race, so it was not only much longer and larger, but it was awkwardly shaped in a way that must have aligned with how the Unitaur Race folded up their horse-halves.

The mess of wires over there was even worse. They got much thinner than the thick ones that hung from the ceiling. A layman might look at this and see nothing but a ratʼs nest, but the longer Sylas stared at it, the more he felt like he was staring at something truly unique and profound.

The wires might look tangled, but they definitely werenʼt. They all ran from one place to the next, not in a random arrangement, but instead down the shortest path possible.

If you did the calculations, all of this was optimized to use the smallest length of wire, and yet for it to look so messy nonetheless, it could only mean that for whoever had built this thing, the calculations came so naturally to them that they did it on the fly.

”This is Andromeda, a UniForge that was designed by my grandfather. It has been retired for many years now… though technically speaking, it was never properly introduced in the first place.”

”And why is that?”

”Um…” Megean cleared her throat again, tapping at her chest. ”… People tend to die.”

She said the last part so rapidly that Sylas almost missed it. For a top E-Grade to speak fast, one could imagine just how fast they were speaking in general. The movement of her vocal cords outsped the movement of sound itself, causing them to jumble up into a mess of soft words Sylas barely managed to decipher.

”Died? Died how?” Sylas asked calmly.

Megean looked toward Sylas and inwardly she almost rolled her eyes. She had seen many men like this before.

A smart person would hear that and run the other direction. Then she would just have to try and coax him back in here, promising to do her best to keep his life. It wasnʼt as though the death rate was 100%.

But then there were men with egos bigger than their heads. Some did it to impress her, while others were just that sort of stubborn, arrogant asshole.

When those men heard about this thing, they seemed to want to prove themselves as some sort of alpha that definitely wouldnʼt die like everyone else did.

Ironically enough, it was those few that ended up dying the most frequently. Those that felt out their limits first were just fine.

Suddenly, Megean didnʼt feel all that bad about whether or not Sylas died here or not. It would be his fault anyway for not listening to her.

”This UniForge is a tool of the Guardians. Itʼs there to help us process and arrange information faster…”