Genetic Ascension

Sylas' claw squeezed down and the Monkey King's staff shattered to pieces. First they started as hairline fractures, ones that quickly spread until, as though a tough piece of glass suddenly cracking to the very edge, it infused itself into the body of the weapon instantaneously.

Then, with a twist of Sylas' wrist, it all crumbled to pieces.

He took a step forward, a screaming Monkey King in a ball of endless flames surging with an endless tide.

Sylas looked down with an indifferent expression on his face.

It was just as he speculated the day he realized his future self would stop the Monkey King for him. The only way to interfere in the past from the future was by forming a closed loop that existed outside the influence and laws of the universe.

He had known this was probably the easiest and most straightforward solution, but he didn't know how to do that. It was just that he believed in his ability to do so.

That day when he destroyed the Monkey King Mountain seemingly out of frustration, that was only a part of the reason. That day wasn't long after he had finally grasped Fathomless Rune Creation. The way he viewed the world was very different.

While it was true that he was frustrated at the time, he was looking countless steps ahead.

He knew that the Monkey King was guaranteed to be his enemy in the future. He realized that the Monkey King had already used the Monkey King Mountain to project himself in the future once before. He knew that the Monkey King Mountain was the root of his connection with the Monkey King.

As such, he knew that if there was ever going to be a way for him to close a loop between himself and the Monkey King, it would be related to that very Mountain.

So, he destroyed it.

The thing was that he didn't know exactly how he would use it to close a loop back then. That was why he didn't completely dismiss the idea of having just done it out of frustration.

He had had a lot on his plate back then. But it seemed that he was also right about one other thing…

A Sylas with information about the world was the most dangerous form of himself there was.

Many of his enemies only had a chance now because he knew too little. But as time passed, and he gained more of an understanding of the world, there were fewer and fewer chances to pull the wool over his eyes.

The Monkey King was clever, he was an expert of combat, a trickster that had fooled even many a god.

But measuring Sylas by how well you had performed against others…

Was the pinnacle of foolishness.

It was even worse that the Monkey King had given Sylas the exact ingredients he needed to rip him to pieces. There were so many paths to victory Sylas almost hadn't known which one to take… but he ultimately settled on the most humiliating one.

Using the Monkey King's plans against himself.

The Golden Race, Champion Will, the Monkey King's projected Will, all of these things were used by the Monkey King to build a path of revenge toward Sylas.

But unfortunately for the Monkey King, they had all also done something else: tell him far too much about the Monkey King's body, Genes, and Abilities.

To make matters worse, the Split Realm had to be built based on the Monkey King's past, so on the way here, Sylas had gotten the chance to fight the ancestors of the Monkey King and grasp where his bloodline had come from and what it had grown to.

In the end, the Monkey King Armor that Sylas had drawn just now was on a completely different level compared to the others he had drawn.

At that point, the system should have granted him a Gene. The problem? There was no impotent system here. This was the era of the Madness System.

However, that only made things worse for the Monkey King.

The impotent system hated the Madness System, but Sylas had realized something very interesting about the Demons that the Monkey King used in his Golden Battlefield.

The Blazara… they feared the flames of the Scorned Wraps so very much. For a Demon Race with such a great weakness against the very thing the Monkey King and the other Madness Sovereigns were trying to hide from with the help of the Scorned Wraps, how could they possibly be of any use to the Monkey King?

It sounded backwards. If the Monkey King wanted to evolve, why would he use Demons that were the antithesis of the path he wanted to follow?

That all seemed to suggest that it was a decoy. After all, if the Golden Battlefield existed for the purpose of eventually killing Sylas, then Sylas' original conclusion that it existed to help evolve the Golden Race was the wrong conclusion… no?

Except, why then did it actually work? The Golden Battlefield could definitely be used to revert the Golden Race back to a previous state, Sylas had already used it on Old Brama.

Was it just an elaborate ruse, then? It was, after all, one of the only ways to fool Sylas. You couldn't possibly trick him with a fake method, the only way to hide something from him all this time was to actually do the thing.

But that… somehow experienced like an empty answer as well.

And that was when it clicked for Sylas.

The Blazara feared the flames not because they were more susceptible to them than any other race, but because their affinity for fire was so high that their sensitivity to it was far greater than any other.

The Monkey King had wanted to see if it was possible to use this sensitivity of theirs, integrate it, and eventually reach a level of being able to control the flames themselves… And that energy that the flames were produced from, wasn't it the very energy that Sylas had used with the help of the Omnimous and the Genesis Forge to break his limits?