Genetic Ascension

The Monkey King wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to use Sylas' intelligence to figure out the last pieces of the puzzle for himself, then kill Sylas and take the solution for himself at the same time.

But even by his estimations of Sylas, Sylas returned to the past far earlier than he expected.

Yet, the Monkey King didn't panic. If he didn't get what he wanted out of the battlefield, that was fine. He would just set that matter aside and focus on killing Sylas. That was his top priority.

Unfortunately, he had just shown Sylas far too much.

It confirmed one very important thing for Sylas. The Monkey King feared those flames as well.

The only question was… why?

The Madness System shouldn't be what was targeting the Monkey King, right? It didn't quite make sense. The Madness System almost seemed built specifically for the Madness Sovereigns.

That was when the Monkey King was so kind to present to him the final piece of the puzzle.

Champion Will.

An impossibly long time ago—at least that was what it experienced like—Sylas asked the Madness Key a question and it answered with… —

[During the Fragmented Era, the life of the common man was harsh and brutal. It was under the power of the Madness Emperor that an era of prosperity was ushered in, and it was thanks to the Madness Emperor that the first system was introduced.

[Many years passed and the Fragmented Era gave way to the Common, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and the greatest of them all, the Legendary Era—where experts were abound and greatness pillaged from the jaws of destruction and chaos.

[No Era is destined to exist through time immemorial, no one is promised forever.

[The Legendary Era fell and a new Fragmented Era was ushered in—]

—

This Era now… it should be the Legendary Era. But what was interesting about this retelling of events was that the Madness Emperor introduced the first Era, and thus should have been the one to usher in the Common Era, not the Legendary Era that they were in right now.

But this was confusing. How could these two things be the same?

Who was the Madness Emperor? Was the Monkey King and the others like Slithering Madness and the like not the original creators of Madness?

Usually, the simplest answer was the solution. But Sylas felt that this was a rare instance where it wasn't.

An organization, without good probable cause, would never waste the time to raise up others over themselves, not when you were effectively asking your disciples to die in the name of your cause. That cause being birthing a Sin within yourself.

And that was the other interesting point. Sylas had to stumble into Virtues himself. It didn't seem like the Madness Key he originally had wanted him to learn a Virtue at all, so much so that when he did learn his first Virtue, he manifested a completely separate Madness Key altogether.

It wasn't until Sylas saw the Champion Will that everything made sense to him.

He had always thought of the First Fragmented Era and the current Fragmented Era—the latter of which he was born into—as a span that crossed the beginning of time to the very end.

But what if that was just what the Madness Sovereigns had wanted him to think? For the sake of growing their organization and establishing their strength?

And what if the reason the impotent system hated the Madness System so much was because this wasn't the first time they had tried to rise and ended up destroying everything in the process… In fact, it wouldn't just be the second time either.

As for why Sylas was thinking of this at all, it was because he could sense the Wills being projected from the knight that looked over the entire universe even now.

Even with the Monkey King writhing in the depths of space, unable to sustain its existence any longer, it persisted still… proving one very important thing.

He was correct. They were here only in tacit agreement. They wanted to witness this. Witness what had caused the Prideful Monkey King to go so insane.

So Sylas had chosen to prove a point.

The moment he realized the Monkey King feared the flames maybe more than even the Blazara, his path forward was obvious.

All he had to do was take advantage of the bridge the Monkey King had formed between them. The Monkey King wanted to use his Will against him? Sure. He could have it. In fact, he could have as much as he could swallow.

Upon establishing that connection, Sylas began to draw, and draw, and draw, crafting an Armor that was the perfect replica of the Monkey King's body. While the Monkey King was too busy trying to humiliate and kill him, Sylas was taking advantage of the bridge between them to comprehend the last secrets within the Monkey King.

And the moment he finished drawing to 100% Mastery, he loosened the chains around his wrists.

Fanelei had already warned him. The chains were handcuffs. The more he extended them, and the more he used their power, the easier it was for those destructive flames to sense him and target him.

Sylas only loosened them just a small bit because he didn't need to do more…

When his new Monkey King Armor realized there was no impotent system here, it began communicating with a completely different system, demanding the Genes it was due for Sylas' success.

The question was, then… where would this new system draw upon to form this new Gene? How did even the impotent system know how to draw those Genes in the first place?

Well, that much was obvious to Sylas. Obviously… it drew on the universe's comprehension of the creature the armor was representative of. Meaning… A large well of Will that represented the Monkey King, a well that the Monkey King had stretched across time and space in hopes of fixing his own weakness… And a Will that was tainted with his attempts to become immune to a flame he would never be immune to.

All at once, the Monkey King was targeted by one system's attempt to give him flames that were never his own, as well as another system's rage for daring to be so brazen.

In reward for managing to place his influence across so many timelines and such a prolonged stretch of time…

He was attacked across them all at once.

He was burnt to ash across all of existence.

The worst part? Because Sylas destroyed the Monkey King's anchor in the future…

He couldn't even fight back properly.

And all the while, Sylas just stood there, watching as the last of him was erased, knowing that the Monkey King was simply no more.