Chapter 2378: Tether

Sylas felt the Will of Sloth immediately, dense enough that there was no mistaking what had just rolled across the Beast Heaven. The yawn carried more than sound, its pressure spreading through the surrounding stars with an oppressive laziness that seemed intent on convincing everything it touched that movement itself was unnecessary. Yet that wasn’t what made Sylas’ eyes narrow.

There was a tether.

His perception had changed in ways that were becoming increasingly difficult to separate from Rune Mastery itself, and the line of Will stretching through the distance stood out to him almost as clearly as an exposed Rune.

Will Manifestation, Will Smithing, Will Mastery, and even Will Priming were all concepts Sylas had understood before, but understanding their existence and understanding how they fit together were two entirely different matters.

Only after grasping what the Seeds represented had the larger structure finally clicked into place.

Will Priming had always made the connection obvious in hindsight. Rune Mastery had never been a discipline of cold symbols and lifeless constructs, since every Rune carried intent, meaning, emotion, and the imprint of whoever had created or used it.

People were no different, and the more Sylas understood both sides of that equation, the more obvious it became that twisting a Rune and twisting a Will relied on many of the same principles.

His Rune Mastery had silently crossed another boundary.

There had been no obvious change to the tier of his mastery. Instead, it felt like the first time he had learned how to properly use Fathomless Rune Mastery all over again, only now the thing spreading out before him wasn’t merely the structure of Runes, but the invisible network of Wills connecting everything together.

Yamero forcing an S-tier Efivara into Gogo’s attack should have been impossible by ordinary spatial logic. Yet Sylas had understood the Wills involved, identified their relationships, then allowed Yamero to exploit the weakest points between them.

Once the hierarchy tying Nosphaleen to the Efivara, Nosphaleen to Sylas, Yamero to the Hibernation Realm, and Gogo to the same old web became visible, space itself had almost become secondary.

Runes had emotions and people had emotions. The best way to force either one toward Sylas’ desired result was to understand exactly what made them move.

That was why he knew where the yawn had come from without needing to follow the sound.

The Will attached to it stretched directly toward Rhykan.

Sylas’ gaze sharpened further as more of the structure unfolded before him, and the next conclusion came almost immediately. Rhykan wasn’t simply using the Virtue of Sloth as a technique or carrying some passing affinity toward it.

The deeper Will tangled around Rhykan carried another presence, ancient enough and strange enough that Sylas recognized its nature before he could identify its exact shape. The moment he compared it to the familiar pressure of Slithering Madness, the answer became obvious.

Slovenly Madness.

Rhykan had somehow gotten an Arcane Madness under his control.

Sylas thought of Slithering Madness and felt the first real weight of the situation settle into place.

The Arcane Madnesses should all exist within roughly the same range of power, and even if the Serpentes held some superiority over other Beast lineages, the difference couldn’t be wide enough at this level to make Slovenly Madness irrelevant. That was especially true after everything Sylas had learned about how deeply the Serpentes had already been suppressed.

Even now, he couldn’t properly measure Slithering Madness. It still stood at a height his senses couldn’t comfortably grasp, a being that had existed around him for so long that it was easy to forget just how absurd its power actually was.

If Rhykan had truly placed something comparable beneath his control, then the balance of everything surrounding the Heaven Clash had shifted again.

Sylas’ mind moved almost instantly toward the method.

There was a familiar logic behind the choice, one he himself had relied on more than once. When facing an opponent intelligent enough to account for every rational path, sometimes the only useful move was one they could never have believed you were capable of making in the first place.

Sylas hadn’t guessed that taking direct control of an Arcane Madness was even possible. He began reverse-engineering the possibilities and found only two that fit well enough to consider.

The first was simple enough. Slovenly Madness might have taken a liking to Rhykan in the same way Slithering Madness had always shown a peculiar fondness for Sylas, which could explain how the relationship began. But that explanation only reached so far.

The Arcane Madnesses were still restrained by rules Sylas didn’t fully understand. Slithering Madness had occasionally helped him along the margins, turning a blind eye where it perhaps shouldn’t have or allowing Sylas to exploit situations it could have easily shut down, but it had never openly shattered those restrictions for him.

If Rhykan had relied on Slovenly Madness’ personal favor, then he had also found some method to break whatever rules bound it.

It was possible, but Sylas didn’t like it.

His frown deepened as the second possibility rose to the front of his mind, not due to some assumption that Rhykan shared his arrogance, though there was certainly enough evidence for that. It simply fit the pieces much more cleanly.

’He found someone worthy of replacing it.’

Sylas’ eyes flashed.

The Thryskai had already been moving in that direction with Nosphaleen. Not exactly, perhaps. But Sylas still believed that at least part of the reason they had targeted her was tied directly to him, especially after he learned that the mysterious Thryskai woman operating behind the scenes was the same one he had supposedly killed after being sent back through time.

By that point, Sylas had already become enough of a problem that using Nosphaleen as an angle against him made perfect sense. Still, there had always been something deeper beneath it.

They had reshaped her around the Goddess worshipped by the Efivara, tied her to Crowing Madness, twisted Envy around her existence, and attempted to turn her into something far beyond the Clypsian woman Sylas had once known. For all that effort, however, they had apparently never managed to complete the final step.

Nosphaleen hadn’t replaced Crowing Madness and that meant Rhykan had succeeded where they failed.

His gaze shifted toward the distance even though there was nothing visible there from this world, and yet his newly sharpened perception of Will made the separation feel almost meaningless.

Somewhere far beyond the Mesmeryx planet, the Skai Heaven was trembling under a pressure that had nothing to do with the ordinary chaos of the Heaven Clash.

The Beast Emperor Sanctum was rising.

Sylas watched the invisible threads of Will stretching toward Rhykan and felt another piece of the board fall into place.

This wasn’t something Rhykan had improvised in response to the Heaven Clash. It had been part of his plan from the beginning.