Chapter 2457: Sylas’ Answer. (4)

The Silver light surrounding Vipermancy shattered before it could settle into Gold, the fragments folding inward and disappearing into the Contract that linked Sylas to the Ruby Ouroboros.

For a brief moment, nothing changed, but then the serpent convulsed within his perception as its ruby scales split from snout to tail and something darker pushed through beneath them, the new hide carrying threads of black that seemed to swallow the light around it rather than reflect it.

—

[Profession Evolution Complete]

[Vipermancy: Silver → Legendary]

[Contract Evolution Detected]

[Ruby Ouroboros → Myriad Ouroboros]

—

Sylas barely finished reading the name before the humanoid appeared before him, its fist already descending beneath enough Judgment Will to erase everything he had rebuilt.

He raised an arm to meet it while the Ouroboros twisted through their Contract, and when [Eternal Cycle] activated, Sylas immediately realized that the Skill no longer functioned as it had before.

His forearm shattered beneath the collision, but the injury vanished before the fragments could properly separate, swallowed by the Ouroboros as though the broken state itself had been consumed.

A second version of the arm replaced it almost immediately, not regenerated from what remained, but pulled forward from another point in the cycle where the damage had never managed to settle in the first place.

Before, Eternal Cycle allowed the Ouroboros to consume wounds after suffering them, turning pain and damage into something that could be devoured and discarded. Now its reach extended one step further into causality itself, allowing it to swallow the path toward injury so long as Sylas still possessed enough Will to anchor another possible state in its place.

The humanoid struck again, and this time Sylas allowed the fist to crush through three ribs while his own hand drove through its shoulder. His bones returned almost as quickly as they broke, while the chunk of white-gold lightning he tore free stopped halfway through its retreat toward the ceiling when [Infinite Hunger] spread through their Contract and dragged the current in the opposite direction.

White-gold lightning wrapped around Sylas’ black skeleton before sinking through the emerald scales covering his bones, and the sensation made even his concentration shift for a fraction of a second.

Infinite Hunger had always been capable of consuming things that should never have counted as food—emotion, Spacetime, causality—but this was different. The Ouroboros wasn’t merely devouring the lightning as energy anymore, it was eating the very connection that told the lightning where it belonged, where its Will placed it in the world, what gave it strength and substance.

Judgment attempted to reclaim what Sylas had stolen and found nothing left that recognized its authority.

The humanoid didn’t give him time to appreciate the change, rushing forward with its Runic structure already shifting to prevent the same weakness from being exploited twice.

Sylas met it head-on, trading fist for fist and elbow for elbow while Eternal Cycle continuously swallowed the outcomes that left his skeleton damaged, each exchange allowing him to give up a little less ground than the one before.

The ceiling adapted again, weaving the lightning more deeply into the humanoid until energy and body became almost impossible to distinguish from one another. Sylas caught the change immediately, and the solution was so simple that his attention moved to the Ouroboros before the humanoid had even finished reforming.

If the lightning could no longer be separated from the creature, he would consume both.

The Myriad Ouroboros erupted from his Contract as a streak of black and deep ruby, its body extending across thousands of meters before curling around the humanoid and biting down on its own tail. The instant [Boundary of Worlds] closed, the pressure from the ceiling faltered for the first time, not because the Ouroboros had overpowered the Judgment Will, but because the boundary it created had been built from Dragon concepts the Milky Way had never learned how to recognize.

For a single breath, the humanoid stood within a world that didn’t belong beneath this Heaven.

Sylas used that breath to tear its head from its shoulders.

The body exploded into lightning as Judgment rushed to reconstruct it, but [Undying Proliferation] activated before the restoration could finish and the Ouroboros swallowed the death that had just occurred.

The ceiling forced another humanoid into existence anyway, yet its new form emerged smaller and less stable, several portions of its body flickering where the consumed death had left gaps the Judgment Will could no longer fill with the same ease.

That was when Sylas understood how the Skill had changed.

Undying Proliferation had once allowed the Ouroboros to devour death and use it as either a replacement life or a means of stealing something from what had died. Now the death itself became a resource that could be removed from the cycle entirely, which meant every piece Sylas destroyed was one more piece Judgment had to recreate without being able to rely on the same ending twice.

The battle shifted from there, but not so abruptly that Sylas could afford carelessness. The humanoid still struck hard enough to fracture his skull and tear a leg from his pelvis, yet every injury disappeared into Eternal Cycle while every piece he took from his opponent fed Infinite Hunger or vanished into Undying Proliferation, leaving Sylas whole and the creature across from him progressively less complete.

Then [Bloodburn] awakened.

The Myriad Ouroboros’ scales split across its length as ruby blood flowed into the closed Boundary, only for the liquid to ignite in dark crimson flames that crawled over its body without being extinguished. It refused to heal those wounds and refused to let Eternal Cycle erase them, converting every abandoned path of recovery into force until the Contract between it and Sylas groaned beneath the pressure.

That strength flooded into Sylas.

His black skeleton darkened until even the white-gold lightning seemed dull beside it, emerald Dragon scales tightening across the bone while crimson veins appeared beneath them like molten lines trapped under glass. When the humanoid struck again, Sylas caught its fist in one hand and remained exactly where he was.

His fingers closed.

The humanoid’s hand collapsed within his grip, and Sylas stepped into the opening before driving his forehead through its face. Lightning scattered around his skull as he caught both sides of its torso and ripped downward, while Infinite Hunger swallowed everything that tried to escape and Undying Proliferation consumed what died before Judgment could call it back.

The ceiling continued inventing answers, but every answer cost more than the last.

A new arm formed from the humanoid’s shoulder and swept toward Sylas’ head, only for him to catch it between his jaws. There was no flesh on his face and nothing about the motion should have felt natural, yet Sylas bit down like an enraged beast, tearing through condensed lightning before swallowing the current as Infinite Hunger dragged every trace of its ownership into the Contract.

The humanoid convulsed in his grip.

Sylas grabbed its head with both hands and pulled until the entire upper half of its body split apart, white-gold lightning erupting across the heavens without a single strand managing to return. By the time the last currents disappeared into him, there was nothing left before Sylas but the ceiling that had spent this entire tribulation judging what he was allowed to be.

He looked up and moved.

Sylas drove both hands into the invisible barrier, his fingers sinking through fractures that had refused to yield only moments earlier while Dragon Wills from worlds the Milky Way had never touched poured through his arms.

The Myriad Ouroboros tightened its Boundary around him, isolating the point of impact from the authority above, and Sylas pulled until the barrier finally gave beneath his hands.

The heavens tore open.

A pillar of white light ripped downward through the opening, piercing the Demi-God Plane before continuing toward the Mortal Plane, while another pillar erupted in the opposite direction and tore upward toward the God Plane. For an instant, the entire Milky Way seemed to shudder between the two, like a world that had spent countless ages growing inside a shell and had finally become too large to remain trapped within it.

Sylas roared.

Then the System spoke.

—

[Perfect Plane-Wide Notification]

[The Grimblade Clan has established the foundation of an Eighth Seat of Power within the Skai Heaven.]

[A God Clan has awakened.]

—

[Error—]

[Anomaly Detected.]

[Established God Clans Detected:]

[Blackseraph]

[Vaelthorne]

[Gravewing]

[Nocthariel]

[Ashcendre]

[Velmorian]

[Dreadvale]

—

[Violation Detected.]

[Rules have been violated.]

[Rules have been broken.]

—

Across the Skai Heaven, every Thryskai froze as a crimson marker appeared above their heads.

—

[Race Designation Updated]

[Thryskai]

[Enemy of the Universe]

—

[Correction Initiated.]

[Demons have taken Seats of Power within the Skai Heaven.]

[The Grimblades have been recognized as the only True God of this Heaven.]

[Expunge the evil.]