Chapter 2461: Foreign

Sylas remained beneath the pillar of light for a long while after dismissing the Vipermancy screen, his attention shifting away from the Profession and back toward the larger problem surrounding him.

The Seven Thryskai God Clans weren’t going to disappear simply because the System had branded them enemies, and if anything, the announcement had probably made the situation more dangerous in the short term.

Powers that had spent generations hiding behind rules, politics, and distance would have fewer reasons to remain patient now, while the rest of the universe had just been handed both justification and incentive to tear them apart.

So how was he supposed to deal with that?

The answer came quickly enough that Sylas almost found the question unnecessary. He would deal with it the same way he always did, by understanding himself better than everyone else understood him, then using that difference to force open a path no one had prepared for.

His attention settled inward, eventually coming to rest on the change that had made the latter half of his battle against Judgment possible.

—

[Voidborn Wisdom]

—

Sylas’ brow furrowed as he looked at the words again, because the more he thought about them, the stranger the evolution became.

For a long time, he had believed that Willborn Wisdom was within reach, sometimes so close that one final realization felt like it should have been enough to push him over the threshold, only for something else to interrupt him before that happened.

A battle would pull his attention elsewhere, some new revelation about his Will or Classes would appear, or a larger problem would demand that he abandon the thought entirely.

He had treated those moments as coincidence. Now, that explanation felt increasingly weak.

If Willborn Wisdom had truly been within reach all this time, why had Judgment forced him into something completely different instead? Why, when his mind had been stripped down far enough that there was almost nothing left to rely on, had the result been Voidborn Wisdom rather than the evolution he had expected for so long?

There was only one answer Sylas could find, and he didn’t like it.

He had never been close to Willborn Wisdom at all.

The problem wasn’t that his Wisdom had failed to connect with his Will. It was that Sylas didn’t understand enough of his own Wisdom for such a connection to mean much in the first place, and Voidborn Wisdom might have been his own existence informing him of that fact in the most insulting way possible.

Sylas had always considered self-understanding one of his greatest advantages. Other people could hide their intentions, organizations could bury their goals beneath generations of structure, and even the System could conceal mechanisms behind layers of abstraction, but Sylas had always believed that if he turned that same attention inward, there was very little about himself that remained beyond his grasp.

Apparently, he had been wrong. Worse, he hadn’t been wrong by a small margin.

Voidborn Wisdom wasn’t telling him that he was missing a few pieces or that there were corners of his mind he had yet to explore. The existence of the evolution itself implied that the portion of his Wisdom he could consciously access was so incomplete that, compared to the whole, it might as well have been nothing.

That realization sat poorly with him. He had functionally become capable of understanding nothingness because he was incompetent at understanding himself.

The thought was almost absurd enough to be funny, but Sylas didn’t feel much humor in it.

Once he stopped bristling at the implication, though, the mechanics became easier to see. Voidborn Wisdom didn’t actually broaden his Wisdom in the way Willborn Wisdom should have. It didn’t place the entirety of that Stat beneath his Will or allow him to consciously push, shape, and extend it. Instead, it removed the gaps between the leaps his mind would otherwise have been forced to make.

If Sylas could understand point A and point C, but lacked the Wisdom necessary to naturally build every step between them, Voidborn Wisdom allowed that missing space to stop mattering. The absence itself became something his mind could cross, allowing him to accept a conclusion without requiring every intermediate piece to be present first.

That was exactly why Myriad Intuition had changed so much.

Sylas could now stretch his awareness into other universes, sense the evolutionary paths that would have been ideal for his Contracts beneath entirely different sets of laws, and then hold several of those conclusions at once even though he had never lived beneath the realities that produced them.

He didn’t need to understand every developmental step those universes had taken to arrive at their answers, because Voidborn Wisdom allowed him to bridge what was missing.

The result was undeniably powerful, but it was also much less satisfying than Sylas had first assumed.

He hadn’t truly increased the breadth of his Wisdom under his own control. He had simply become a far more efficient machine.

Instead of needing every piece of information between one conclusion and the next, he could skip across the missing portions and continue reasoning from whatever lay beyond them.

Instead of being restricted to the logic of a single universe, he could draw from countless others at once, collecting results his current Wisdom shouldn’t have been capable of reaching and using them without needing to reconstruct every step that produced them.

That was useful. Extremely useful. But it still wasn’t what he wanted.

Willborn Wisdom should have been fundamentally different. If it followed the same principles as his other Willborn Stats, then the breadth of his Wisdom itself would become tied to his Will, something Sylas could consciously command rather than something he bypassed through a relationship with absence.

Sylas didn’t particularly care for shortcuts when the shortcut itself became part of the foundation.

Maybe Voidborn Stats would prove far more valuable later, once Willborn Stats were already anchoring him. If he could first gain absolute control over what he possessed and then use the Void to extend beyond those limits, the combination would be far more interesting. He could imagine the shape of it already: certainty at the core, followed by the ability to bridge anything that certainty couldn’t yet reach.

But starting from nothingness carried a different problem entirely. If the foundation itself was built on absence, what exactly would he return to if he ever lost his way?

Voidborn Wisdom made it easier to reach conclusions without necessarily understanding every piece of himself responsible for producing them. Most people would probably consider that an advantage. But Sylas couldn’t see it that way. What he wanted most was control, and this felt like the lack of it.

For now, that made the evolution feel more dangerous than desirable, even if its immediate usefulness couldn’t be denied.

Unfortunately, recognizing the problem didn’t give Sylas a way to solve it. He had no clear method of forcing the rest of his Wisdom into reach, and he had even fewer ideas about how the same understanding of the Void might be used to trigger evolutions in his other Stats.

In truth, he wasn’t even certain he wanted to attempt it yet. If Voidborn evolutions all worked by replacing missing foundations with absence, then stacking more of them before securing their Willborn counterparts could easily leave him with a great deal of reach and very little control over what supported it.

That was something he would have to deal with sooner rather than later.

Before he could continue the thought, a pulse struck his mind through a connection distinct from the System, carrying with it the familiar sensation of countless interlocking Runes shifting beneath a single intent.

The Creation Tower.

Sylas’ gaze sharpened as the message unfolded.

—

[Creation Tower Warning]

[Foreign Tower Creator Authority Detected]

[Claim Challenge Initiated]

—

His eyes narrowed.

The Perfect Plane-Wide Notification had only just echoed across the Heavens, and they were already targeting the Creation Tower this quickly?