Chapter 2494: A Motivated Sylas Grimblade [Bonus]

[Bonus thanks to TheGhanianPrince <3]

Three years passed, and Sylas didn’t move a single inch.

For three years, the only things that occupied his attention were Cheri’s corpse, the Omnimous, and the Death Seal. He didn’t concern himself with the affairs of Earth, the movements of the various Heavens, or even the consequences of the countless Rune Creators he had slaughtered. There was only one matter that interested him, and until he had exhausted every method available to him, he had no intention of allowing anything else to interfere.

It had been a very long time since Sylas had dedicated himself to something with such single-minded focus, and even longer since he had been so thorough.

He didn’t simply study Cheri’s Genes and move on after understanding their surface-level functions. Every strand was separated, every relationship examined, and every apparent dead end revisited until he understood precisely why it existed. When one method failed, he didn’t discard it. He examined the failure itself, identified which of his assumptions had been incorrect, then rebuilt the experiment from the beginning.

The Omnimous proved invaluable in this regard.

Rune Mastery allowed Sylas to understand the structure of Cheri’s body through the Mesh of Reality, while the Omnimous approached that same structure through an entirely different perspective. It understood the relationships between the physical laws and their interpretations through Aether, allowing Sylas to compare two interpretations of the same existence and expose details that neither method could reveal alone.

But even that wasn’t enough.

The Nethum were a Clan that had spent countless generations refining their Bloodline, and the protections they had placed upon their descendants weren’t something that could be casually unraveled through superior comprehension.

That was why Sylas began creating copies.

At first, he simply used his Rune Mastery to reconstruct Cheri’s body, building it Stroke by Stroke until an almost perfect imitation lay beside the original. He then used the Omnimous to compare them, searching for differences that his own senses might have overlooked.

The first copy was disappointing.

Although its physical structure appeared identical, there were thousands of minor discrepancies hidden within the deeper layers of its Genes. Some came from differences in the way Aether interacted with the reconstructed body, while others originated from relationships that didn’t seem to possess any physical foundation at all.

Sylas destroyed the clone and began again.

The second was better, as was the third, and by the time he reached the hundredth, the discrepancies had already diminished to a fraction of what they had been before.

But Sylas wasn’t satisfied.

He continued creating copies, sometimes altering only a single Rune Stroke between iterations, while other times he rebuilt entire sections of the body to test whether a different approach would produce a more faithful result.

The Death Seal became increasingly important as his comprehension deepened.

It wasn’t limited to examining the Genes that currently existed within Cheri’s body. It could reach into the dead possibilities that had preceded them, identifying evolutionary branches that had been abandoned, mutations that had failed to survive, and structures that had once existed only to disappear beneath the development of something greater.

To Sylas, every possibility, whether abandoned or otherwise, was another method of understanding what had produced the person lying before him.

He could reconstruct an earlier version of a Gene, compare it against its present form, then study the precise changes that had occurred between them. And if he understood those changes well enough, he could begin predicting what other forms that Gene might have taken under different circumstances.

The number of experiments increased.

By the end of the first year, the laboratory had become a place where countless copies of Cheri’s body were created and destroyed, each iteration bringing Sylas closer to a level of precision that would have once seemed impossible.

Eventually, he reached 99.99% accuracy.

Sylas examined the result for a long while.

The remaining discrepancy was so small that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have considered it meaningless. But he wasn’t reconstructing Cheri for the sake of creating a functional body, and when it came to something as complicated as a Gene Lock, even the smallest difference could represent an enormous gap in comprehension.

How many times had one heard just how many genes you shared with a monkey? Or even a banana for that matter. In this more complex world, that 0.01% gap could be the difference between an F-tier and an S-tier Race.

More importantly, he had begun to suspect that the remaining discrepancy wasn’t something he could correct through Rune Mastery alone.

That was when he turned his attention toward Vipermancy.

The Profession had long since reached the Legendary Grade, and the changes it had undergone gave Sylas access to methods of examining Genes that went far beyond what conventional Rune Creation could accomplish.

In particular, there was Causal Extricate.

The ability didn’t simply allow him to extract something that existed within a target’s body. It could follow the developmental history of an aspect of that existence, reaching into potential that had yet to manifest and drawing a higher-level foundation backward until it reached a state that Sylas could use.

In essence, he could take something that should have required a higher Tier to access and reconstruct a weaker version of it within the limits of his current strength.

However, there was still a problem.

Cheri was a C-tier, which placed her within the range of Sylas’ current Rune Mastery and Vipermancy, but the Nethum Bloodline clearly possessed depths that wouldn’t reveal themselves until she underwent further evolutions.

Those were precisely the depths Sylas wanted to examine.

He could use Causal Extricate to reach toward them, but the distance between understanding that something existed and possessing the authority to retrieve it remained considerable.

So he changed his approach. Rather than continuing to reconstruct Cheri exactly as she was, Sylas began modifying the clones.

He used Rune Mastery to alter their physical structures, introducing increasingly complex mutations while preserving the portions of the Nethum Bloodline he wanted to study.

His objective wasn’t to improve their strength. It was to make them Serpentes. Or, more accurately, to bring them close enough to the fundamental characteristics of the Serpentes that Vipermancy would recognize them as valid targets for its more advanced abilities.

This was far more difficult than it sounded.

The Nethum Bloodline possessed its own evolutionary foundation, and forcing it toward an entirely different Race without destroying the structures Sylas wanted to examine required an almost absurd level of precision.

The slightest mistake could alter the developmental history of a Gene, making whatever conclusions he reached afterward completely worthless.

But Sylas had time, and more importantly, he possessed the patience to use it.

The second year passed as he worked through one mutation after another, discarding countless failed iterations until he finally produced a clone whose Serpentes characteristics resonated with Vipermancy without completely destroying its original Nethum foundation.

Then he activated Causal Extricate.

The Death Seal opened the pathways of abandoned evolution, while the Omnimous maintained an independent record of the changes occurring within the clone. Sylas followed those pathways deeper, using Causal Extricate to reach toward abilities that should have remained inaccessible until higher Tiers, then drawing them backward through their developmental histories.

Some collapsed the instant he attempted to reconstruct them, their foundations too dependent upon conditions that didn’t exist at the C-tier.

Others survived, but only after losing so much of their original complexity that they became almost unrecognizable.

Sylas didn’t mind. He wasn’t attempting to create a perfect higher-tier Nethum, nor did he care whether the abilities he reconstructed were strong enough to be useful in combat.

He only wanted to understand them, and every successful reconstruction gave him another piece of information that Cheri’s original body couldn’t have provided.

The process continued through the third year, with Sylas moving between the original corpse, its countless reconstructed variations, and the deeper evolutionary pathways revealed by the Death Seal.

Sometimes, he spent months investigating a single discrepancy, only to discover that it led nowhere. Other times, a minor alteration to a clone revealed an entirely new relationship that forced him to reconsider conclusions he had reached more than a year earlier.

He never hesitated to begin again.

Eventually, Sylas reached a point where the number of viable experiments began diminishing. There were still mysteries buried within the Nethum Bloodline, some of which he couldn’t even begin to approach with his current strength, but he had already extracted everything necessary for what he intended to do.

For the first time in three years, Sylas moved.

He rose from his position, his movements unhurried as the countless Runes surrounding the laboratory began disappearing one after another.

The world had never truly understood what a motivated Sylas Grimblade was capable of. He had always been powerful, always possessed extraordinary talent, but the circumstances surrounding his rise had rarely allowed him to dedicate himself to a single objective for very long.

This time was different.

He had spent three years dissecting the foundation of a Clan that had ruled an entire Heaven for countless generations, and although he couldn’t claim to have uncovered all their secrets, he understood enough.

Sylas didn’t have the time to wait until he reached the S-tier to challenge the hegemon of a Heaven.

He was going to do it now.

Anyone who stood between him and his wife would pay a bloody price for it. The years had only made the legend of Sylas’ rampage all the more shocking. However, none of these people truly understood just yet was a furious Sylas Grimblade was capable of.