Chapter 2506: The Return

The Hollow Ship crossed the boundary between the Cryst Heaven and the Poise Heaven, its enormous body slipping through the spatial distortions around it without the slightest trouble.

However, anyone who had seen the Hollow Ship before would have had a hard time recognizing it now.

What used to be a vessel built mainly for stealth and transport now looked like an enormous yacht made of condensed starlight. Its sleek silver body was surrounded by several magnificent rings, each one rotating around it at a different angle.

Countless intricate patterns flowed across its surface. But, instead of ordinary Runes, much of the structure was held up by the strange Aether manipulation of the Haloryn.

The result was a vessel big enough to comfortably carry billions. Despite its size, it moved through the void with an elegance that many of the God Plane’s finest treasures would struggle to match.

Alex stood near the front of the ship, looking out at the Poise Heaven spreading before him with a rather complicated expression.

A notification had appeared in his mind not long ago. He’d known it would show up eventually. He just hadn’t expected it this soon.

[Nethum Gene Lock Activated]

[Generational Return Threshold Reached]

[More Than 50% of Eligible Descendants Have Returned]

[Remaining Return Period: 3 Months]

Alex rolled his eyes.

"Of course. Of fucking course."

If Sylas hadn’t more or less forced him to abandon his original preparations and run his plan ahead of schedule, he would have been completely screwed.

He’d been counting on the other Nethum descendants having enough patience to use the full return period. Apparently, half his generation had decided that getting home as fast as possible mattered more than actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.

What happened to slow is smooth, and smooth is fast? Were these bastards even Nethum anymore?

Alex shook his head. Though, as he looked back over the enormous vessel, he couldn’t help but feel a little pleased with himself.

He had gotten a lot more done than he expected, especially considering how little time he’d had to prepare.

The 5,000 years he’d spent inside the Summoned World hadn’t exactly been pleasant. If Nathan knew the full extent of what he’d done in that time, there was a good chance his friend would never look at him the same way again.

Alex had let the world fail its Summoning twice more.

All the while, he had carefully protected his own foundation and set up secret factions that could survive the jump between cycles. Pulling that off took an extraordinary amount of preparation, especially while making sure the System never caught on to how much he was interfering.

But, the failures had a purpose.

Every cycle let him study how the world’s Races developed, pick out the most promising Bloodlines, and slowly steer their evolution, in ways that would normally have taken countless generations.

Looking back on it now, Alex actually felt a little guilty. He had basically played God.

He had carefully selected individuals with the traits he wanted, pushed certain Bloodlines to combine, and kept refining the results until the descendants started showing the qualities he’d spent so long looking for.

Once those results showed up, he separated the most promising talents from the rest. Then, he gave them the resources and training they needed to develop. And that was before even counting the foundation he’d brought in from Earth’s oceans.

Alex had spent a lot of effort studying the hidden Bloodline legacy buried beneath those waters. He hadn’t been able to draw out its full potential, but he’d gotten enough to use as an extra foundation for his experiments.

The combination had produced results that even he had trouble believing.

The Haloryn were already an extraordinary Race. Their innate comprehension of Aether let them do things that conventional Rune Masters would call impossible.

The descendants Alex had cultivated, however, were something else entirely. Their abilities weren’t limited to their Race’s natural talents anymore. After thousands of years of selective development, their comprehension had reached a level that made even Alex wonder whether he’d gone too far.

Of course, none of that would have mattered without Sylas. That was the frustrating part.

Alex could spend 5,000 years developing a Race, build an entire civilization around its abilities, and raise an army whose foundation would make even some God Plane Clans jealous. Yet, the moment he brought them into the Real World, there was a good chance all of it would get stolen.

The Genes of his Haloryn were far too valuable.

Without proper protection, anyone with enough comprehension could examine their Bloodlines, pick apart the secrets hidden inside, and reproduce everything Alex had spent millennia creating.

This was why Gene Locks mattered so much.

Most people thought of them as a way to keep valuable Genes from being stolen. However, that was only part of it. A complicated enough Gene Lock could also hide the underlying structure of a Bloodline, keeping outsiders from understanding exactly what made it special.

The Nethum were a perfect example. Their descendants could wander through the Heavens without giving away their Clan’s secrets. Even people powerful enough to sense something unusual in their bodies would struggle to understand what they were looking at...

Unless they ran into someone like Sylas with enough time on his hands.

Still, Alex needed something like that for his Haloryn. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly his field of expertise, and his technology couldn’t make up for all the gaps in his understanding.

Sylas, on the other hand, had spent 3 entire years doing almost nothing but studying those very secrets. When Alex finally went to him for help, the bastard pulled off in a handful of days what Alex suspected would have taken him another few centuries.

It was enough to make a man question the point of living.

Alex sighed and turned his attention back to the Poise Heaven.

He’d thought about stopping at a few merchant guilds along the way, maybe to make some connections or trade off some of the treasures he’d collected. In the end, though, he decided against it.

There wasn’t much point.

The resources he’d gotten from a God-tier Summoning were already on a completely different level from most of what an ordinary merchant guild could offer. After 5,000 years of careful preparation, he had equipped his army with things that even the Nethum would struggle to figure out at a glance.

More importantly, he had dug up an enormous amount of his own hidden potential.

The Gene Lock in his body had kept unwinding as he got stronger, revealing secrets he doubted most Nethum descendants would ever get the chance to discover before going back to the Clan.

His Demonic heritage had made that process more complicated. However, it had also let him come at certain problems from angles that an ordinary member of the Clan would never have.

His most important secrets, though, were related to the mysterious Race statue at the bottom of Earth’s oceans.

For the first time, Alex felt like he had something worthwhile to show for himself.

He wasn’t stupid enough to think that 5,000 years of preparation would let him take on the entire Nethum Clan. But, he wasn’t coming back as some helpless descendant who had to beg for a place in their hierarchy, either.

He had his own foundation, his own people, and enough hidden cards that even he was starting to look forward to seeing how the Clan would react.

Alex grinned.

It was time to go home.

**

Deep inside the Hollow Ship, Sylas was still seated in silent meditation, eyes closed as countless streams of thought moved through the vast expanse of his mind.

Almost 3 weeks had passed since they left Earth. Even so, he still hadn’t fully recovered from the toll of his 3-year seclusion.

The problem wasn’t physical exhaustion, and it wasn’t something his Healing Factor could fix.

For 3 straight years, he had pushed his mind to its absolute limits, using the Omnimous, Death Seal and Rune Mastery to examine parts of existence that his current Tier should never have been able to understand. Even with Void Sovereign giving him an extraordinary amount of mental capacity, the burden had piled up.

Then, just as he’d started to recover, Alex had come to him with another problem. Building a true Gene Lock was far more complicated than understanding an existing one.

Sylas had spent 3 years studying the Nethum’s methods. However, applying those principles to an entirely different Bloodline meant rebuilding much of what he’d learned from the ground up.

He had succeeded. The extra strain, though, had set his recovery back considerably. Now, all he could do was wait.

Fortunately, his mind was recovering, and it was getting better faster with every passing day.

The countless thoughts that used to move through his consciousness with effortless precision were slowly getting their old clarity back, and the deeper layers of his Will were starting to settle into place. It wouldn’t be much longer.

Sylas stayed perfectly still, leaving the approach to the Nethum Clan entirely in Alex’s hands.

He had given the man a chance to show what he could do. So far, Alex had done a lot better than Sylas expected.

If the Nethum were fortunate, that would continue. Maybe Alex could handle everything himself, and Sylas would have no reason to get involved in whatever internal struggles were waiting for them.

But, if the Clan made the mistake of getting in the way of his goals, or if they dragged things out until his mind had fully recovered, there would be very little reason for Sylas to keep being patient.

He had already lost 3 years. He had no intention of losing another.

If the Nethum were lucky, Alex would deal with everything before Sylas opened his eyes.

If they weren’t, Sylas wouldn’t be responsible for what happened next.