Genetic Ascension

Chapter 602: Form [Bonus]

It wasn’t just the new tag-along, ragtag group that was surprised by the next events. Even Alex, who had become quite stoic and absolutely silent since they entered the pyramid, was rendered speechless.

They began to move from puzzle to puzzle as though it was nothing more than a joke. They blazed through the dangers so quickly and suddenly that often they didn’t even get a chance to observe before Sylas had already seen through the solutions and led them through.

By this point, even the black mirror world had become simple to navigate. None of them could tell how Sylas chose the next node to enter, but there was something about his method that seemed holistic and so sure that they didn’t even have it in themselves to second guess it.

This latter half that should have taken substantially more time became like a game. They refueled their stamina and health far faster than they used it up, and not a single one of them ended up with new injuries or extra fatigue.

And that somehow included Sylas, who was taking on the brunt of the tasks moving ahead.

But why would it burden Sylas at all? The difficulty of these puzzles wasn’t beyond the Rune Enlightenment Realm, while he had Rune Essence, a tier of Rune Mastery that was an entire four levels above.

On top of that, any Wisdom he used up was so insignificant that his now passive <Maddened Enlightenment> Gene Skill covered for it.

In a shocking turn of events, the group of five reached the bottom of the black mirror world, finding themselves no longer standing on a node at all.

There was nowhere forward.

It looked as though they had run into a dead end.

For a moment, Alex and the family even wondered if Sylas had been too random with his choices in the nodes to follow. Sylas was wearing a calm expression, but that was the expression he wore no matter the given situation. It was hard to look at it and use it as a reason to relax.

Also…

Why were they at the bottom of the black mirror world? It felt logical that if there was a destination to reach, it should be at the very top. Had they been going in the wrong direction?

There was silence for a long while before Sylas nodded as though he had understood something.

Back when Sylas solved the puzzle, he used a pin board and yarn. He wrapped the yarn around the pins he stuck into the board to recreate the scribble pattern that had been on the sheet of white paper. Then, he cut it from two points, pulling the yarn until the shape of the string formed an eye and a pinecone.

This was the solution he had come up with as a youth.

It wasn’t until much later, and after his meeting with Alex, that he redid the solution and pulled the yarn up instead of across, causing it to form the body of a pyramid instead.

A three-dimensional solution.

However… that didn’t mean that the two-dimensional solution was incorrect. In fact, the two-dimensional solution was actually the harder solution to find. That was because it was the most important.

The nodes that Sylas chose while making his way down here weren’t just the ones that sped up his downward approach the most; they were also the nodes that formed the outline of the Pinecone of the Tree of Life and the Udjat Eye!

At every single one of those nodes, Sylas found an altar. And each one of those altars carried with it a different word that meant something like “Enlightenment,” but instead meant something just slightly different.

Illumination… Awakening… Epiphany… Realization… Insight… Awareness… Understanding… Perception… Clarity… Transcended… Revelation… Wisdom… Discernment…

Sylas had gathered dozens of these Ithkuil Symbols together, and he had grasped a slightly different definition from each one of them. And each one of these Symbols corresponded to a node that formed the Pinecone of Life and the Udjat Eye.

The question was…

What then should you do with them?

Sylas’ gaze flashed and one after another, the Symbols began to appear in swirls of Aether.

The world of black lit up with delicate silver-blue hues that eventually burned with a fierce green and violet instead. They had been tainted by Sylas’ Will, driven by his intent.

The symbols popped up all across the air and Sylas scanned them quickly one by one, looking for the final solution that he undoubtedly needed.

‘I’m missing some. Because we entered from a random location, I didn’t get the perfect start. That makes this list of words incomplete, and Illumination, the first Ithkuil Symbol I found, is unlikely to be part of the overall solution. But…’

He had enough of them to reverse engineer the answer.

Someone else might have to backtrack to find the rest of the words, putting their lives in danger all over again, while also wasting time.

But Sylas…

He had Rune Essence. He could feel the Runes whispering to him in ways now that they never had before. It was like he had peeled the veil of Earth’s cancerous undertones away, looking into the world of Runes the way it was meant to be looked at.

And now, with the Symbols floating in front of him, and the countless crisscrossing patterns of black and silver above his head that formed a complex web of spatial nodes, he could practically see how it all fit.

The reason you had to make it to the bottom was because only by looking up at the pyramid and these spatial nodes from this vantage point could you see the eye and the pinecone. In all likelihood, after completing this, the pyramid expected you to go back upward while following those nodes.

This was why there were random entry points. They were meant to waste your time in the first place.

But…

“Form.”

Sylas’ eyes flashed with a dense green light. The Ithkuil Symbols were stripped down, becoming Strokes, and then reformed to create Foundations, which then formed together to create…