Genetic Ascension

Sylas stood in silence. It was already too late to move, his parents were gone.

More people started to vanish afterward, but they were far less important to him. Or, more accurately, the majority of them were people he had never spared a single thought toward.

What just happened?

Sylas was certainly not ready for something like this. It was amongst the very last things he expected to happen.

He thought he had grown beyond the point of things catching him off guard in this world. He thought he was ready for every possibility, every iteration of what could possibly occur… And then something like this swept out from right under his nose.

For this to not only happen, but for it to also happen on Earth, the place he had the most power he could possibly ever have.

Murder flashed in Sylas' eyes, streams of violet and black lightning erupting around him.

"Scram." The Crimson Eye shuddered. Sylas didn't even speak that loudly, but it felt like there was something inside of him that caused every piece and fold of reality to vibrate to the cadence of his words.

The world shook, and the Heaven System, realizing that there wasn't anything it should be here for, was forced to oblige and shrink away to nothingness.

Sylas' jaw clenched, the space around him trembling.

There was no malice in what just happened to his parents. He didn't believe that they had been targeted by anyone for their lives. From what he could tell, whatever change had just occurred was directly related to their breakthrough.

If not for the presence of the Crimson Eye, Sylas would have been able to stop it before it happened. After all, he was the Progenitor of Earth. There was no place other than maybe his own Hibernation Realm that he had more direct control over.

Some other mysterious power coming in and teleporting his parents away would have been impossible.

For that alone, if Sylas had had the power to do it, he would have destroyed the Crimson Eye.

The problem wasn't that his parents were in immediate danger right now. The problem was that the moment they left Earth, the variables for what might happen multiplied several times over.

And if his enemies found out that his parents were just out and about.

Sylas found himself clenching his fists. His senses had already gone over toward where the disappearances had taken place, but their exact location was already too far away for him to pinpoint. His senses just couldn't possibly stretch that far.

And the Rune Mastery level involved in something like this was too high even for him to see through, and by the time he could, there would be too little evidence left to decipher what was going on.

Sylas was absolutely furious. The very mountain beneath him trembled, and yet there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it.

First his little sister had been taken out right from under his nose, and now his parents.

Sylas took a step and vanished.

When Sylas appeared again, he found himself in front of his grandfather. Magnus was sitting in silence, looking like a man in his early thirties, once again in the prime of his maturity.

He was still lost in enlightenment and Sylas didn't interrupt him. There was no need, what was done was already done.

However, what Sylas did note were the dried leaves forming around his grandfather. His Runes were manifesting in beautiful autumn leaves, but by the time they fluttered to the ground, they were brown, grey, and dead, collapsing to ash and then being whisked away into nothingness.

Sylas sensed an energy sweep over his grandfather, but as though deciding against it after a moment, the energy disappeared. But then his grandfather would have another moment of enlightenment, and it would return once more, only to choose to disappear afterward nonetheless.

This process happened over and over again, and by the time Sylas had experienced it for the third time, he felt like he understood what was happening.

That energy was a Will sensory sort of energy. It was matching itself to compatible Wills and reacting accordingly. But then, following this, it checked for age.

However, it wasn't checking for objective age. It was checking for age in the same way the Weaver Guild had checked for Sylas'. Meaning… it was measuring the length of time one had been learning Rune Mastery.

For Sylas' parents, even if they picked up on something when the Summoning began, their Runic Age couldn't have been more than two years.

For them to have stretched enlightenment and comprehended a Path of their own, to the Will Sense that picked them out, it would have looked as though someone had reached Pure Spark Mastery in a handful of years.

If his parents had never bothered to learn any Rune Mastery at all, then it would look even more ridiculous, because it would look like they just started to learn Runes a few minutes ago and instantly carved out their own path.

But what this meant for Sylas' grandfather was something more shocking than that.

Logically, his grandfather should be the same. At most, two years. With the enlightenment he was having now, it was impossible that he was too old to be considered.

Though the standards of the Demi-God Plane were higher than the Mortal Plane, reaching Pure Spark Mastery with a Runic Age of less than two years was still truly rapid. It wasn't the fastest of the fastest, but it was still fast.

So, there were only two potential explanations…

Either the Path Magnus had selected was so exceptional that the standards of the organization that picked him out were far higher than the ones that had selected his parents, or maybe some combination of the factors they had spoken about before. Or… Magnus' Runic Age was somehow far, far older. Old enough that it would extend before the Summoning even began. Old enough that it would fool these unintelligent scans into thinking his Runic Age was far older than it truly was.

And if that was the case…

It was truly ridiculous.