Chapter 2417: Hell (1)

Before Sylas left, he found his mother and handed her a tome.

Isolde looked down at the bright white-gold book in her hands, the faint markings of wings and halos across its surface shifting whenever she moved it. She could feel the weight of the Will inside despite not understanding even a fraction of what it contained, and when she looked back up at Sylas, he had already turned his attention toward the Creation Tower.

"It’s a Heaven Creation Path centered around Life."

His mother stared at him for a moment, then tucked the tome against her chest. "And you’re leaving again."

"Not for long."

She narrowed her eyes, clearly remembering their conversation from not long ago, but Sylas had no intention of disappearing for months this time. He was going to Hell, dealing with whatever Slithering Madness wanted, and coming straight back unless something forced his hand.

That seemed enough for her, though barely.

Not long after, Sylas entered the Creation Tower with Cheri beside him.

He no longer needed to navigate the tower the way he once had. The moment his Will touched the surrounding Runes, the enormous structure reacted, glass floors shifting and distant mechanisms turning as pathways rearranged themselves before him. A road formed directly toward the presence he was looking for, and several minutes later they stepped into a wide study hall lined with more books than most Mortal Plane Rune Guilds possessed in their entirety.

Fanelei was seated in the middle of it all with several open tomes floating around her, but the moment she sensed Sylas, every trace of concentration vanished from her face. Her eyes lit up, her chair scraped backward, and then she crossed the room fast enough that the books behind her were still falling when she wrapped her arms around him.

"Sylas!"

Sylas looked down at her, then toward the books she had abandoned.

Fanelei slowly pulled back when she realized that was all the response she was going to get, her lips pulling downward. "Do you not like me because I’m a grandma? Is that what this is?"

Sylas didn’t answer.

"I’ve only been with one man in my entire life, you know, and he died a very long time ago." Fanelei placed her hands on her hips. "You have a Lust Seed now. You have plenty to go around, so stop being stingy."

Cheri stood off to the side without much of a reaction. Compared to some of the things she had seen within the Genesis Covenant, an older woman openly trying to seduce a younger man hardly registered, but what did catch her attention was who the woman was.

Fanelei’s aura had changed considerably since Cheri first met her. Her status as a Legend had finally begun catching up to the environment of the Demi-God Plane, and standing before her now felt little different from standing before some of the absolute powerhouses of the Genesis Covenant, yet this woman was practically throwing herself at Sylas while he couldn’t even be bothered to respond.

Cheri understood why she herself was wary of Sylas. She had watched him survive the assault on the Genesis Covenant, watched her Guild crumble around him, and seen enough since then to know that offending him was foolish, but even that victory had relied on outside items and circumstances that weren’t entirely his own strength.

But Fanelei was an A-tier Legend whose strength was finally beginning to settle into what it should have always been on the Demi-God Plane, and yet the interest in her eyes whenever she looked at Sylas went beyond simple gratitude. Cheri found herself studying Sylas from the side for a moment, wondering if there was something she still hadn’t understood.

Sylas ignored both women and looked toward the floating tomes instead.

Fanelei had spent the last week trying to fix the most obvious hole in her foundation. By Mortal Plane standards her Rune Mastery was extraordinary, but that meant very little here when she had yet to reach even F-tier Rune Creation, let alone anything that could properly match the A-tier power she wielded.

Technically, she had more than enough comprehension to cross that first barrier. With the resources of the Creation Tower laid out before her and the experience gathered over so many lives, reaching F-tier Rune Creation itself wasn’t the difficult part, choosing the wrong foundation was.

She still didn’t know what Path suited her.

Once that choice was made, changing it later would be far more troublesome than waiting now, so Sylas didn’t see much wrong with her caution. He had spent enough time rebuilding his own foundations to understand better than most how expensive a poor decision could become.

"We’re going back to Hell."

The playfulness vanished from Fanelei’s face.

Her gaze sharpened, and Sylas expected some hesitation after everything she had experienced there, but what he found instead was a faint eagerness. Fanelei glanced toward the books surrounding her, then waved a hand and sent them all flying back toward their shelves.

"Okay."

Sylas turned and left.

A private room opened for him several floors deeper into the tower, one normally meant for Rune Creators who needed complete isolation. Once Cheri and Fanelei entered behind him, Sylas sealed the doors and placed a palm against the wall.

The tower answered immediately.

Runes peeled apart beneath his hand as Sylas began modifying the room, removing layers meant to anchor it to the Creation World while reinforcing the barriers that separated it from everything else. As the Ancestor of Creation, the tower gave him enough authority to alter functions that would have taken ordinary Rune Masters years just to understand, and what Sylas needed wasn’t particularly complicated now that he knew what he was looking for.

Hell wasn’t somewhere that could be reached by simply traveling far enough. Its location was everywhere, much like the Void, existing beneath the layer of ordinary reality rather than at some measurable point inside it. He could stand an infinite distance from the place he had entered Hell before or be a single step away, and functionally there would be no difference at all.

The Void was the embodiment of nothingness, while Hell was something different, a realm built through Hell Rune Creation and given enough structure to exist beneath everything else. Followers of Madness who failed to outlast their Keys were dragged there upon death, which meant the connection between Hell and ordinary reality was already ubiquitous.

That was why the Creation Tower was useful.

The Creation World itself already existed in an unusual relationship with normal space, everywhere and nowhere at once, and Sylas had authority over one of the few structures capable of taking advantage of that fact. He didn’t need to cross an impossible distance, he only needed to strip away the layers separating one overlapping reality from another.

The final Rune shifted.

The wall ahead of them folded inward, darkness spreading from its center until a portal formed where solid material had been moments before. A familiar pressure seeped through, heavy and ancient, carrying a Will Sylas recognized immediately.

It was undoubtedly Hell.

Sylas stepped through first.

Fanelei followed without hesitation, and Cheri entered behind her.