Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 292

Chapter 292: Proficiency

Sylas actually failed on his first attempt, something that he hadn't expected. He thought that the moment he understood the purpose of the challenge, this would just be a simple matter of completing it.

This time, it wasn't a matter of control. The trial didn't ask him to complete the lock, per se. It only asked him to deduce it. The pieces of the lock would then form on their own. So the only person that Sylas could blame was himself for coming up with the wrong result.

'No... my answer should be correct, but I'm still missing something. What is it...?'

Sylas didn't immediately try again. He watched as the pieces of the lock disassembled themselves, lost in his own thoughts.

For some reason, his thoughts flashed to the scene he had witnessed the first time he laid eyes on Earth's Runes. They were twisted, chained, and in some cases, they had cancer-like growths on them that looked unnatural. Even without having seen Runes before, Sylas was still certain that there was nothing about what he was witnessing that was good.

Sylas shook his head. He didn't feel like these things were related, except for the fact that he had an innate desire to understand more about Runes if for no other reason than to understand what had been done to Earth.

'Done to...'

Sylas' gaze flashed.

He thought of those cancerous growths and found them interesting.

If someone messed with Earth's Runes, it made sense for them to be chained, or even incomplete, but the growths... that seemed odd. It was almost as though Earth's Runes had been poisoned or had become diseased. It was like they were...

'Living?'

A realization overcame Sylas and he realized something. Had he been too precise?

After some thought, Sylas applied his solutions again, but this time, he increased the degree of freedom and loosened his precision.

As expected, this time, the task was cleared. In fact, it wasn't just the task, but the entire third door disappeared and Sylas found himself back on the path once again.

'Interesting... I don't actually think that that's the lesson the door wanted to teach me...'

The problem with Sylas' first answer was that it was too good. It didn't allow for the Rune to "breathe" and treated it like a real key with precise dimensions that could only work for equally as precise locks.

But he was treating Runes too mechanically. No two trees were identical, no two blades of grass, no two creatures, no two rocks. Nature had patterns, but even within those patterns, there was a degree of variation.

Runes were the same. No two Runes were perfectly identical, and even within a closed system of a single Rune, there would be variation as it interacted with the world.

Sylas felt that he had touched on something profound.

'If I create Runes with this in mind, the pressure on my mind will lessen considerably. My Rune construction doesn't need to be perfect and stringent. It's like writing. So long as it's legible, it will work... within reason.'