Alex stared at the message on his screen.
'Psycho Syl sure is something else. Grade 10 Silver, huh? How'd he manage that?'
For a long while, Alex seemed to have disappeared off of the face of the planet. As for where he was, probably only he knew.
Well… he wasn't confident enough to say that, not with a monster like Sylas lurking around everything.
'I don't know how you managed to screw Legacy over as well, but betting on you really is the only way the cards don't go belly up.'
Alex grinned. Thanks to Sylas, he really had flown under the radar all this time. Now, he could get exactly what he wanted.
Before Alex, there were five statues… The Great Ape, the Clypsian, the Dogon, the Dinos, and finally…
Alex's eyes landed on the statue masked in shadows.
'You'll probably try to kill me for this one day, but hey… a man's gotta have dreams of his own. I'll have to use you as a shield for a little longer.'
Reaching forward, Alex selected the shadow statue.
Almost at the same instant, the smiling, playful look on his expression vanished. His face was covered by a shadowy mask, and all that was left were a pair of stone-cold eyes.
He had no intention of failing.
**
In an irony of ironies, Sylas had once again left Earth before he could see the message. He had no tangible measuring stick for how much he had helped Earth at all.
But there was another question to be asked. If the longevity of the Ancestors was related to the plummeting of Earth's potential…
Just how much higher was Earth's potential in the past?
Unfortunately, that question was the furthest thing from Sylas' mind right now because he was in his own bind.
The Beast Master Garden was only meant to open at certain times. Activating it beforehand wasn't supposed to be allowed.
Sylas had forced its hand.
At first, he thought he would have to use his Rune Spark Mastery to force the ticket's hand. That was his original plan.
What he didn't expect was for Earth to make it so much easier on him. Not only did it help him to force the ticket to activate, but it had even provided the energy itself.
Luckily, Earth had the wealth of energy a powerful, budding world should now. This energy didn't even remotely harm it. It was akin to a drop in the ocean that was taken out, only to be replaced by a torrential storm of rain.
It would be very difficult to drain Earth's energy like Sylas before again.
All that seemed to work out well, even to the point Earth had even helped him take Lorien along as well. Everything was working well…
Until he actually got here.
He found himself stuck in an odd limbo. He couldn't breathe, and telling down from up was impossible. In fact, he could barely feel Lorien over his shoulder right this moment.
His Luck blared warnings at him. He knew that if he was too careless, he would end up falling into the depths of space and be lost. There would be no saving him at that point.
Without a world to tether himself to, his Will wouldn't work, which meant his telekinesis also wouldn't if he had no method to propel himself, he stood no chance.
Plus, there were an assortment of other issues. Even if he could use his Aether to replace his need to breathe, what about the frigid cold? The radiation? The shocking distances? Even if he could move, what good was even 100,000 Speed if the distance in question was light years?
But Sylas remained calm. His confidence in himself was absolute.
Almost instantly, he found the solution.
There.
His Will pierced forward.
…
Sylas tumbled to the ground, the injured Lorien falling a small distance from him.
The first thing he noticed was that the ground was quite soft. The second thing he noticed was the darkness.
It wasn't a normal darkness, the sort one might find in the middle of the night. Instead, it was almost like this world had no light source at all. There was no moon or sun up above. And yet, Sylas could see the faintest of the faintest outlines of things around him.
'Aether?'
Sylas had experienced something like this before during the Trial. On the first night, the world seemed to still be arranging itself and had only started to awaken the creatures after the fact.
But now that Sylas thought back to it, that event was very odd. The fact that the trial wasn't already prepared at the start was… peculiar.
Thinking back, it must have been because Earth had been bent and twisted in too many ways. The Runes were so cancer-laden that even the system had trouble making good use of them.
Seeing the Aether slowly gathering here, Sylas got some of the same feel.
'I see… the reason this garden takes so long to open is because it was designed by relatively weak Rune Masters. There are too many imperfections, so the Aether takes a while to properly gather up—usually many years, even decades. This should be a mirror of what happened on the first night of the Trial…'
Sylas' gaze flickered. He felt that he could actually take advantage of this.
Originally, he wanted to enter this world to give his Serpentes a chance to level up. If he could do that here instead…
'These Runes are powerful. If I'm correct, they're F-Grade Runes, but they were drawn by E-Grade masters… maybe D-Grade, so the Aether behind them is exceptional. But the Runes themselves… are shoddy. I can definitely control them.
'In that case… let's clean out this place.'
Getting Gogo to Level 50 with just this place alone was a pipe dream. Nosphaleen might be impossible as well, though more likely. But Sylas had a feeling that he could help get the Bone-Tailed Lizard and the Glarisirth up to Level 50 in one go here.
If he was going to piss the galaxy off, he would need some backup, at least.