Chapter 2367: Eat

Sylas didn’t seem to care about what he had just done in the slightest.

He had already said it before, no one in this world could stop him from killing who he wanted to kill, and the power of his eyes had finally reached a level where even the God Plane wouldn’t be able to casually dismiss them.

Deconstructing a Rune Mesh of that quality should have been beyond him, because although it had been anchored to the body of a C-tier, the structure itself had been fueled by God Aura and reinforced by the Will of an ancestor whose existence stood far above the Demi-God Plane.

Yet Sylas had torn it apart without much difficulty.

The more important change wasn’t some fancy new function added to his eyes, because Runeweaver still did what Runeweaver had always done.

The Weaving Irises constructed and joined, the Unravelling Pupils separated and dismantled, while Sylas’ evolution had simply driven both halves to a level that would have been absurd before.

More than that, the bottleneck between his Will and his eyes had finally disappeared, allowing him to pour far more through them without destroying the very vessel meant to express that power.

Even projecting the Life and Death Seals through his eyes should have shredded them in the past.Now they could hold the pressure without approaching their breaking point.

Sylas looked at Orithrael’s limp body for only a moment before opening the Hibernation Realm and tossing the Heavenly Serpent inside. The corpse disappeared without ceremony, and his voice carried through the Realm a heartbeat later.

"Eat."

Dry Mouth, Iskaleth, and Sarethvane all looked toward the corpse at once.

How much they could gain from it would depend entirely on them, because Sylas had no intention of spoon-feeding them the answer. In Orithrael’s final moments, Thaeloryn’s Will had fused directly into his body, and even though Sylas had severed that connection, the process had left changes behind that strengthened Orithrael’s relationship with his own ancestry in ways an ordinary Heavenly Serpent wouldn’t possess.

For a Beast, the corpse of a God was the boon of a lifetime.

Bloodline alone could drive enormous growth, especially when that blood came from a Race that considered itself supreme among all Serpentes.

If Dry Mouth, Iskaleth, and Sarethvane saw nothing more than stronger blood, however, then Sylas would have been disappointed enough to wonder why he had chosen them in the first place.

He closed the Hibernation Realm and turned toward the cave.

His steps were slow, but distance seemed to collapse beneath them, every measured movement carrying him across stretches of ground that should have required far more time.

Whatever remained of his fury had settled into something colder now, and he wasn’t thinking about Thaeloryn, the Heavenly Serpent Race, or the fact that he had almost certainly earned himself another powerful enemy on the God Plane.

None of that mattered right now.

On the distant moon, Vaelith continued staring toward the planet until her attention finally shifted toward Yamero. The Rune Serpentes had relaxed again now that the immediate battle was over, though something about his expression suggested he was still replaying what Sylas had done to that ancestral projection.

"Are you really not him?"

Yamero looked toward her with a bitter expression.

"At this point, I wish I was him." He sighed and adjusted his massive body against the moon’s surface before his usual confidence started returning. "Luckily for me, my ego is enormous, so he can have his little victories for now, because once I make my final breakthrough, I’ll be glorious."

Vaelith’s lip twitched.

Yamero was already an A-tier. Just how much more room for growth did he think he had?

Down below, Sylas stepped through the cave entrance again, and this time no one dared to interrupt him. The distant Mesmeryx remained where they were, the memory of tens of thousands of their C-tier generation dying in a single command still fresh enough that even their fury couldn’t overcome the fear surrounding him.

Sylas ignored them.

The cave narrowed around him before gradually opening again, its stone walls becoming smoother and wetter as a faint, cool mist drifted through the darkness. Then the passage widened all at once, revealing an oasis hidden deep within the planet, surrounded by pale stone and luminous vegetation that reflected pink, violet, and blue light across the surface of still water.

A woman sat at its center.

She was naked, seated atop an enormous lotus whose translucent petals floated without disturbing the water beneath it. Her skin was covered in scales that mirrored those of the Mesmeryx, but they were so thin and transparent that they looked more like a layer of gauze draped directly across her body, catching the surrounding colors without hiding anything beneath them.

Nosphaleen’s eyes were open.

She looked at Sylas with a deadpan expression as he entered, neither startled nor pleased to see him, and for a moment the two simply regarded one another across the oasis.

Sylas didn’t slow down, stepping directly onto the water and walking across its surface as though he had no intention of acknowledging the silence she was trying to impose.

Then he walked past her.

Nosphaleen’s gaze shifted slightly.

Sylas stopped behind the lotus and looked toward the small of her back, but his attention had nothing to do with the curve of her body. He had noticed the anomaly the moment he entered the oasis, a foreign continuity in her structure that didn’t match the rest of what he understood about her.

Her spine continued beyond where it should have ended.

It extended from the small of her back like a thin tail, passing beneath the lotus and disappearing into the water below. The connection wasn’t merely physical either, because something within it carried Will, Aether, and a deeper thread Sylas couldn’t identify from the surface.

His eyes narrowed. That was a tether.

Whatever had kept Nosphaleen connected to the Mesmeryx, whatever had allowed her to remain part of this Race even after becoming something entirely different in the eyes of the Efivara, it was down there.

Sylas didn’t ask her about it. He didn’t need permission.

He stepped off the surface of the water and allowed himself to fall.

Nosphaleen’s deadpan expression finally changed, her eyes widening as she turned sharply toward him. Her lips parted as though she meant to call out, but Sylas had already disappeared beneath the surface before she could make a sound.