Chapter 2435: Genuine

Caelum’s condition was deteriorating faster than Sylas expected, the red spreading through his eyes until even the flesh surrounding the mechanical portions looked inflamed.

His golden formations still carried B-tier strength, but the precision behind them had begun slipping, every response growing heavier and more wasteful as Greed continuously pressed against his Will.

Even his use of Time had changed, no longer selecting the smallest possible interval necessary to accomplish something when twisting a much larger section of the battlefield would achieve the same result.

Sylas noticed the difference after Caelum reversed one of his movements for the third time. The first two uses had been precise enough to affect little more than Sylas himself, but this one caught several meters of broken obsidian along with him, briefly restoring shattered pieces of the battlefield to where they had been several exchanges earlier before the effect collapsed.

Caelum had gained strength since devouring the five Fallen Madness Disciples, but Greed was making him careless with that strength.

That made the black cylinder considerably easier to take.

Sylas had kept track of it since Caelum first released the five failures, along with everywhere Caelum had stood while handling it. There was no reason to reach for the device directly when Caelum was watching it closely enough to react, especially when the man had already shown Sylas that he was willing to distort increasingly large sections of Time just to prevent him from gaining anything.

Sylas shifted backward beneath another golden formation, allowing the edge of it to catch his shoulder before folding Space and appearing several dozen meters to the side. Caelum followed without hesitation, his domain expanding ahead of him as another temporal formation formed, while Sylas continued giving ground in a path that looked considerably less deliberate than it was.

Three exchanges later, Sylas stopped.

Caelum didn’t notice where.

There was no reason he should have. The battlefield had already been torn apart several times over, and they had crossed this section long enough ago that even a normal person with an excellent memory would have struggled to distinguish one stretch of black stone from another.

Sylas remembered exactly what had happened here. Caelum had stood in this position while opening the cylinder just moments earlier.

A loose emerald Stroke formed beside Sylas and shot toward the device in the distance.

Caelum reacted immediately and Time twisted.

Sylas felt the formation spread far wider than it needed to, Greed pushing Caelum toward the most forceful answer rather than the most efficient one. The surrounding battlefield lurched backward through its previous states as broken stone climbed from the ground, displaced Aether returned along old paths, and the cylinder itself was caught within the backflow.

That was what Sylas had been waiting for.

He didn’t resist the temporal reversal. Instead, he adjusted his position by less than half a step as the cylinder retraced the history Caelum had forced upon it, moving backward through the moments since it had been opened.

For a fraction of a second, the device occupied the exact point in space where Caelum had once held it.

Except Caelum wasn’t standing there anymore.

Sylas was.

His fingers closed around the cylinder as though it had simply appeared in his palm.

Caelum’s temporal formation collapsed a moment later, the battlefield snapping back toward the present while the device remained in Sylas’ grasp. The red in Caelum’s eyes seemed to deepen as he finally understood what Sylas had done: there had been no attempt to overpower his Time Rune Creation at all.

Sylas had simply decided where Caelum would send the cylinder.

"Give it back."

Sylas ignored him and turned more of his attention toward the device, allowing several loose Spacetime Strokes to occupy Caelum in his place. The cylinder was considerably more interesting from this distance because, while Runes were certainly integrated into its architecture, they weren’t the true foundation holding everything together.

Beneath them were circuits, layered control systems, and structures compact enough that Sylas wouldn’t have understood what he was looking at before studying beneath the Omnimous.

Sylas pressed his Will into it and immediately encountered the first security layer, but it had clearly been designed under the assumption that anyone attempting to access the device would use its intended interfaces.

He had no reason to respect that restriction, so his Will slipped beneath the Rune protections and followed the actual hardware instead, tracing the changes in current and state until he found the boundary where physical function became software.

The Omnimous had taught him circuit programming first and more advanced methods afterward, including approaches that used particles and their paired states as the foundation of instruction.

This device wasn’t identical to anything he had learned, but software had to become understandable commands somewhere along the line, and once Sylas found where information was stored and where instruction began, the unfamiliar architecture became a matter of pattern recognition.

Caelum attacked again while Sylas worked, forcing a wall of compressed Time around him in an attempt to reclaim the cylinder. Sylas shifted the relationship between two nearby moments and sent the formation folding into itself, leaving Caelum to deal with the contradiction while his Will continued moving deeper through the device.

The first layer of information was exactly what Sylas expected from something designed for collection. There were Will profiles, environmental readings, containment stability, timestamps, and long strings of measurements whose purposes weren’t immediately clear, but the device had stored far more than information about the five Fallen Madness Disciples currently outside it. Its software had inherited reference structures from a much larger network.

Sylas followed those structures backward instead of bothering with the surface records, reading how files referenced old templates, then how those templates referenced previous collections.

The information wasn’t arranged for someone browsing through it, but the relationships between the files formed their own trail, allowing Sylas to reconstruct portions of the history from what the software expected to find rather than what it openly displayed.

Thousands of numbered entries gradually took shape. Most followed a consistent pattern, with collection orders appearing first, followed by capture information, transportation records, and finally confirmation that the samples had reached their destination.

Others ended in rejection, termination, or failure, but one older entry broke the pattern badly enough that Sylas’ attention stopped on it.

The Will signature attached to experiment numbered 01114 caught his attention. It once again matched the Will signature of The Rat, but unlike the Fallen Madness Disciples here, it was exact, not just close.

It was also the same one that Sylas had encountered during the Summoning from a young man who tried to kill him named "Grin".

What mattered more, though, was the metadata surrounding its collection. There had been no assignment for 01114, almost like it had just disappeared during transport. The carrier who captured it hadn’t been looking for it, and there was no target profile attached to its entry before containment. It was like the Professor hadn’t realized 01114 existed at all.

The device had simply encountered something that satisfied its automated collection parameters and swept it up along the way, only for the record to end later with a containment breach and a failed recovery notice.

01114 had escaped before reaching the Professor.

Sylas looked toward Scurrying Madness again as another chain strained against the cyborg’s strength. That single detail removed the largest flaw in the conclusion he had been building, because it meant the Professor hadn’t created 01114 at all. Scurrying had.

The five Fallen Madness Disciples Caelum collected belonged to the Professor’s work, but 01114, and others like it, had come from somewhere else entirely. Scurrying Madness had been creating its own variations of Greed from inside this prison, pushing different Wills and vessels toward the same result until one had finally become capable of surviving beyond the restrictions placed on its creator.

That iteration had eventually crossed Sylas’ path during Earth’s Summoning. At the time, Sylas had only understood part of what Rat left behind inside him, and he had long since destroyed that defective Greed Seed along with the deeper roots it attempted to establish.

The Seed he possessed now had nothing to do with 01114. It had come much later, taken from the Scorpion lineage within the Beast Emperor Sanctum and representing something far closer to the original authority of Greed.

But that hardly mattered now. What did matter was that Sylas carried now was the thing Scurrying had spent iteration after iteration trying to reproduce without ever truly possessing it. A genuine Virtue of Greed.

All this time, Scurrying Madness had been trying to create at incarnation that could represent Greed on his behalf and become the first of the Arcane Madnesses since Pride to be in full control over his own path.

Sylas had ruined that in the past by killing The Rat, the one who had successfully become the representation of Greed. He had been so close to succeeding back then...

But now, Sylas would give him another opportunity.

Scurrying Madness pulled against its chains again, and Sylas finally understood the hunger filling those enormous yellow eyes. If the cyborg obtained his Virtue Seed, it wouldn’t need another 01114 or another thousand failures searching for a different expression of Greed.

It could change the foundation of what it was. And the prison had only been built to contain what it was now.