Genetic Ascension

The Monkey King thought himself clever, and maybe in some odd, certain respect, he was. He had probably faced off against Sylas' future self, which meant he also knew of the Grimblade Bloodline.

What was the Grimblade Bloodline best at if not swallowing up Wills?

To put a battlefield of Wills in front of Sylas like this, and expect him to just keep taking lumps and deaths one after another would have been the pinnacle of foolishness, and the Monkey King was no fool.

That was why instead of taking the fluctuations of the Split Realm as a flaw, the Monkey King used it as a strength.

Supreme Commander Ros had been the first to attack Sylas, but after she was finished, she was suddenly pulled back through time, sent to her starting position, and had to rush forward to attack him again.

After everything that happened, that attack was only the second one that Supreme Commander Ros had been able to levy, and it didn't even get the chance to land in the first place.

It was truly clever. By trapping the Wills in a time loop, they were in a tangled mess of spacetime that wasn't easy to access. What was even more clever was that the time loop wasn't just stretched across the present or recent past, but instead to the Golden Battlefield that Sylas was familiar with a long distance in the future.

Not only were these Wills displaying infinite tendencies, they were also effectively stretched across what should have been basically infinite time in Sylas' eyes.

To make a complex situation simple to understand, trying to absorb these Wills while they were stretched out so far was basically like trying to suck up a river that was as thin as a single atom's width with nothing but a straw. Whether you stood in the same place and sucked, or you tried to move the straw down its length, you were going to have a dreadful time no matter what.

That was the situation that Sylas was in, and this was the very situation that the Monkey King believed would do him in.

The problem with that, of course, was that if it was done, it could likewise be undone.

What was curious to Sylas about the Golden Battlefield was that while it looked like it had time aspects, it had done everything in Space. In fact, that was part of the reason Sylas had been able to unearth a new path forward for his Spacetime Rune Path in the first place.

The only way the likes of the Monkey King could control space and time was by keeping them separate. If they interacted, there would be too many holes to find, too many loopholes to take advantage of.

As such, the real reason why it seemed like the Golden Battlefield was one of Spacetime, and yet there was only space that could be sensed, was because all of the timelines the Wills here were experiencing were personal to them.

Their attacks seemed coordinated and like they were a well oiled machine, each one taking a brief instant to attack before being sent back in time and allowing the next one to take up the next attack.

In reality, this coordination was so perfect only because their timelines couldn't be allowed to interact lest they clash and ruin one another.

The moment Sylas realized that, ripping their Will out of their timeline was as easy as breathing.

Time was so highly dependent on space. When others spoke of speed and relativity, they were actually just speaking about how much space was being crossed and what that did to time as a result.

However, one could just as easily say the vice versa.

The problem with all of the things happening here is that Time and Space were never separate to begin with. They were altogether known as Spacetime, and it was impossible to change the parameters of one without also influencing the other.

The idea that the Monkey King could perfectly separate them was asinine. Any attempt to do so was just a cleverly masked piece of sleight of hand.

Being stretched across such an impossible length of time was impossible without giving something up.

If time was infinite, it meant that in return space had become finite, so incredibly finite that it was basically impossible to pinpoint.

But it wasn't true infinity, now was it? The Monkey King wasn't capable of doing this. The limit was the last moment of existence for the Golden Battlefield in the future. Or, in other words… the very day that Sylas had cleared the A-tier Golden Battlefield himself.

That was surely billions of years into the future, but it wasn't infinite.

That meant that no matter how small the point in space the ghosts were occupying was, it was a point in space that existed, a point in space that Sylas could find.

And the instant he could find it, was likewise the instant that he could rip it apart and swallow it whole.

And the moment Sylas swallowed it whole, he was taking not just the Will of the D- and C-tier Wills that were here, but the projection of the B- and A-tiers they could have been as well.

In doing so, he broke through a ceiling that had been keeping him down for a very long while.

From Fragmented Infinite Will, he had stepped into False Infinite Will long ago.

But now, he stepped from False Infinite Will to True Infinite Will.

His body bloomed with might and he grew in size once again, his horns piercing the skies as the Golden Battlefield ghosts were shredded apart to nothing.

He tore the very flesh from their bones until there was none of them left in the slightest, his laughter pealing across the starry skies as his power continued to rise.

Reaching out, his scythe shot up from its fall through the darkness and slammed back into his palm with the echo of a GONG through the world.

Then he vanished. frёeωebɳovel.com

When he appeared again, his scythe was slashing down at the Monkey King.