The first thing Sylas did when he woke up was go back to the UniForm. He could sense the odd change in the atmosphere due to Megean’s actions, but it had nothing to do with him, so he didn’t spare it a thought.
The most trouble Megean could give him was dying, because that would mean that the old man wouldn’t be nearly as easy to control. However, Megean also wasn’t Old Brama’s only family, and Sylas was also well aware that he was the pillar of their branch.
Regardless, Megean’s actions were her own choice. He didn’t bother to look into hers. As he had said, his time was limited.
…
‘Mesh…’
There was a reason it had taken Sylas all day just to reach this point. The idea of using the Mesh of Reality to simplify things and streamline them sounded simple enough in action. But it was one of those things that sounded intuitive, while being very much the opposite in practice.
In action, it seemed to touch on the concepts of dimensions. A higher-dimensional being was infinitely stronger than one on a lower plane, much the same way an author had absolute command over what happened in the pages of their books.
But this seemed to take that concept and flip it on its head. It was the opposite, taking concepts that could only be properly explained in three or more dimensions, and simplifying them until they laid down on a plane of just two dimensions.
This was the reverse of everything Sylas had ever known or come to know, and it was even more difficult to put into practice.
It was even harder because, as far as Sylas knew, the physics of Earth only really spoke of four dimensions, though more were theorized. Those four dimensions were usually denoted as three of space and one of time. So it was hard for him to even understand why the Mesh of Reality was just two-dimensional in this regard, when everything he knew said that it should actually be four.
The trouble was that the implication of Old Brama’s work seemed to imply that Runes were also much more complicated than their three-dimensional forms denoted as well. Meaning, he wasn’t necessarily distilling something from three dimensions down to two—it might be even more complicated… dealing with four, maybe five, maybe even more.
He honestly didn’t know.
Much of these roadblocks had kept him feeling like he was in a hamster wheel. However, the breakthrough that allowed him to finally calm down and take a break yesterday came from one thought…
Why was he thinking so much in the first place?
Maybe eventually he would understand the underlying facts of all of this, but was it necessary when laying a foundation? Why was he chasing after a PhD in physics when he hadn’t even completed elementary school arithmetic yet?
What he should be doing was stripping things down and understanding the lowest-level concepts first.
When he reached that point in his thoughts, and let himself feel just the surface level, he felt it.
The interaction between the Mesh of Reality and his Will, how he formed his own indent and influence on this two-dimensional mesh.
That was when he was enlightened to the true strength of Rune Spark.
He became akin to his own gravitational force in the Mesh of Reality. As though the entire world around his Will had become a grid, he sank into it with the heft of a planet, forming the Mesh of Reality to his Will and changing its form with his Charisma.
He wasn’t as external to the Mesh of Reality as he thought. He was here, and he could sense it as clearly as if it was the whistling wind around him.
When Sylas had this breakthrough, it was like large streams of Runes had suddenly begun to whisper in his ears in ways that he hadn’t been able to hear before, or maybe that he had ignored in the past.
That was when he understood something that had been confusing him all the while.
The Mesh of Reality wasn’t two-dimensional at all. The grid he was seeing all around him was akin to the universe’s abacus. It dialed things in, tweaked them, and distilled incredibly complex things into a simple output.
The dips and changes in the grid were nothing more than the Laws of the Universe shifting the beads on the abacus, deciding how it was the world would interact.
When outside interferences came in, those calculations changed or clashed with others, leading to a cascading flow of what was both predictable and chaotic.
The motion of planets, the rotation of the sun, the formation of Runes…
And when you could grasp this, calculate it in advance, or see through these changes, what might have otherwise been a difficult calculation to manage became as simple as flipping over a palm.
Sylas found himself lost and immersed in this feeling, so much so that for the entirety of his second day, he did nothing but familiarize himself with it.
His views on the world were slowly changing, and as he sat there, thinking, he knew that he had to find a way to gain an even better language.
Right now, his Will was too weak to push and pull on the Mesh of Reality exactly how he wanted to. His only method to direct it was through his thoughts, and those thoughts were almost jammed by the clunkiness of his communication method.
However, by this point, Sylas was being far too hard on himself. That was because by this point, the Temporal Delay Tome in his Madness Key was already vibrating wildly.
He saw the world in a completely new light, and the effort he needed to draw Runes continued to plummet off a cliff.
Runes he had never even drawn before came as easy as breathing. On a first attempt, it was already at Rune Soul with just a casual thought. By the second, it had already crossed that elusive barrier, skipping over Rune Essence, and reaching Rune Vitality.
When it came to his Scorpion Warlord Armor…
It hardly needed to be considered.
First Layer.
Spark Mastery.
Second Layer.
Spark Mastery.
Third Layer.
Spark Mastery.
85%… 87%…. 91%…
However, there were two things completely and wholly consuming Sylas right now.
His own personal Rune of Poison… and that final Unique Gene…