Sylas immediately felt pain. Visceral, unrelenting pain that sank to the deepest depths of his body. It tore into his psyche, his Will, and made him feel as though he was right back in the Slithering Madness Dungeon.
It had been a very long time since he had felt something like this, but there was something particularly dark and sinister about the lineage of the Thryskai that he had simply not been prepared for.
It was either this, or he had underestimated the Thryskai by a large margin. It wasn’t just their Genes that came with sturdy protections, but how could they not protect their eyes as well?
It wasn’t that Sylas hadn’t thought of this possibility, but instead that he had no way of knowing ahead of time that this would be the case.
For their Genes, he could just use Extricate to check and see if he could take them or not. But their eyes… honestly, Sylas still wasn’t all that sure how such a thing fit into the lexicon of Genes and abilities. The best he could tell was that they were related to Blood and Bone Essence, somewhere in that level, while also having tidbits and strands related to Race Quintessence.
But other than that, the only other way to check was by doing exactly this…
Testing it.
‘These… aren’t protections…’
Sylas winced and wheezed, an aura drilling into the depths of his psyche and battering against it. It was trying to take hold of his body in ways he couldn’t quite understand. On the one hand, it seemed quite hostile, but on the other it seemed almost… childish. Not in an innocent way, but more so in a naïve, psychopathic way.
When Sylas sensed it clearly, it felt like he was watching a toddler sitting before a kitten, slowly dissecting it and pulling out a new organ one by one. Then the child would turn its head to the kitten’s own, as though trying to see how many it could take out before it finally died.
The child’s actions were slow and meticulous, careful to the point of being anal in their focus, and each eerie glance was only colder and colder than the last, their chubby little hands coated in blood — but not flesh.
Sylas didn’t know why the visual was so clear in his mind until the child suddenly looked up at him.
His heart stopped.
That child… that child was him.
Sylas felt his mind freeze over. He had never done such a thing before, he was certain. His memory was impeccable. If he ever had, he would remember. His earliest memories were when he was one or two years old, and this child was older than that, being at least four or five.
But he could recognize his own face when he saw it. Why was he being shown this illusion? Where was it coming from? Why did it feel so targeted at him?
Why did he suddenly feel so Hungry? So, so… so very Hungry.
For food… for power… for understanding…
What made that cat tick? Which of its organs were vital? How many of them could it live without, and how long could it live on?
He wanted to know. He wanted to know everything.
So very Hungry… so Hungry…
No… so Greedy.
Sylas’ eyes suddenly blazed with a blinding light, snapping out of the illusion with the sharp suddenness of glass smashing against the ground.
He pulled himself out, his vision clearing only to see two long lines of destruction extending out from him. It took him a beat before he realized that these two large trenches…
Actually came from his eyes?
What happened? How long was he out? What had he seen just now?
Sylas looked down and his heart shuddered as he saw piles of burning corpses. No, they couldn’t even be called corpses anymore. They were more like bundles of flesh mashed with the occasional limb or head.
Intestines dangled like rope around a neck, a heart was lodged into the broken jaw of a man, there were even two fingers of a hand poked right through the third eye opening in one of the Thryskai’s foreheads.
It looked like a scene right out of a horror novel, and then Sylas looked down at his hands.
They were larger, but the scene was just the same… that child’s hands… his hands…
Waves of memories came crashing into his mind, an understanding the likes of which couldn’t have possibly been his own coming in waves.
What were the Thryskai’s weaknesses? Where were their most vital organs located? How dense were their bones? How much blood could they lose? Where were their most important arteries located? How were their Aether Pathways configured?
One question after another popped into Sylas’ mind, but the shocking part wasn’t the questions, but rather that he had the answer to all of them.
Looking down at the pile of mangled corpses, his expression still reading nothing at all, Sylas realized that this had all been him.
But how? He had suppressed the Greed Seed so thoroughly that it hadn’t even been able to rear its ugly head. His Will was progressing so much faster than it could keep up, that it would only be a matter of time before he could shatter its Will entirely.
But in the end, he had actually still suffered like this?
The answer came to Sylas just as easily as all the rest.
The Rat was a Thryskai. Not just any Thryskai, but an exceptionally powerful one.
Somehow, when he connected the Skai Eyes to his Will and formed a loop between them, the Greed Seed resonated with the Skai Eyes and used them to amplify itself considerably.
This was temporary, and the moment the evolution of Sylas’ eyes was complete, it vanished. But in this time, it had had almost complete control of Sylas’ body, causing him to do things that he would have never done before.
But staring at this pile, Sylas didn’t feel remorse. Instead, he felt curiosity.
Just what was that? Could you really understand bodies just by dissecting them like that? Why did it feel like it should be more complicated than that?
‘Is that it? Could it be related? In that case…’