The thoughts would be enough to drive any man mad, but Sylas just kept eating. His body was like a bottomless pit as he circulated his Gluttony Seed and [Primal Gut] at the same time. He devoured one F-Grade beast after another because Nosphaleen didn’t have the strength to bridge that gap on her own.
Eventually, Sylas just released all of his contracts, letting them hunt for him. It was Gogo who finally managed to bring him some E-Grades to devour, but as the minutes turned to hours, Sylas still didn’t have any solutions.
He had several methods of becoming stronger immediately, but none of them would give him the chance to consistently crush the sort of enemies he was facing.
Sylas gave up on trying to find a pinpoint solution to all of his problems. It was clear that he wouldn’t be able to spot such a thing in this situation—the chessboard was too big, and his plan to shift things in his favor had failed. In that case… he needed more information.
A lack of information was exactly what had landed him in this situation.
So, he began to question the Madness Key, not about general solutions, but about the details of the Milky Way that he hadn’t grasped yet.
He needed to know. What were the power structures of the galaxy? Who was the top dog? What regions did they control? What navigation methods did they use? What weaknesses might the Madness Key be aware of?
As he did so, he found out more about the limitations of the Madness Key.
Its answers were capable of tapping into things that were mostly publicly identifiable information, or things that were directly influenced by the system.
For example, the leaderboards—at least the important ones—were all immediately triggered by the system. This was why Sylas had appeared on them without his input. Something like the system taking action to wipe out a race was also well within the Madness Key’s abilities to detect.
The system was akin to an administrator. When it took action, there was a quasi sort of bureaucracy it had to go through, and it had to “file” the reasons for its actions. The Madness Key could tap into this and understand what happened.
This was all to say that the Madness Key wasn’t omnipotent, at least not at Sylas’ current disciplehood level. But what it could do was hack into the system’s network to understand the goings-on.
Still, this was incredibly valuable. He wouldn’t be able to unearth shocking secrets kept well hidden by these families and stored separately from the influence of the system, but what he could do was understand the inner workings of many things even better than most of the ancestors of these families nonetheless.
It took Sylas two hours to go through it all, time during which he wondered how much faster he could have finished in the UniForm—but there was no going back now. Not when the trip back would only waste even more time than he had here.
Even after all of this, though, there didn’t seem to be a solution anywhere.
‘The only solution that seems to be available is to somehow force them into a confrontation with me… But how do I force a fight like that?’
The only real solution, even after so much thought, seemed to be to get them to join a battlefield of his own creation, one where outside interferences couldn’t influence things. But that was just as impossible as everything else.
‘Wait…’
Sylas’ eyes narrowed, and he turned his attention back to the screen that held the changes to Taboo Bond. He fell into silence for a long while, his eyes narrowing.
There was another path here. As Sylas thought, his mind churned with potential solutions.
He took a final bite of food, and his body brimmed with power as he stood to his feet.
“Come back,” Sylas called out.
Quite quickly, Sylas’ Contracts obliged, being sucked into the Hibernation Realm.
Sylas found that he could actually step into the Hibernation Realm now if he wanted to as well. Well, he had always been capable of doing so—or more accurately, he had the potential to do so.
The Hibernation Realm was like Sylas’ own personal world, but it was more like an embryo than anything else. It had to be nurtured first, and he hadn’t had the time or ability to do that just yet. As such, it was currently only a place where his Contracts could enter to rest.
But it also had to be remembered that Sylas had once received a Quest that would have given him quite a bit of Experience for turning it into a lab. It was just that completing such a Quest was quite expensive.
With the evolution of his Profession now, though… while he still didn’t have a lab, what he did have was a space he could enter and exit more or less freely.
Gogo had been able to use his connection to Sylas’ Progenitor Flame Ability to peek outside of the Hibernation Realm and maintain some lucidity, and now Sylas could do the reverse. He could sense his Hibernation Realm and step into it as well, though this would leave a void in the world behind that could be detected.
After all, at that point, Sylas’ body wouldn’t be here to act as the anchor any longer.
However, right now, there was a thought swirling around in Sylas’ head that was anchored to this as well.
If his plan was going to work, he needed to prepare more first. What he needed more than anything now was more influence over the world, more of a say, stronger Will. And the easiest way to do that…
Was by becoming a D-Grade Human Simiod.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough time to do this. So… he was just going to have to make enough time on his own.
Sylas returned to the dungeon, his mind swirling with calculations.