[Cejae Valeria—541st Head of Seeing Thorn Branch 01113]
—
Vines from the surroundings shot forward, and Cejae didn’t even resist—not that she could. She had been ready and prepping for the absolute worst, but even she hadn’t expected things to suddenly flip on their heads like this.
Even though she tried to remain calm, it was an impossible task when she could feel that her life could be ripped out of her at any moment.
Soryntha’s eyes opened wide, and she was in too much shock and fear to even move.
“Matriar—!”
“Don’t move,” Cejae said coldly, her ire toward her daughter practically being tempered into her being akin to hot steel at this point. She knew this was a trap of some sort from the beginning—she just had no idea what could have possibly triggered it, or even what the purpose of it was.
It just didn’t make any sense. What could someone gain by doing this? Giving up a True Chosen mark just for the sake of killing her? She wasn’t even participating in all of this to begin with. It was ridiculous.
Her gut kept telling her that something was wrong, but all of her logic pointed to it all being just fine.
Under normal circumstances, she would have just stopped things before they went too far. But because her daughter went ahead and got the ball rolling all on her own, she had already reached the point of no return. There was simply no going back, even if she wanted to.
And now… it felt like everything was over.
No matter what plans these enemies in the dark had, they were laid out right here, and there was simply no chance of changing it now. Her life was no longer in her own hands.
But when the Matriarch saw the code she had supposedly violated, her eyes opened wide and she shuddered from head to toe.
Monster. She was facing off against a monster.
—
[You have been Sanctioned—Pending Trial]
—
[S Class Sanction Applied]
—
S Class Sanction?
There were only a handful of things that could trigger something like that. And after going through them all, the Matriarch knew exactly which one it was.
Her face drained of all color. There was simply no way out of this. Not a single way.
**
Sylas gasped for breath, his body in aching agony and yet not having nearly the healing factor it needed to recover as fast as he would like. Luckily, amongst the things he had taken from the Golden Grove, high-class Healing Elixirs were definitely among them.
He didn’t want to use them too often because they were very valuable, and as far as he could tell, all of them put great stress on the body. But he had no choice at this point.
Sylas had learned many things during his research and study. Among them, he had taken a deep dive into the alchemy world of Rune Masters as well, and he had more knowledge about Elixirs now than ever before.
There was a good reason that Elixirs—especially healing ones—scaled based on your stats. They were drawing on your own body’s strength to fuel them.
The stronger the Elixir, then, the more of this draw occurred. That was also why Elixirs couldn’t just be pounded one after another, and there was a “cool down” period before you could use them again.
Elixirs that provided all the healing strength themselves theoretically existed, but they were only spoken about in vague generalities in the Golden Grove’s information stores.
As far as Sylas could tell, this section of the universe didn’t have them—likely because the Rune Masters here were too inferior to create them.
From his educated guesses, the reason these lower-tier Elixirs were so limited was because the Rune Mastery behind them was too poor. The human body—or any living body, for that matter—was formed from Genes drawn to beyond Spark Mastery. Healing it thus required relying on that perfection, otherwise what filled it in would just be cancerous slop.
Theoretically, though, if you could draw Healing Elixir Runes to the same level of Mastery your body was at, then you wouldn’t need to draw on your body’s potential to heal yourself—you could just get the healing done through the Elixir’s energy alone.
These were all just speculations on Sylas’ part, of course. He doubted it needed to be so complex, but the logic was still mostly sound.
BOOM!
A pillar of light shot into the air as Sylas drifted in his vessel. That pillar without a doubt came from a certain Petals of the Seeing Thorn branch, no doubt.
Sylas couldn’t help but slightly relax. He knew that he had succeeded.
The Seeing Thorn… it was a treasure of the information organization, and it was a very precious commodity. One had to think, though… why would the Petals of the Seeing Thorn be so careless with who they gave it to? How could even a small branch like this one have a B-Grade Race protecting it?
The truth was that despite its strength, the Seeing Thorn could be easily mass-produced. In fact, just a small piece of the Seeing Thorn could grow out an entirely new one.
One might wonder, then, why this creature wasn’t the Overlord of this entire sector, then? And that was, one, because of the very strict rules of the organization, and two, because the Seeing Thorn was obviously not invincible. It had its weaknesses.
But much the same way it had its weaknesses… it had its shocking strengths as well.
The Seeing Thorn’s ability to absorb—even to the point of suppressing and overwhelming a World’s Core—was obviously very enticing. Many in the past had done their best to try and take advantage of this, so much so that the Petals of the Seeing Thorn had no choice but to stop this.
And that was because it had been taken too far…
More shockingly, the secrets behind this involved the Petals of the Seeing Thorn…
And the Professors of Legacy.