Sylas felt absolutely frozen in time. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t move a single muscle. It was like control over his body had been ripped away from him, stripped down and placed under the control of another.
Staring into the depths of the eye made him feel like he was looking into the birth of the universe. But not in a spring of life, blooming potential sort of way… it felt like he was instead staring into the depths of cruelty the world was capable of, the kind of cruelty that made a mother bird abandon their chick, or a lion pack leader eat the cubs of another lion.
It was the gritty sort of hidden underbelly soaked with blood that was all around them in the world, and right now all of that hidden darkness, animosity, and rage was aimed right for Sylas.
At that moment, Sylas felt a sinking feeling in his chest. He had felt this emotion before; it was the kind of thing he had experienced when the Gluttony Seed was formed. However, back then, he didn’t have nearly enough control or understanding of his body to know exactly what was happening.
But now, he could feel the formation.
It was buried deep within the layers of his body, deeper than where his Gene Talents resided, deeper than even where his Rune Soul comprehension resided.
However, he also felt that there was something off about the formation of this new Seed.
It was sinister in a way the Gluttony Seed wasn’t. Though the Gluttony Seed was hard to manage and often caused him problems, it was more like a problem child or a naughty puppy. But this new Seed was evil, truly evil, carrying an edge to it that made Sylas’ eyes slowly turn red.
No one could see them with his eyelids forcefully closed, at least not until the crimson turned so bright that the beams began to emit from within them as well.
The discomfort in the depths of Sylas’ body grew greater and greater as he was overwhelmed by the creation of this new Seed. In fact, it even looked as though it might try to swallow his Gluttony Seed whole.
Veins of black pulsed across his body, and they were especially dense out of the corner of his eyes. They bulged and grew, wiggling about like live snakes as his blood pressure shot through the roof.
Sylas began to struggle, but no matter what he did, it felt like things were out of his hands.
He had known that this was a risk when he accepted it, but this was still spiraling much too far out of control. However, what he liked the least was the attack on his mind.
It was growing, and it almost felt as though the thoughts were forming worms in his brain that forcefully entrenched themselves deeper and deeper.
There was an insatiable evil to it. But most prominently, there was a Hunger…
A Greed.
Sylas had never felt it so clearly before.
He had always wondered why the Madness Key used words like Hunger, and yet it formed a Gluttony Seed and not a Greed Seed.
The Title Gluttony Seed was one that he was intrinsically certain about. It was like the name was spoken into his mind and psyche, as though it didn’t want him to mistake it for anything else.
In the right context, though, especially when the lines were blurred away from food, the Gluttony Seed could easily be mistaken for the Greed Seed.
But right now, Sylas was sure that the Seed forming in him was the Greed Seed. And compared to the Gluttony Seed… it was like it had found a weakness of his to exploit.
He didn’t align with Gluttony nearly as much as he aligned with Greed. But… that wasn’t the main problem.
This wasn’t the reason the Seed felt so sinister.
There was another problem, an additional hurdle, something foreign added into it that wasn’t natural to the original Seed. And this parasite looked for more, wanted more, didn’t know how to be satiated.
Veins began to bulge along Sylas’ jawline as he clenched his teeth. He pressed them together so hard that one might even be worried that he could crack one of them or all of them at any given moment.
‘Get out of my head.’
Sylas’ eyes started to slowly force themselves open. He circulated
He started to take control of Extricate, using it to move the energy in his Genes along and force the new Gene Skill to activate how he wanted it to move.
He was focusing his entire being on opening his eyelids as though that would fix something, but he had already deduced deep down that this wasn’t the issue. At most, it was a distraction that stopped his mind from being taken over.
Sylas let out a roar as his eyelids snapped open, the tension causing blood to leak from his eyes and the bulging veins across their corners to pop in a rain of black and red.
Twin beams of light shot out from his eyes, piercing toward nowhere. But what Sylas didn’t know was that this one action of his would only bring him a great deal of trouble in the future.
The sinister aura leaked into the surroundings, and as expected, the assault on Sylas’ mind didn’t stop. But the opening of his eyes did allow the Gluttony Seed to awaken from a slumber it seemed to have entered. Although it didn’t fight back against the Greed Seed, it protected itself, becoming impenetrable.
Ultimately, the Gluttony Seed had already had some advancement while the Greed Seed was fresh and new. It was incapable of doing anything to the Gluttony Seed.
Sylas grasped onto the opportunity and a mighty Will exploded forth from him.
“Get out of my head!”
His roar shook the very City Lord mansion itself.
