Genetic Ascension

Sky Roaming bloomed.

The walls of the former Casstle Main rose first, stone and structure stretching upward as though the city had taken a breath and exhaled. Towers expanded, defensive lines thickened, streets widened, and territory burst outward beneath the authority of the Legendary City Stele until the old boundaries of Casstle Main became almost meaningless.

Sylas watched the transformation without moving, and right then, an ability he had almost completely ignored from the beginning suddenly became one of the most important pieces of everything he had built.

Sky Roaming could steal experience from other City Steles. Before, Sylas hadn't cared. A normal City Stele was a drop in the bucket compared to a Legendary City Stele, and the amount of effort necessary to meaningfully advance something of this Grade made scavenging lesser cities feel almost pointless.

More importantly, there had always been another reason Sylas refused to anchor the Stele in the outside world. He had no intention of becoming trapped in one place. City Lords gained enormous authority over their territories, but moving freely between worlds while retaining that authority required a city to reach exceptionally high levels first.

That was difficult enough for a normal Stele. For a Legendary one, the requirements were absurd.

But this was no longer the Mortal Plane, and Sylas no longer had access to only a handful of mediocre cities.

He had an entire galaxy.

Sky Roaming trembled once and a ripple of light spread outward.

The structure of territorial advancement itself was simple enough on the surface. There were six major ranks: Village, Town, City, Kingdom, Empire, and finally World. Each rank was further divided into Rudimentary, Common, and Elite stages, and each of those stages contained ten Grades, with Grade 10 representing the peak before the next advancement.

Actually reaching those levels was where the simplicity ended. Experience alone was never sufficient. A City Stele might demand a certain number of talented citizens, a threshold of prestige, the construction of a specific building, the completion of some defensive achievement, or requirements unique to the nature and Grade of the Stele itself.

Some conditions were universal, others changed based on the city, and the higher one climbed, the more unreasonable the demands became.

For an ordinary City Stele, moving from Village to City within a single generation wasn't uncommon. A sufficiently talented City Lord could perhaps raise one to the level of a Kingdom within their lifetime, especially with strong resources and a proper foundation behind them.

An Empire was different. Even a Common Grade Stele could require several generations of accumulated work before reaching that stage, and World Level was something some cities would never touch no matter how long they existed.

A lineage might control worlds, systems, even an entire galaxy and still fail to push its City Stele that far.

A Legendary City Stele made all of those standards look forgiving.

A World Level Legendary City wasn't just a powerful settlement, nor was it simply a city that had grown large enough to cover a planet. It was closer to a pocket universe, a territory where the City Lord's authority became law, where the surrounding environment bent to the master's Will with a power not unlike that of a Progenitor. The only difference was scale.

A Progenitor could hold unmatched authority over their world, but a City Lord whose Legendary Stele had truly reached World Level might command a territory stretching across distances that made a single planet seem irrelevant. By the time a bloodline managed to raise such a city to completion, they might already control several Sectors.

In truth, this was probably why Sylas had encountered so few Progenitors.

Sylas had simply been intelligent enough not to fight City Lords inside their own territories whenever he could avoid it. The one time he had truly been forced into such a situation, raw power hadn't been enough. He had used science instead, and that was well back before Earth cleared its Summoning.

The difference between those old City Lords and Sylas wasn't talent, it was time. They had had generations of growth, and Sylas was the first generation of Grimblade to survive his Summoning.

However... they also possessed weaker Steles. Luckily, they also possessed quantity. An obscene amount of it.

The ripple from Sky Roaming crossed the first world.

A Common City Stele cracked.

Then a Bronze Stele shattered.

Another ripple passed through a distant system and several more collapsed in sequence, their accumulated experience ripping free and flowing through the connection Sylas had already established across the Galaxy of the Grimblades.

There were Silver City Steles too, several of them, old enough that even without overwhelming foundations behind them, sheer time had allowed their cities to crawl upward across generations.

All of that time now belonged to Sylas.

The ripple continued.

It crossed worlds that had once answered to the Vosskarr, then entered territories that had belonged to the former Milky Way, worlds whose City Steles had only just survived their ascension and been baptized beneath the denser laws and Aether of the Demi-God Plane.

Every one of them carried history. Decades of construction, centuries of accumulation, generations of City Lords solving requirements one by one, cultivating citizens, raising walls, surviving invasions, building prestige.

Sky Roaming didn't care. It took everything.

City Stele after City Stele crumbled across the galaxy, their stored experience stripped clean and dragged toward the Legendary Stele anchoring the former Casstle Main. Entire bloodlines watched generations of territorial progress vanish before they could even understand what had happened.

The ripple reached farther and Worlds dimmed behind it.

By the time it touched the outer edge of the galaxy, every City Stele Sylas had claimed through the Vosskarr network, every Stele from the old Milky Way newly elevated into the Demi-God Plane, every lifetime of effort tied to those structures— All of it had been swallowed in a single bound.

BOOM.

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