Chapter 465 So…
The black scales receded from Sylas' body as his strength plummeted.
At the same time, no one noticed a beast suddenly appear amongst the torrent of beasts over 50 meters away.
Who would notice just one more in a sea of so many? — [Cassius Novar (FF+)] [Level: 22] — [Talia Orin (FF+)] [Level: 21] — [Corvus Lumin (FF+)] [Level: 22] - [Physical: 482] [Mental: 578] [Will: 433] — The five agents weaved through the beasts, closing in on Sylas in what they likely thought was a covert operation.
But the moment they entered a 50-meter radius of Sylas, he felt that their intention was different from the others.
His Luck and Will didn't just help him to form this comprehensive bubble around him; they also nudged him toward danger.
However, even without the Basilisk King… he was more than enough to deal with these few.
The question was how fast he wanted to do it.
Corvus, despite being the strongest of the five, lagged behind.
All the while, General Song was watching with hawk-like eyes, his intention not very subtle at all.
It was as though he wanted Sylas to notice.
'I see.
He wants me to be on edge.
He likely knows he can't hide it from me, but he probably thinks he can hide the exact number.
So long as one of the five slips through while I'm unaware, I'll suffer.
' Sylas continued to retreat, seemingly looking around warily, but his heart was unprecedentedly calm.
… On the other side of the battlefield, the Basilisk King slithered forward.
Now being outside of the range of Sylas' visualization, the Beast Totem was no longer effective on it, making it one of the weakest beasts present.
— [Basilisk King (FFF-)] [Level: 5] - [Physical: 125] [Mental: 113] [Will: 271] — However, it had something that the other beasts didn't have: intelligence.
Well, that and Voice of a King.
Facing off against so many powerful opponents, its Gene Talent was practically thrumming with life, slowly increasing its stats over time.
With its intelligence, it avoided battles it could and played dead when it fought battles it couldn't.
All of the beasts were rushing for the Planar Convergence Gate anyway; they didn't have the mind to care enough to deal with such a weakling.
Every time this happened, the Basilisk King felt itself die a little bit more on the inside.
It was a mighty Basilisk, a beast of Legendary stock… how had it fallen so far? Its yellowish eyes flashed with rage it quickly suppressed.
It pushed forward, not quite realizing the change happening within it.
After Sylas broke it, maybe it would have already collapsed.
But although it wasn't gung-ho now, it at the very least had spirit.
Though… if it continued to think that Sylas was the one that had caused its fall, it would likely never reach the level it was meant to.
The fall of the Basilisk King had started long before it met Sylas Brown.
At that moment, it poked its head up.
The path forward was too congested, and there was no way through.
With how important Morgan was, and how weak it was, there was simply no way that it could sneak all the way to Morgan.
Just the soldier by Morgan's side was enough to kill it ten times over.
It could feel its heart trembling as it made itself tall.
In the past, it had been quite a large creature to Sylas.
But now, it looked almost quaint on the battlefield.
And yet, as expected, Morgan noticed it.
Morgan had seen the Basilisk King before.
Sylas had used it during the final battle at Casstle Main before the Trial ended.
Although the Basilisk King now was much larger than the one he remembered, when he connected the fact Sylas' scales had disappeared and how this beast was oddly staring at him, he realized what was going on.
At the end of the day, Sylas had judged Morgan correctly.
He was a sharp man with a meticulous mind.
"That beast, let it in, Kael.
" The soldier by Morgan's side frowned and was about to say something.
But at that moment, the Basilisk King was battered from the side.
Blood flew, and its scales flung from its body.
"If you let that beast die, we're all finished," Morgan growled.
Hearing these words, the young soldier didn't dare to hesitate again.
He wasn't high up enough to know the details of Morgan's duty.
But he wasn't a fool.
Morgan was so weak, yet he had such an important position.
This was obviously a matter that was existential to the government.
Plus, considering how weak the beast was, there really wouldn't be a problem even if he let it in.
From a distance, General Song didn't notice this matter immediately.
He was too intently focused on Sylas and didn't see such a thing happening behind his back.
By the time he pieced together how he had lost, he might very well be breathing his last.
"Give me some distance, Kael.
" "I—.
" "Distance.
I might be weak, but I'm sure you can see that I can handle this beast if things go south, right?" Kael nodded.
However, that didn't stop him from making a report up the chain of command.
But in a battle like this one, it would take time before General Song got information about what was going on here, especially since Morgan had pretty high clearance himself.
… Morgan stared at the Basilisk King as it stared back at him.
Neither spoke.
The latter because it couldn't, and the former because he didn't really understand why Sylas had sent it.
Realizing that the Basilisk King wasn't going to hand him anything or communicate, Morgan frowned.
'Sylas obviously didn't send it for protection, and the beast is too weak to break me out of here.
So…' Morgan's eyes flashed with understanding.
The beast obviously couldn't speak or else it would have explained why it was here already.
And it obviously wasn't strong enough to take him out of here.
That only left one thing… Sylas wanted it to bring something back.
And Morgan had nothing to give other than information.
n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om.
Chapter 466: Linguistics
n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om
"General Song is-."
Morgan began to speak, planning on listing out everything he knew about General Song's abilities and skills; however, the Basilisk King quickly shook his head.
The Professor was taken aback, first because he was surprised that this wasn't the information Sylas wanted, and second because this beast had picked up on the fact that it wasn't what its master needed so quickly as well.
This was the smartest creature he had ever come across, and for a moment, the scholarly side of Morgan almost geeked out. What he did best was study peculiar minds, and a mind like the Basilisk King had him on edge.
However, he quickly realized the situation they were in and that there wasn't much time.
If he was correct, Kael would certainly report this, and though it was easy enough to bullshit a rookie without much experience, he knew enough about General Song to know the stoic man didn't have the mind of the meathead one might expect from him.
'If not that, then...' Morgan's pupils sharpened. '... Could he see through that already? But how could he possibly take advantage of that?'
Sylas was correct; Morgan's role here wasn't simple.
The truth was that his role as a studier of neurodivergence in humans was almost a side project, though it would still be inaccurate to describe it as such.
He was a psychologist, psychiatrist, and, oddly enough, a linguistics expert. His real specialty was in studying the changes of the human mind over the course of history, with a focus specifically on the extremes of the spectrum.
In the infancy of his career, he was focused on things like depression and why there seemed to be an uptick in it despite the fact that by objective metrics, quality of life was increasing. But that led him down an interesting rabbit hole.
For his second PhD, he actually posited that the uptick in depression was due to the overall increase in human IQ.
The greater the self-awareness and self-introspection, the ironically more susceptible to such things people became.
He remembered that he had given it a particularly click-baity title as well, annoyed by the backlash he had been getting.
"Humans Were Better Off Dumb," he called it.
Well, it was safe to say that he wasn't very popular for those ideas, and his studies, though having some foundation, remained quite fringe.
However, the idea still stuck with him, and he burrowed further into the rabbit hole until he stumbled onto neurodivergence.
What was interesting was that he found that while IQ was increasing overall, so too were cases of neurodivergence-though, to be sure, such cases in the past were hard to document.
People were more likely to burn such people at the stake than actually study them.
But that was why they were so lucky that the Sixth Summoning existed, making it much easier to track.
The reason this was so fascinating to Morgan was because IQ could be changed and even gamed in a way.
You could quite easily train someone to boost their IQ score a few percentage points.
Though you couldn't put them in an entirely new bracket, it was easy enough to say that the general increase in IQ was due to better education around the world overall.
In fact, you could even track better IQ back to better living conditions and nutrition.
This was an important distinction. Because while training, nutrition, and living conditions could tick your IQ up a few points... it didn't make any sense for it to create more neurodivergent people.
Logically speaking, neurodivergent existences-absolute geniuses who broke molds others couldn't fathom, the Isaac Newtons and Nikola Teslas of the world-couldn't be created just because of better living conditions.
Either you were such an existence, or you weren't.
Interested in this phenomenon, Morgan began to tie it back to the homogenous mixing of Earth's genes. Maybe there were more absolute geniuses now because the Human Race had pooled together all of their best traits.
In fact, one of the reasons he became a linguistics expert to begin with was because he wanted to see if it was because everyone spoke the same language now-as opposed to in the past where there were hundreds of them-that knowledge was simply passed from country to country more smoothly and thus allowed for more geniuses to emerge.
It could be said that he was absolutely obsessed with this study. So much so that he seemed to neglect the fact that he could only take it so far because he was one of the neurodivergents he claimed to only study.
This was all to say that when the Celestial Republic ran into a group of aliens that seemed to have set up shop near one of their World Wonders, the top of the list to study this matter was
Morgan.
Not only was he a linguistics expert and could decipher their writings and language, but he was also the best suited to comprehending their culture, their thought processes, and how those two things would inform their decisions.
The reason he was called to the battlefield today, then, was obvious.
General Song thought that there might be a chance that this Planar Convergence Gate situation was related to these aliens that they had detected the existence of.
If it came down to it, Morgan being here might be the difference between them being wiped out or not.
But that was precisely why it was hard to fathom how knowing this would help Sylas.
Even Morgan and the others hadn't quite figured everything out yet, and they had yet to make contact with these aliens.
It was just that a member of the Celestial Republic, even higher up than Morgan and General Song, had already confirmed that they must exist.
Even with his intelligence, Morgan really couldn't figure out how any of this would be of help to Sylas.
However, that only made his eyes light up with more fervor.
He really wanted to see what kind of brain Sylas had.
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