Chapter 5344: Origin I
Chapter 5344: Origin I
Seo-yeon watched Mister Noah stand against the Scary Source Lady, and she saw everything beneath the surface.
This was simply how she saw. Where others looked at a lifeform and saw a body, a face, a shape, Seo-yeon saw the lines.
Every existence presented itself to her as boundless threads of its authorities, the deep structure of what a being actually was laid bare beneath the surface that everyone else mistook for the whole. She had always seen this way. She did not remember ever seeing differently.
The Gentleman Knight, Sir William, showed her clean obsidian lines of THE Primordial Source, ordered and disciplined, woven through with the dignity that was his whole record.
The Scary Source Lady showed her something far denser, obsidian lines so concentrated and so deep that looking too closely at them made Seo-yeon’s perception ache, the threads of a being who sat a full Scale above the Gentleman Knight and did not bother to hide it.
But out of all the ones she had seen, Mister Noah was the most unique.
When she first looked at him, back in the dying storm she had held for so long, she had seen boundless multicolored lines of Infinity wrapped together around a complex source of existence, the threads denser and more tangled than any Infinite Lifeform she had glimpsed in her father’s heritage memories.
And moments ago, when he grasped THE Primordial Source, lines of obsidian brilliance had begun to flow within him too, and they were twisting and wriggling against his Infinity in a way that even she could not fully understand. That was the strange part.
She understood a tremendous amount about Infinity and THE Primordial Source. Her mother and father had been beings of exactly those two distinctions, and she had inherited the sight that came with both. And still, what was happening inside Mister Noah did not resolve cleanly for her.
She thought, sometimes, about how badly most lifeforms misunderstood Infinity.
Most of them treated it as a thing to reach toward, a vast ocean of power they could draw from if they were strong enough, a resource. They reached for it the way a thirsty creature reached for water, hoping to take some into themselves without being swept away. That was why the Gilded Ones built their negative Egos, to keep from drowning. That was why so many went mad. They thought Infinity was something to hold.
Even Infinite Lifeforms...many of them held both negative and positive Egos amplified to keep their identities...but many still did not understand.
Seo-yeon understood it differently.
Infinity was not a thing you held. Infinity was a thing you became, and the only question that mattered was whether you stayed yourself while becoming it or whether it ate you. Most beings got eaten.
They reached for the ocean and the ocean simply made them part of itself, and they called the drowning enlightenment because they were no longer present to know better. The strong ones did not reach for Infinity at all. They made Infinity reach for them.
They became so completely themselves that Infinity had no choice but to organize around their identity, and then they owned it, the way a king owned a kingdom that existed to express his will.
That was the truth of it.
Mister Noah understood Infinity the way she did. Maybe better. She could see his very being, and what he stood for, fully integrated and incorporated with the multicolored lines, his identity not floating in the Infinity but forming its spine. He had made Infinity reach for him!
And now he was doing the same impossible thing with THE Primordial Source, forcing two authorities that almost never mixed to twist together around the spine of who he was.
And right now, he stood against Dame Seraphine.
The Scary Source Lady moved calmly. That was the part that frightened Seo-yeon, more than any display of power would have. Dame Seraphine simply walked, taking unhurried steps toward Mister Noah, her Olympian Intent wrapped around her figure like a still pond that did not ripple, and yet with every step she took, it felt like Mister Noah was facing a terrible weight that could crush him at any moment.
There was no rush in her. There was only the certainty of a being who had already decided how this would go.
Seo-yeon clenched her tiny fists.
She wondered if she should help. Mister Noah was the only person who had helped her in all those years. The only one who had come. He had made a pinky promise, and her Ama always kept her promises, so Mister Noah had to keep his too, and that meant Seo-yeon should help him keep it!
But she understood, watching, that this was a spar. A test. Mister Noah was not in danger of dying, only of being beaten, and there was a difference, and helping would ruin whatever it was he was trying to prove. So she held her fists clenched and did nothing.
Dame Seraphine swung her hand.
She did it gracefully, almost lazily, her arm carrying down through the air with her terrifying Intent wrapped around it, and Seo-yeon watched the whole thing slow down.
With tremendous effort, Mister Noah’s entire existence surrounded itself with an aura Seo-yeon had seen before, the obsidian-gold blaze, and it was that aura he threw up to stand against the Intent of a Mesozoic Scale being.
In the beginning, he swung his own arms, his aura trailing them, or he tried to move sideways to slip the blow.
It did not matter. The Scary Source Lady was too much. Every time she hit him, his entire body smashed backward across the farm, and he only steadied himself after several stumbling steps, digging in to stop his own momentum.
And every time, his face stayed the same. Warlike. Tyrannical. The face of a being who had decided he would return to an enemy he could not defeat for as long as it took!
He came back. She hit him. He flew. He returned. She hit him again!
Seo-yeon watched it like a dance performed in slow motion. The two of them traded movements that were beautiful in a brutal way, Dame Seraphine’s graceful descending swings and Mister Noah’s aura-wrapped arms rising to meet them, the swing and the block and the impact and the long skid backward, over and over, a rhythm forming between them.
Dame Seraphine stayed calm throughout, as if she were only stretching, only passing time. Mister Noah looked like he was fighting for his life, and perhaps he was, in the way that mattered to him.
As she pushed him, Dame Seraphine spoke, and her words came as calmly as her swings.
"THE Primordial Source," she said, hitting him again, sending him sliding back through a plot of Source Herbs. "Even those of us born with it do not fully know how to use it. Do you understand that? I am Mesozoic Scale, and I have grasped only a small portion of what THE Primordial Source actually is. THE Primordial Tongue is more unfathomable still. Only Vakochev himself can claim to know all of it." She advanced.
"But THE Primordial Source alone, if a lifeform learns to truly integrate it into their existence, into their Intent, into their Civilization, it makes everything express itself toward its true source. Its origin. Everything reaches back toward where it began, and the one who holds the origin holds everything that descends from it."
BOOM!