Chapter 5347: Genesis I
Chapter 5347: Genesis I
His father smiled through the blood, brutal, and laughed.
"Haha. Semantics," Erick spat. "Pretty words. They don’t change the fact, boy. This illusion gave me life more than you fucking realize as your Origin...Your Source is critical. You have to answer. You have to!"
HUUM!
"You can’t escape me. You will never escape me, not if you live for millions of years, not for billions. I am part of your Cause! Part of your history. Part of your origin whether you draw the power from me or not." He grinned wider, red running down his chin.
"You have my fucking name. I gave you that. Osmont. My name. You etch it across existence, you make it grand, you make beings tremble at it, and it is still my name riding on top of everything you do. You will never escape that. Even your Infinity is named after me! Osmont! OSMONT! MY! NAME!"
HUUM!
"And my boy. With my name...you will fail. Just like your old man. The higher you climb, the further you fall, and you will fall, and you will die barren of anything that lasts. Alone...under the claws of some beast. It doesnt matter if it is F Rank Beast or a Gilded, Source, or Primeval Beast. You will die! Just like me. Just! Like! Me!"
BOOM!
"I ain’t afraid to die!"
HUUM!
"And my name is mine, and mine alone!"
BOOM!
Noah roared it back at his father’s brutal words, and his hands, burning pure obsidian now like two massive pillars of molten metal, smashed down and pulverized the illusion of Erick Osmont into nothing!
He...was not afraid to die. He had never, once, in all of it, been afraid to die.
The only was ever becoming someone like his father.
But as a paradoxical as it was...
He was not afraid.
He was not afraid.
Noah knelt in the empty space of the illusion, breathing heavily, his knees on a floor that was not there, and he raised his head and roared, his muscles undulating across his frame, his jaw and his eyes vibrating with the immensity pouring through him. His expression was heavy and tyrannical and full of an anger that had nowhere clean to go!
The higher one climbed, the harder things became. Things never got easy just because he grew more powerful. They only got harder, because more power meant more responsibility, and more responsibility meant he could not afford to fail.
It was not a floating landmass depending on him anymore. It was not a single Wheel of Existence. It was an Observable Existence. Two of them now.
It was heavy.
His father’s words rang in his mind as the illusion faded and fractured around him, the obsidian void coming apart.
|Illusion successfully broken. Your origin has been affirmed to yourself under the pressure of an Olympian Intent. THE Sovereign Origin questioned your source and you answered it. This affirmation is recorded in your existence.|
Externally, Noah’s body knelt in the crater on the farm, his hands still burning with obsidian light, and a terrifying influx of brutal multicolored Infinity surged around him, churning, the residue of what it had taken to break free. He raised his head and looked coldly toward Dame Seraphine.
She looked back at him with an apologetic expression.
"I am sorry," she said, and the Fifth Scale being meant it. "I did not realize the Intent would reach for a painful memory. I do not see what a being sees inside THE Sovereign Origin, only that it draws from their origins. I understand that what you saw was not pleasant. I would not have chosen it for you deliberately."
A being a full Scale above him, apologizing.
Noah’s anger cooled, somewhat, slowly. He let the Infinity settle around him, let the obsidian fade from his hands, and rose from the crater.
Dame Seraphine looked at him seriously.
"Alright," she said. "You can run, and you can defend yourself, and you can stand back up from something that put you down. That is what I needed to see." She nodded once. "You are cleared and mission ready."
He was cleared, she said.
But he did not focus on Dame Seraphine, because within his existence the change chugged along fully and gloriously, and he turned his attention instead to another of his bodies, the one resting on THE Early Veiled Shore.
---
In THE Infiniverse, on a beach of golden sands, the humanoid manifestation of THE Infiniverse hugged Noah from behind.
Tears of Infinity fell from her face, dropping onto his shoulder and dissolving into light, and her voice came soft and pained against his back.
"I am sorry for those memories," she said. "Master has never shared those memories. Not with me. Not with anyone. I did not know they were inside you, and I am sorry you had to see them brought out by that being’s Intent."
HUUM!
Noah looked down at his hands. They were shaking slightly, a faint tremor he could not quite still, the residue of the illusion that was far too real and the power of a Mesozoic Scale being and the face of a man he had spent his whole existence climbing away from.
The illusion had been genuinely unpleasant.
He reached up and held THE Infiniverse’s hands where they wrapped around him.
"It is just the past," he said calmly. "The future matters more than any of it. I am trying not to let that man have any more impact on my existence than he already had. I have spent a long time reducing the space he takes up in me, and I would like the version of him I saw today to be the last version I ever see. But it is okay. Really. It is over and it is behind me and that is where it stays."
...!
Infinity and THE Primordial Source flowed into his hands, and the shaking stopped.
He looked at himself, feeling the budding changes ebbing and flowing through his existence, and what he felt at this moment, more than anything, was closure. The illusion had asked him to look at his origin, and he had looked, and he had answered, and the answer had held. He felt like he could move forward now. So he did.
"On this day," he said, "I will consider my First Infinite Scale of Existence complete."
HUUM!
His existence began to flow with a terrifying mixture of power, the Infinity and THE Primordial Source within him continuing to ebb and flow against each other, twisting together.
He had expected, on some level, for this to resolve quickly. Most of his major milestones did. His whole existence was built on rapidity, on moving through stages of power faster than any being he knew, the path of infinity carrying him across thresholds that should have taken eons.
But this time, he could feel instinctively that even for him, the resolution would not be quick. Whatever transformation his unique Infinity and his newly grasped Primordial Source were inducing together, it was deep enough and unknown enough that he might be waiting a considerable while for it to finish.
The two authorities were not simply layering. They were reacting, and the reaction had no precedent for him to measure against, and reactions without precedent took their own time.
That did not mean he would refuse to enjoy this milestone. He had access to THE Primordial Source now. After everything, after all the paths, he had touched the thing.
It was a unique sensation. For all these days and weeks and months, Infinity had coursed through his existence as the foundation of everything, multicolored and boundless, organized around his identity.
Now THE Primordial Source coursed through him alongside it, and it felt different. Where Infinity felt like an ocean he had taught to flow in his shape, THE Primordial Source felt older, heavier, the obsidian weight of something foundational, less an ocean than bedrock, the substance reality itself was poured onto before it set.
He focused on his utterance of the letters of THE Primordial Tongue, and noticed what he had been noticing since the chicken trial.
Their effectiveness had shot up to an unimaginable level. They had already been terrifying, each one elevated to a Prime Letter, resounding through his existence every single second. But since he obtained THE Primordial Source, every utterance did something new. Before, Persevere and Exelissomai had refined his existence broadly, reinforcing and elevating everything he was.
Now, every time he uttered them, they specifically increased the concentration of the slivers of obsidian Primordial Source within him. THE Primordial Source was not like Infinity in this respect. Infinity was infinite, boundless by nature. THE Primordial Source was more like a resource, an authority that came in a set number of units, finite, not endless.
And yet his ongoing unknown transformation seemed to be trying to make this finite authority infinite, which should have been an impossibility, the kind of contradiction existence did not permit.
So what was happening, for now, was simpler and still extraordinary. His existence was gaining steadily increasing concentrations and density of THE Primordial Source, the obsidian accumulating most thickly in his arms, which was why his hands had taken on their appearance of pure burning obsidian, like pillars of molten metal.
He shook his head and set the question aside, focusing instead on the completion of his First Infinite Scale.