Chapter 5403: THE Genesis Tesseract III
Chapter 5403: THE Genesis Tesseract III
"What interests me is your path. Your record. Your Intent, and how you carry it. You’re a Bounded Lifeform who reached THE Fifth Scale alone, with no framework handed to you and no one to teach you. So talk to me. Tell me about your progression. From THE Fourth Scale to THE Fifth. How you crossed it."
...!
It was information he was after, more than anything. Data. He could understand THE Mesozoic Scale far better from a being who had walked into it the hard way than from any record the Swords might hand him, and the wider his breadth of knowledge, the more freely he could choose, for himself, exactly how he wanted his own progression to unfold. He collected the knowing the way THE Mirror That Keeps collected everything, quietly, against future use.
Nereon regarded him from within his massive form. And a moment later, the leviathan began to speak, and as he spoke, something shifted in him. The cold regal grace of an Emperor who had ruled for many long years, buried under ages of grief, slowly began to show itself again. The sovereign was still in there, beneath the monster, and the question had called him out!
"THE Fifth Scale," Nereon said, and his voice steadied into something almost lecturing, the cadence of a ruler who had once held court. "One cannot look at it as though it were merely more. More power, more weight, THE Fourth Scale with another floor stacked on top. Many are wrong, and the wrongness is why so few cross it. THE Fifth Scale is not more of the same thing. It is a change in what kind of thing you are."
HUUM!
"To reach THE Fourth Scale, one forms an Akashic Civilizational Intent, and lives by it," the Emperor continued.
"But to cross into THE Fifth, that is not enough. You must live by your Intent and your Civilization so completely, so totally, that there is no gap left between what you believe yourself to be and what you actually are. Every contradiction burned out. Every doubt resolved. Your existence has to attain a state I came to call Irrefutability. A condition where nothing in you can be argued against, because nothing in you disagrees with anything else in you. When your existence becomes irrefutable, when there is no longer any seam in you for a counterargument to enter, only then may you attempt the crossing." His eyes glinted.
"And the higher your Intent, the better your odds. A being with a low Intent attempting Irrefutability is trying to make a small thing perfect. A being with a grand Intent who achieves it crosses with far greater certainty, because there is simply more of them made unassailable."
"But achieving Irrefutability only earns you the attempt," Nereon said. "The crossing itself is the building of something. To become a Mesozoic Scale being, you must construct an Existential Pantheon."
BOOM!
"A Pantheon," he repeated, savoring the word. "A massive structure, internal and external at once, that holds the entirety of your records. Every deed, every truth, every facet of your irrefutable self, raised into a single architecture. Your whole existence, built into a structure grand enough to contain it." His voice dropped into something graver.
"And when the Existential Pantheon is successfully established, it does a thing that changes everything. It places you within your own Pantheonic Dimension of Existence. You no longer simply exist within the Observable Existence or Gaps around you. You exist within your own Pantheon, on your own existence, in a dimension that is yours and answers only to your records."
WUU!
"Do you understand what that means?" Nereon’s vast eyes fixed on Noah. "It is why we are so unfathomably hard to kill. So hard to even injure. To strike a Mesozoic Scale being, you cannot simply reach them through Existence, because they are not fully there. They are in their Pantheon. To do anything against them, you must have a Pantheon grander than theirs, vast enough to reach into their dimension and overrule it. And when two equal Pantheons meet, two beings of comparable record and comparable structure, they find they can do nothing to each other at all. Their dimensions hold. They press, and press, and neither can breach the other, because neither record outweighs the other. That is why THE Fifth Scale so rarely kills the Fifth Scale. We are each of us sovereigns of our own existence, and a sovereign cannot be deposed by an equal."
He paused, and then, with the pride of an Emperor recalling his greatest work even through his grief, he named his.
"Mine," Nereon said, "I called THE Tidehall Pantheon. The drowned palace of every record I ever made, every tide I ever ruled, every soul I ever failed. I built it across my crossing and I have carried it through the long dark, and it is the only thing of mine that did not die when my Observable Existence died, because it does not live in the Observable Existence. It lives in me."
And then he exerted his power.
WAA!
All around the leviathan, a Pantheon erupted.
It rose out of him and out of nowhere at once, internal and external as he had said, a vast drowned palace of trench-dark stone and crowned coral and luminous abyssal light, halls beyond counting stretching into a dimension that had not been there a moment before and now was more real than the resuscitated sea around it. THE Tidehall Pantheon unfolded, gigaparsecs of it, every chamber holding a record, every column a deed, the whole architecture of an Emperor’s existence raised into a structure that placed Nereon within his own dimension, suddenly and unmistakably elsewhere even as he loomed right there. The aura of it crashed outward, the full weight of a Mesozoic Scale being expressed through the thing that made him one, and Noah felt the difference at last, viscerally, between THE Fourth Scale and THE Fifth! Not more power. A being existing on his own existence, sovereign of a dimension of himself!
"This," Nereon said, the drowned palace blazing around him, "is THE Mesozoic Scale."
BOOM!
His vast eyes turned back to Noah, and beneath the regained Emperor’s grace, the grief still waited.
"Now. If your tendency to make others explain simple things to you is satisfied," Nereon said, "why don’t you tell me where this Observable Existence full of Gilded Ones is? I have heard enough of my own voice. I wish for them to feel my grief!"
...!