Chapter 5436: Potential! II
Chapter 5436: Potential! II
Noah kept elevating his Egoic Intent by slow degrees, seated in the storm of his own blue flame, while above him THE Estuary Eye devoured more and more of the surrounding existence.
It really was a fascinating thing, the eye. It was not a technique he used or a power he spent. It was closer to a limb, an appendage of what he had become as a True Lifeform, something that simply grew out of the fact of him and fed him without being asked. That interested Noah enormously, and not only for what it did now. It interested him because it implied more. If becoming True had grown him one such thing, there would be others, further traits waiting to surface, and the key to all of it was the same key as always. Osmontian Source Infinity. Deepen the fused authority, clarify the distinction, and the appendages would keep declaring themselves. He only had to keep starting where he always started, with himself!
As he was turning that over, something pulled at his attention.
Far off across the obsidian seas, near where he had left the Dora Shath’yar, a commotion had broken out, and power was erupting, the unmistakable pressure of multiple Pantheons unfolding at once, dimensions crashing against each other in the distance. He noted it, unbothered. And then...
HUUM!
His existence began to buzz, and every instinct he owned lit at once, because he felt, suddenly and completely, that he was being stared at by a predator.
|You are currently locked onto by the gaze of a lifeform of unknown origin and unknown power. Assessment: the being’s strength likely exceeds the equivalent of Vakochev’s Fifth Scale of Existence. Proceed with caution.|
...!
The words flashed before him, and Noah looked ahead, and found nothing.
He could not sense a single thing. No aura, no weight, no presence pressing on his perception the way the Dora Shath’yar or the Sanctum’s own lethal Intent pressed. And yet, visually, he saw her. A dazzling woman, making her way toward him across the deep currents, and the disconnect of it was deeply wrong, seeing a figure his other senses swore was not there.
She took only a few unhurried steps, entirely unbothered by the killing ambient Intent that would have unmade a Fourth Scale being where it stood, and in less than a nanosecond she had crossed the distance between them and stood before him.
HUUM!
He looked straight at her. And he could confirm nothing about her existence at all, except that his eyes reported she was there. Everything else in him came back empty.
The Dora Shath’yar in the distance stayed calm, glancing this way without alarm, and that told him enough to keep his own composure. This was some particularly powerful Source Lifeform of the Swords of Existence, or of another branch of the Source Lands, someone the Daughters knew and did not fear. Looking at her, he almost wanted to say she gave him the same feeling as THE Queen Regnant. But that was the strange part. He could not feel anything from her whatsoever, and to hide oneself that completely from a being like him, she had to be extraordinarily powerful!
She was slender and graceful, her legs long and fair, her frame carrying an easy wildness that sat oddly against the depthless silver dark of the Sanctum around her. Her hair fell loose, and her eyes were large and vibrant and far too knowing, and a smile rested on her face as though it lived there. She looked him slowly up and down, humming a small tuneless melody to herself, taking her time, appraising, and then she opened her mouth.
And she spoke.
"$&@^$& &@&$&, @&#^$ $$?"
...!
The sound that came out carried terrifying waves of Infinity and Primordial Source, the two great authorities twisted seamlessly together, wrapped in a veiled Intent that coiled through the space around them both. It was grand, and it was old, and it pressed the fabric of the Sanctum in ways nothing else there had managed. But to Noah, none of the meaning landed. What reached his ears was only a series of odd clicking sounds, sharp and repeating, a rhythm without sense, like a tongue built before the concept of tongues!
Unknown clicking sounds that buzzed and resonated with his Osmontian Source Infinity, and yet they produced absolutely nothing else- no meaning or anything else from his existence!
|You have been exposed to an unfathomably old language. It predates known frameworks. Beginning to decipher what was said. This will take time. The language does not resolve easily, because it was not built to be understood so easily.|
...!
She watched him not react, watched the clicking wash over him without landing, and after a moment she shook her head with the faint disappointment of a teacher whose student has failed a question she’d hoped he might pass. She sighed, small and fond.
"It seems you are not there yet," she said, in plain speech now, the clicking gone. "No matter. No problem at all. I have many more little tests to run before I understand exactly where you stand." Her smile warmed. "The New Sword, Osmont, yes? I’ve heard a great deal. I am Ryaenara. THE Mirthful Antiquity."
She said it simply, and stuck her hand out, as though this were the most ordinary greeting in existence.
And Noah’s eyes went unfathomably sharp, because his intuition, the thing that had carried him through every catastrophe and never once steered him wrong, was buzzing hard.
Who the fuck was this?
He kept his face easy, and beneath it he pulled on his foundations and his existence, reaching to unveil whatever he could about the being who had crossed light years in a nanosecond and stood before him as a hole in his own perception.
|Status recovered. Details are almost entirely shielded.|
|Name: Ryaenara.|
|Title: THE Mirthful Antiquity.|
|Intent: ?????|
|Source: ?????|
|Foundation: ?????|
|Records: ?????|
|Scale of Existence: NOT UNDER VAKOCHEV’S SCALES OF EXISTENCE.|
...!
BOOM!
He couldn’t recover much, but he did recover something! And it gave a heavy glimpse regarding the power of this being!