Chapter 5509: Giving! I
Chapter 5509: Giving! I
He patted the Primeval limb once more.
"So, what do I gain from something like this? Exactly that. I know things I have no control over will happen, big guy. They always do. Horses leave, and armies come. I cannot stop any of it." He shrugged, and there was nothing resigned in the gesture at all, only appetite.
"So I just seek more and more knowledge, to just maybe understand those things when they happen...or get through them. Understanding the power of beings like Primeval Lifeforms is a good test of knowledge! And knowledge is the only thing I will ever need, while I prepare for whatever existence sends my way." He laughed at himself, waving a hand.
"Haha, I talked too much, it’s been a while since I had company that talks back! I’ll be done with a preliminary look soon, and then I’ll see if I can take us to Osmont."
With these words, Anaximander focused.
He closed his eyes while touching the limb, his tousled head bowing slightly, a man with no authority quietly reading the corpse-flesh of an apex being like a text, and the red sea went very still around him.
And THE Creature, half-sunken and healing, thought about the story.
How do you know what is good or what is bad?
He turned the parable over in his flat, ancient way. His other half, brutalized before his eyes, the worst thing existence had ever done to him, and the reason he had carried every burden alone since. It was..Bad. Surely bad!
And yet that carrying had grown into THE Burden of Existence, the appendage that had crushed a Serpent and hammered Gilded True Lifeforms into THE MAW among many more. The statue, inherited and unwanted, foreign weight wearing his name. Bad? It had risen for him many now, and he still breathed! Even today, pressed bloody across a red sea by a Cenozoic-equivalent being, moments from a loss that would have ended eras of solitude, bad, plainly bad, and it had forced him to finally finish the weavings he had refused for so long, that connections were not only things he protected. And the finishing had brought Anaximander, and Anaximander was about to bring Osmont!
"..."
How do you know it is good or bad?
He didn’t.
Existence itself, and he could not judge his own story mid-telling.
"Hm," THE Creature said quietly to the red water, and let the parable settle into his foundations.
Then he had to focus himself.
For eating the Intent and Pantheon of an Ananke Intent True Lifeform, alongside the Intent and Pantheon of an Egoic Intent True Lifeform, was truly a heavy feast! Wrath’s seamless pride and inevitability’s golden grammar poured through his deepest weavings as his own Intent drank and drank, and the accounting of the digestion ran clear before him. It should be enough to take him to Ananke as well.
Just barely!
Enough to carry Existence itself across the threshold of the second order, from I am...to I must be obeyed!
So he focused.
And like this, the red sea closed on the two of them.
A scholar in white robes with his eyes shut and his palm upon the limb of a dead apex being, reading! A titan of obsidian flame half-sunken in arterial waters, digesting two True existences toward inevitability! Neither of them speaking, neither of them moving, the storm turning in slow reverence overhead.
And around the two of them, unfathomable Trueness gathered in silent, invisible waves!
...!
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
Ever since he became THE True Human Emperor, Noah felt like he had become more...contemplative.
He thought about many things now, in the drifting quiets between eruptions, and he had come to understand that this was not idleness. It was work! For a True Lifeform advanced through Identity, and Identity was not a treasure one stumbled upon, it was a territory one surveyed. If he was not turning his own self over, examining its borders, questioning its choices, then he would not truly be advancing at all. Contemplation was cultivation now. The throne was also a training ground!
And after transcribing THE Protagonist, his last Letter, or perhaps his potential last Letter, his thoughts had circled back to a decision he had made without ever formally making it.
Why had he never made INFINITE one of the Letters of THE Osmontian Tongue?
He turned the question over honestly! Infinity was the root of him, the fireball skill book, the mana, the first Cause, the boundless rivers he traveled by. Surely it deserved a Letter? And yet every time he weighed it, it did not feel like it could stand entirely true! For he was not Infinity itself, he was Osmontian, and Infinity was one of the things his identity expressed. To carve INFINITE into his backbone felt like claiming a robe was the body! He wanted to stand for Infinity through his Osmontian identity, not beside it.
And the Source received no Letter for the same deeper reason. He had long since fused Source and Infinity into Osmontian Source Infinity, one thing, seamless, his! Declaring them as separate Letters felt like...seperation. Like undoing a marriage to honor the spouses individually!
Well. This was how he currently felt. He could always change his mind.
And as he was thinking all this, the chaotic tendrils of Infinity nearby had gathered to him.
They floated in like rivers finding their sea, wild currents of the storm bending down to the golden island and coiling around his seated figure, and Noah read them idly, the information they carried of where they had been, of the ancient territories they had raged across, of things that had passed through them in ages past! It was like listening to well-traveled elders gossip, and he had been at it for hours.
Then the surroundings fluctuated heavily!
Noah rose to attention in an instant, Intent gathering, wings a thought away, for something was folding space nearby and folding it close, and in this Dimension, arrivals were rarely gentle...!
WAP!
The air split, and THE Creature appeared!
The titanic figure landed upon the edge of the golden sands wrapped in his obsidian flames, freshly-healed wounds still tracing pale lines across his frame, his aura carrying a new density that Noah’s senses flagged immediately! And behind him, hanging in the storming sky...
Was a foot.
A colossal severed limb floated in space above the golden island, pale and unrotted and vast beyond framing, clouds gathered around its heel as its residual grandeur pressed the storm flat for miles, and standing before it, wiping his brow, was a man in white scholarly robes!
"...Anaximander?"