Chapter 5547: Collision!
Chapter 5547: Collision!
Damodred regarded him from behind the veil of ancient, severed hands.
"If an old dead thing may offer the Master a recommendation."
The great head inclined slowly, sending a subtle shudder through the empty gray domain.
"You have been trying to do something, and it has not been working. You hold two sets of Causes right now, do you not? Nine of your own, seated in your Infinite Cause. And nine more, the First Causes of THE Steed you cured, which now stand behind you."
The gray eyes held Noah with unblinking, ancient focus.
"You have been trying to mix them. To fuse the two sets into one. And they will not fuse, Master, no matter how you press them, because they cannot. They are not the same kind, and no amount of will makes a stone into a fire."
Noah said nothing, for the titan was right. He had felt that exact conceptual resistance within his own existence.
"But..." Damodred spoke, opening one massive, scarred palm as the atmospheric density of the gray space deepened.
"My own Causes could never fuse either. Yet I taught them to collide instead, to strike against one another forever, and out of that endless collision came all our grandeur. You could do the same. Not fuse your nine Prime Causes and THE Steed’s nine First Causes. Collide them. Set them crashing into each other without end, so that the push and pull of the impact pours their benefit straight into your existence, elevating you endlessly and feeding you adversity from the inside for as long as you live."
The old voice carried a terrible, unyielding calm that resonated through the strata of the void!
"Give yourself an eternal wound that heals into strength. You could climb higher than THE Laestrygonians ever did. You have living Causes where mine were only wounds and stone. You... could become grander than we were at our height."
Noah’s lemniscate-ringed eyes sharpened, his gaze locking onto the titan with sudden, predatory intensity!
"How?"
"To collide your own Causes, you must command them. And Causes do not answer just any voice. They answer only the voice of the existence they belong to, spoken in that existence’s own tongue."
He waved a colossal hand, and in the empty gray space, a shape of pure, resonant sound seemed to hang, vibrating with the ancient authority of an uncarved script!
"There are many kinds of Tongue across existence. But a True Tongue is a particular thing, Master, and a simple one once you see it plainly. A True Tongue is nothing more than your own personal language of your own existence. It is you, saying yourself. Those who have raised their Pantheons and begun to lay down their weavings of time speak it most easily, because by then their existence has already learned to repeat itself, and a True Tongue is only your existence repeating itself out loud, on purpose."
The gray eyes did not blink as the giant continued, delivering the mechanics of an extinct epoch without hesitation!
"Speak your own tongue. Fill the words with the intent to steer your Causes toward collision. That is all the command is."
Damodred paused, his voice hardening without softening the truth.
"And it will hurt. At first it will feel as though your existence is detonating inside you, because in a way it is. But acclimate to it, endure the first shock and do not flinch away, and when it settles you will hold many Causes that empower you every moment you draw breath. This is the very art that got my people extinguished. It made us too grand to be permitted."
He raised a single, scarred finger, teacherly once more.
"And...simply striking the Causes against each other is not enough. A blow is not a reaction. For a true reaction to happen, three conditions must be met, all of them, together."
He counted them off, and as his fingers moved, the gray space displayed three points of light knocking against one another in a slow, precise demonstration!
"First, collision frequency. The Causes must actually crash into one another, again and again, not drift past. Second, sufficient energy. Each collision must carry enough force to break the old bonds and forge new ones, or the Causes simply touch and part unchanged. Third, correct orientation. The Causes must align perfectly in dimensional space, so that the reactive parts of each one truly meet, and not merely their edges."
As Noah watched, the demonstration in the gray space came together, two points striking at the exact speed, at the exact angle, and with sufficient force, generating a sudden, glorious bloom of new light that expanded through the gray!
"Frequency. Energy. Orientation."
Damodred let the three conditions sit in the air between them, his voice echoing softly.
"Why does the Master not give it a try?"
...!
Noah did not hesitate, his mind already three steps ahead as the realization settled into his core, for the answer had been sitting in his own mouth the entire time!
His True Tongue! The personal language of his own existence, the language that was only Noah Osmont saying Noah Osmont out loud! What was it, truly, but THE Osmontian Tongue?! Five Letters and one Word! He had spent this entire journey learning to speak himself into reality!
Was this also the gibberish he heard from Ryaenara when he first met her? It was simply her speaking with her own tongue?
Noah closed his eyes and he began!
He uttered the Letters low and grand, a rising mantra of absolute sovereignty echoing through the empty domain!
"I AM OSMONT. I AM QUINTESSENTIAL. I AM HUMAN. I AM THE PROTAGONIST!"
HUUM!
And following them, the Word sang out from his soul!
"I AM THE MORTAL COIL. I AM! I AM! I AM!"
WAA!
He did not speak them as mere names this time. He spoke them as a supreme command, pouring his full Ananke Intent into every syllable, the intent to take the eighteen Causes inside him and drive them into one another like particles hurled together in an existential accelerator, bending frequency, energy, and orientation to his unyielding will...!
BOOM!
His existence detonated!