Chapter 5574: A Glorious Direction!
Chapter 5574: A Glorious Direction!
Noah came to a stop before it and looked at it coldly.
"I never had any issues with you," he said. "Think about that. All this time. Then you took our Lower Observable Existence, you played your long games from behind your curtains and now you’ve made me an enemy. Can you imagine? Whatever plans you had for eons, however many boards you’ve arranged, however many vessels you have folded and pressed and hung in whatever closet you keep them in. They may all just crumble. Because you happened to target the wrong guy."
HUUM!
The vessel’s ragged mouth curved. Even decaying, the voice that came out was calm, unhurried, almost warm, and the heavy anger beneath it had been pressed flatter still.
"A young thing like you can also be a unique thing, and a special thing," THE Sealed One said. "And there are many such things across existence. I have collected a few. I have discarded more. So let us not make this larger than it is. Tell you what. How about we call it quits? I will not pursue you as a vessel. I will even bear the unbearable pain of handing off that collar I planned so very many years for, the one you are wearing right now, the one you stole. Consider it a gift between professionals. I have too many things going on to designate this much focus to something like you."
...!
The offer hung in the red air, reasonable and generous and rotten all the way through.
Noah smiled slightly.
"Now see, a me from days ago may have taken that deal," he said. "Truly. Walk away, and don’t worry about an old monster. A younger man closes that deal and sleeps well." His eyes did not warm at all as he spoke.
"But now? Ah, I’ve grown up. For me to be true, and Quintessentially me, I wouldn’t take such a deal. You do not get to reach into my life, take what is mine, hunt my people, and then buy your way back to neutral the moment the weaving turns on you. Our choices, our consequences, big boy."
He drifted closer, and the crimson gold film below them stirred like a tide sensing its moon.
"This is the first of your vessels I kill. There will be more. However many you have, wherever you have hidden them, in whatever ages you have seeded them. I will find them, and I will make each one cheaper than the last." His voice dropped, cold and even. "O ancient thing. I want you to feel afraid. I am coming for you."
"Sanguine Blood Drop."
BOOM!
Another drop of blood bloomed before Noah, crimson gold around stellar blue, and it exploded like a wave!
The detonation rolled over the vessel of THE Sealed One and eradicated it completely, body and robes and pressed-flat anger and all, scattering it into red ash that thinned and dissolved into nothing!
And this time, nothing stitched.
The wave passed on across the ruined expanse, sweeping the puddles and the stains and every last remnant of the army that had ridden in on rivers of the dead, and when it settled, the domain was clean of all of them. Nothing survived.
Slowly, the spiderweb cracks hanging in existence began to heal, panes of fractured reality drawing themselves closed seam by seam, the way a wound closes when what caused it has finally been removed. The torn pages of the sky sealed. The red light drained away.
The final domain returned, by degrees, to its ancient stillness, minus one army, one vessel, and a considerable quantity of borrowed power that had leaked out of its owners and gone wherever such things go.
Noah stood in the center of the quiet, and felt his Provenance Essence buzzing.
HUUM!
|Your Provenance Essence has increased slightly in concentration.|
|Your PONDUS has increased by +2. PONDUS: 7.|
|You were Quintessentially true to your existence. Your VERITAS elevated tremendously, but has not been able to climb past the value of 10.|
...!
Oh?
Noah’s existence pulsed as he thought about that information.
He did not need to devour anything externally. He had just confirmed this. No corpses harvested, no essence absorbed, no boons collected from the ash. He had simply acted, truly and faithfully as who he was, and his power had increased. So long as he conducted himself as himself, the numbers would climb. That was the entire system. That had always been the entire system, and existence had needed to crush him under a falling sky before he saw it.
He just had not thought elevating the values of his four attributes would be so arduous. A slaughtered army, an eradicated vessel, an Art created from nothing, and the yield was a plus two, and a VERITAS that strained against its own value of 10 and could not pass it. Small numbers, grudgingly given!
But having numbers that were small yet meaningful was something he also liked.
After all, he had played with numbers that reached Trillions and Decillions before. The new system his existence was slowly enacting seemed much more meaningful!
Noah turned.
Anaximander had seated himself near the base of the obelisk at some point during the eradication of an army, arms resting on his knees, and he was shaking his head at his friend!
Noah took a step and appeared beside him.
"You are one ridiculous existence, you know that, right?" Anaximander said.
"I am just a human trying to grasp the wonders of existence. Just like you." Noah settled his gaze on him. "But how is the situation elsewhere? I ask because you took the Ancestral Voice within you."
Anaximander nodded slowly, and his eyes unfocused, looking at something that was not in front of him.
"It is a unique sensation. I am still grasping it. It is as if I have an eye overseeing vast stretches of THE Ymnaros, and the eye never closes, and it was never mine, and yet it reports to me now." He exhaled.
"What it reports is not good. Armies of Infinite Lifeforms are still rushing into the different domains of the Superpowered Lifeforms and waging war. The Superpowered Lifeforms are strong, but they defend homes while the invaders spend bodies. And in the largest domain of THE Ymnaros, in THE Golden Expanse, the largest army of them all has gathered. Killing the vessel of THE Sealed One does not seem to have deterred them." A pause.
"Or they simply do not know yet."
His eyes refocused, and found Noah.
"Hvitrmarr and Damodred and Ryaenara still move. Though the White Steed seems distraught." He tilted his head. "Your transformation here affected a few things?"
Noah thought about this for a moment. The bond, the mixture of Causes, the cry through it as eighteen seats emptied without a word of warning. A feeling her other half vanish out of her own existence.
"A few things that I will correct," he said. "But when it comes to dealing with the armies of Infinite Lifeforms..."
He let the sentence rest there, and pondered.
His new power. His new self! The possibilities of what he could do were, in the most literal reading his Status Panel offered, limitless. His potential was limitless. All that was left was his imagination.
He had already reclaimed Mana as his own, something he generated, and it was now his blood. In time, he would think about how Causes could also be his own, something he generated rather than seated. That was a project for a quieter hour.
But first, he had to design something grand of his own to address the immediate problem. One body, however true, could not stand in every burning domain at once.
His hand rose and touched the Collar on his chest.
It was silently resonating, humming along with his Provenance Essence in a low harmony, and through the contact he could feel the slow work underway: the unique thing was being refined by him, layer by patient layer, his essence working into bones older than every framework in existence. When his Provenance Essence actually got through to it, he would grasp its secrets. For now, it was a grand necklace on his chest, and he was entirely at peace with owning the single most coveted piece of jewelry in THE Ymnaros.
He allowed his existence to continue refining it, and turned his mind to generation.
Ideas were already buzzing. Many of them!
He selected one, opened his palm, and let the skin split.
A drop of incandescent blood rose out of his palm, crimson gold around stellar blue, and he gathered it onto the tip of his finger.
Then he began to write.
His fingertip moved through the air, and the blood followed it, laying down lines that stayed where he drew them. A runic symbol took shape stroke by stroke, and it was like no script in any catalog of existence, because it came from no catalog!
Curved lines nested inside curved lines. Rows of dots marched along the arcs in deliberate rhythms. Spirals turned inward at the joints, and every stroke was placed the way old rituals place things. He was not remembering it. He was generating it, and his hand simply knew, because the knowledge was being made in the same instant as the ink.
HUUM!
The finished rune hung in the air, humming, drinking the light.
Then it transformed.
The lines swelled and flowed outward, blood multiplying upon blood, and the rune unfolded into a figure that rose and rose until it stood titanic against the obelisk light!
It looked like Noah.
And it did not.
The face was his face, calm and cold. But the body stood far taller, broad and ancient, skin the deep crimson gold of his Sanguine Mana with ritual markings scored across it in stellar blue: spiral upon spiral down the arms, dot-lines crossing the chest in measured rows, patterns that read as ceremony older than language. Charms of pale bone hung in layered strands from its neck and wrists, and curved horn framed its shoulders beneath a great mantle that fell like a chieftain’s burden.
In its right hand it held a bloody staff, taller than itself, wet and dark with blood and crowned with a knot of the same nested spirals!
Above its head floated a crown made entirely of blood, turning slowly, never dripping. And around its whole titanic frame, streams of blood swirled in endless infinity symbols, crossing and recrossing, the oldest shape Noah owned, drawn now in the resource he would never exhaust.
|The second Provenance Art has formed.|
|PROVENANCE ART: SANGUINE SHAMANIC RUNE.|
|A rune written in Sanguine Mana that unfolds into a PROVENANCE SANGUINE CLONE. Each Clone portrays half of your power in full expression: your force, your Sanguine Mana arts, your control. Clones draw their blood from you. Your reserves are INFINITE; the cost is a formality.|
|Termination clause: if a Clone is ever destroyed, its blood does not die. It stains. The stain corrupts a region up to the measure of an Observable Existence, and within the stained region, all enemies you have designated will leak their Trueness out through their own blood. Allies are untouched. The stain does not expire.|
|Note: destroying your Clone is the least advisable way to defeat it.|
...!
Anaximander rose to his feet and looked up at the bloody crimson gold version of his friend in its ancient adornments, and for a while he said nothing at all!
Noah spoke first.
"I will make more of these. For now, can you do what the Ancestral Voice did, and transport this one, and the others I will make, to different locations across THE Ymnaros?" His voice was even, almost administrative, as though he were arranging deliveries!
"I will finish this quickly, and see about extending my human rule here fully..."
...!
Anaximander’s eyes pulsed as he turned to look at his friend.
He saw that it was still Noah.
And yet, looking at him now, Anaximander truly felt it. Something ancient, and far. As though his friend stood beside him and also somewhere very early, in an age before ages, and the distance between those two places was growing quietly wider every hour.
Anaximander shook his head with a wry smile, and closed his eyes.
"Understood."
An instant later, the ancient looking clone of Noah disappeared, sent somewhere across THE Ymnaros between one breath and the next.
And Noah himself stood by the obelisk with blood flowing freely from him, palms and fingertips running crimson gold, as he began to draw more bloody runes!