Chapter 5579: Existence Does Not Collapse!
Chapter 5579: Existence Does Not Collapse!
<THE Creature>
The number, at this moment, stood at nine hundred and ninety nine.
THE Creature walked through the deep places of THE Ghor-Vazhal, and the deep places were veins. Tunnels of pulsing obsidian ran down and down, their walls contracting in a slow rhythm, warm underfoot, wet along their seams, and through their channels rivers of blood flowed thick and unhurried, all of it moving in one direction. He followed the direction as he knew who it would lead to!
Behind him, only corpses remained as a fiendish aura wrapped around his entire figure.
Ten minutes of the hour remained to him, and he did not hurry either.
The blood was not his. Very little of the last hour’s blood had been his!
He had walked through rivers of it. True Lifeforms of the Cultivation Farms, in their hundreds, bred and stacked and set against him in the trial’s counting, and he had borne their attacks and THE MAW had eaten what was worth eating, and the rest had gone into the rivers now keeping him company on his walk. Nine hundred and ninety nine lives lifted, and set down. One remained.
The statue spoke as he walked.
It had been silent for most of the hour. And yet now, its voice arrived the way it always arrived, from no direction.
|The coming battle will be extremely taxing and almost impossible for you. You can be given a boost to guarantee your victory... for another condition.|
THE Creature did not slow down.
"And what condition would that be?"
|Your friend. Osmont. He is also a perfect candidate to bear weight, just like you. We are interested if you steer him towards Existence as well. Only the willing may walk this path, so they can remain unfathomably true. Make the introduction. That is the only condition.|
...!
THE Creature’s gaze went heavy.
He walked on through the pulsing vein-tunnel, blood parting around his tread, and he thought for a moment before deciding.
Then he shook his head.
"Everyone has their own weight to bear," he said. "My introduction would be me imposing that weight upon him. That is not an introduction. That is a debt, dressed as a door. If he is meant to bear the weight of Existence, he will bear it, regardless of my introduction or not." His voice did not rise. It never rose.
"Existence is vast, and existence is grand, and there are countless paths through it. Even you. Even Those Who Remain behind you. You are only grains of sand in the vastness of existence."
BOOM!
...!
Existence shook as he said it.
The vein-tunnels seized around him, the rivers of blood jumping in their channels, the whole deep structure of THE Ghor-Vazhal trembling once!
And THE Creature could see the statue with whatever sense a bearer has for what he bears. The seated colossus, faceless and gray and worn, and across the blank stone where a face would be...smiled!
A brutal smile, wide and slow and satisfied, the smile of something that had asked its question mostly to hear this exact answer.
Then it turned silent.
THE Creature walked on, silently, and the tunnels widened as the rivers deepened, and the pulse of the walls grew slower and heavier, the rhythm of a larger heart. At the end of the last vein stood a door.
It was a door of blood and gore. Sheets of dried crimson layered over meat, arteries braided into hinges, the whole of it seamed together with the patience of something that had been building itself out of its victims for ages. Behind it, he could sense the power.
He walked through it while speaking.
"I always felt my fingers trembling, whenever I was about to face a truly fearsome enemy," THE Creature said, to the statue, or to the door, or to no one really.
"Every time. In the early ages, when I was small, and everything above me was a weight I had not yet learned to lift. I would look at my hands, and they would tremble, and I would close them, and go forward anyway. Always...just step by step. One foot at a time. Keep moving forward."
The gore of the door parted around him, unwilling and yet obeying!
"But after so many years, they never tremble anymore. Do you know why?"
A pause, in the place where he carried the statue as its voice boomed out...
|...Why?|
"Now," THE Creature said, "Existence itself trembles."
HUUM!
And everything began to tremble.
The door shuddered apart around his shoulders. The vein-tunnels behind him convulsed down their whole length. The domain he stepped into rippled from its floor to its distant ceiling, blood standing up in the rivers, gore shaking loose from the walls, all of it trembling at his passage the way his fingers had once trembled at everything, the debt of ages inverted and repaid in a single direction.
The domain was vast, and it was made of slaughter.
Lakes of blood spread across its floor between islands of mounded remains. Arteries thick as towers rose from the lakes and climbed through the dark air toward the far end of the domain, converging, feeding. And at the place where they all connected, fed by every vein in this deep Domain, stood the final weight.
A massive humanoid titan, mountainous in the gloom, its flesh crawling and seething where countless Gu Lifeforms had been fused into it, bodies within bodies, a colony wearing the shape of a colossus. A Primeval One!
Its murky obsidian eyes opened, and looked at THE Creature coldly, with the flat assessment of something that had ended ages and expected to end another. It opened its mouth to speak.
THE Creature shot ahead!
Existence shook all around him as he came, the lakes of blood parting in walls, the tower-arteries snapping taut, and his voice arrived ahead of his fists gloriously!
"A vile thing like you does not even deserve to converse. Fight. Either you or I will collapse here today." The distance closed to nothing!
"And...Existence does not collapse."
...!