Chapter 5582: Home! I
Chapter 5582: Home! I
After his ridiculous eruption and his words that rhymed, Noah looked at Ulf while squinting.
Of course, the seer noticed the look. Ulf blinked, and then scratched his throat with a bit of embarrassment, the royal bearing slipping just enough to show the man underneath it. Perhaps the recitation had come out of him the way a shiver comes out of a body, arriving on its own schedule and asking no one’s permission. He did not seem able to fully control it!
In truth, Noah found himself marveling at the ability of this being more than the delivery. Interest from Those Who Remain, because he had undone two of their actions. That alone was a thought!
The attention of such beings, arriving now, when he had only just begun enacting his own true power, with a single point of PROVENANCE to his name and most of his system still unbuilt. But how much did he actually need to worry? What extent did Ulf’s ability reach? What exactly had he seen, and how much of it could be trusted?
So Noah walked close to the seer. Ulf swallowed hard and took a small step back!
"What limits does your capability have?" Noah asked with interest.
Ulf scratched his head at the question. And when the answer came, it was once again in a rhythmic cadance...almost as if he had a stutter he could not deviate from after his transformation!
"My limits, Master, none have I found, for I was never pushed past ground. A sick man paints what fever shows, and half his life to fever goes. I was sick before, and I am sick no more, and I have not tested what lies in store. But ask your questions, one by one, and I may answer what can be done..."
"..."
Would he truly be rhyming every time he talked?
But...
It was a fair answer, all things considered. A man who had spent his whole existence dying had never been given the room to find his ceiling. Compared to testing the limits of an art, asking questions cost nothing, and so Noah chose the question that mattered most.
"You mentioned the attention of Those Who Remain. Can you tell me more about this?"
At that, Ulf’s pupil-less eyes began to release beams of crimson gold brilliance, two soft rivers of light pouring into the air, and around him the floating paintings drifted slowly closer, as if his own old works wished to listen. His voice deepened.
"Those Who Remain are power beyond all measure and name, and no category holds them. They do not move as lifeforms move, in want or fear or plan. Across all history’s turning, they have not moved at all. They send instead their extensions, to answer every call: their progenies, their Descendants, the sentences they spoke, who act across the ages. Never once, in any age, in any war or need, has one among Those Who Remain moved personally. And so their interest, Master, will come the only way it can: their Descendants and their progenies, and even Primeval Ones, will begin to circle, slowly, around your weavings."
The beams from his eyes brightened, and his cadence slowed, giving each line its weight.
"The future I envision now is bright, and yet it bends, unpredictable in all its roads, uncounted in its ends. Yet of the few points narrowing the countless ways I see, the brightest of them all are Causes... and yet not Causes. For what the Master comes to forge is not a Cause at all, but something else entirely, that answers his own call. And I see us, oh Master. Ryaenara. I. The dragon in her crimson, the one-eyed giant. The Undefined Lifeform, the Living Observable Existence too... I see all of us as your extensions, put to use by you, to move where you would not be seen, to mask your weavings’ hue. I am here to serve, my Master. And so are many, many others."
WAA!
Each word he said felt sacred and grand!
The light faded from his eyes, and the paintings drifted back to their stations.
In other words, this highest-rarity Noblesse Blood Apostle among his people was truly unique!
He had always planned to enact his own version of Causes, generated entirely from himself. The only thing that had changed was the schedule. A rhyming man and the circling attention of the oldest things in existence had moved the project to the front of the queue.
After all, the foundations were already laid. He had begun enacting Arts- the Blood Drop that made no distinction between body and framework, the Rune that unfolded his blood into titanic clones across a Dimension, and the Blood Mark that pulled Lifelines out of every framework and had built the very Apostles standing around him.
Beneath all three, he had defined his own Infinite Sanguine Mana, the resource that made the rest possible. Compared to where he had stood a little while ago, he had already come far.
But the other thing he placed the most importance on was understanding his four new attributes. How to pass that ridiculous number of 10, the wall his VERITAS pressed against with every true act. His potential had gone beyond it by infinity, of course, though that felt less like an answer and more like a differently shaped question.
And the Seer in front of him was the first existence apart from himself to pass the value of 10 in any attribute at all, that quiet 12 sitting in his potential like a door nobody had opened.
There should be a grand change when one passed the value of 10. It was too hard a wall for that not to mean something, when even he could not push through it. But was potential different from the others? The other three values correlated to something currently held: power, trueness, Provenance.
And since nobody held Provenance unless they were First Lifeforms, VERITAS and PONDUS were the two values that gave a direct display of the power anyone currently expressed, while POTENTIA pointed only at roads not yet walked!
Perhaps the wall at 10 guarded the actual, and left the possible unguarded. Perhaps potential was allowed to be absurd precisely because it had not happened yet.
There was a lot to understand. And while he was thinking, he found he had begun stroking the necklace on his chest without quite deciding to, thumb moving slowly over bones older than every question he was asking.
At this time, the figure of Ryaenara came over.
She knelt beside her brother and took his head in both hands, and Ulf smiled at her. The siblings held each other, and their foreheads touched, obsidian hair against dark.
The sister spoke softly.
"I was ready to find IT," she said. "I even bound myself to THE Sealed One, who was chasing after IT, for you. I did not think that I had already found IT... and that it was the Master himself, right here."
Noah came out of his reverie at such words.
Him? IT?
Of course, different things could hold different meanings for many. In this case, plainly enough, she meant that he was the solution she had been hunting this entire time, the cure her whole long deception had been bent toward, found at last standing in her own Dimension. But no. He was not as grand as whatever THE Sealed One was chasing!
Whatever IT was that an antiquity had spent ages hunting, it was not a man who had held his first drop of Provenance for less than a day.
And as he was thinking of this, his eyes began to shine.
Because he began to think about a certain Steed.
Her Causes were transforming. He could sense her as an Apostle, out across THE Ymnaros, and the sense was precise. Everything regarding any framework she had belonged to had been stripped away when she was bound to him. The only thing that was not stripped away was what she already held. Her Causes.
Which were actually her organs.
And he had replaced those very same organs himself, back when he cured her. From cursed ones, to brand new ones that carried his previous Causes within them. He had seated his own work into her flesh, and now that flesh was becoming something that was hers alone, under his authority, outside every framework.
So if he was looking to generate his own version of Causes, not the same idea carried out by THE Sleepless Fiend and the others, not seats installed from outside, then he simply needed to utilize...his organs. Or anything within his existence. Something he had already generated. Something filled with Provenance Essence, grown from it, steeped in it!
The solution was once more within his own existence, just like his blood that he had made into his Infinite resource!