Chapter 5620: A Dance Beneath Budding Skies!
Chapter 5620: A Dance Beneath Budding Skies!
Inside THE Infiniverse, a body of Noah floated quietly beneath the endless blue, looking up at the skies with a heavy gaze.
Of course, the heaviness had little to do with anything above him. It had to do with what was unfolding countless gigaparsecs away, before a main body that the members of THE ETERNAL PAX believed to be leashed, chained, and safely inhibited. An organization with grand workings and origins!
THE ETERNAL PAX.
As he turned the name over yet again, a figure came over the grass toward him.
One moment the stellar fields held only wind, and the next she was beside him, red hair loose over the white and blue of her robe, composed and unhurried, carrying her immensity so lightly that the grass barely bent beneath her feet. Since her wounds had closed, something in her bearing had settled as well, and what remained was simply grace with patience wrapped around it.
"For you to have your cute serious face on," she said, "you must have made a lot of progress in obtaining information."
Noah gave a light nod.
"THE ETERNAL PAX." He watched the skies as he said it. "So in addition to the threat of THE Sealed One, there is also an organization intent on enslaving all those who utilize authority, wherever they deem the holder unworthy of it. And both sides are likely backed by Those Who Remain."
He glanced at her. "I have only now come across a single Descendant of Those Who Remain belonging to THE ETERNAL PAX. But can I assume there are many, many Descendants making up that organization?"
He looked at the exquisite lifeform before him and waited.
After all, she could not tell him too many things explicitly, since every revelation about what was to come cost her a piece of what she was. But he had learned the shape of their arrangement by now. He reasoned aloud, and came to his own conclusions, and she could simply do something small.
Thalia nodded lightly, with a smile.
And Noah thought about it for a moment.
Existence was vast and full of terrors, and enemies and adversity were not at all scarce. If anything, the count of them only grew the higher he climbed. So the path forward was not complicated, however long it was!
He needed to continue becoming unfathomably powerful at an increasingly faster pace. He needed to keep forcing the very weight of all existence onto his quarks, filling them with his Provenance and his Teloi, becoming a grander version of himself particle by particle, all while continuing to spread his rulership across everything his hands could reach.
That was the most straightforward way of raising his attributes and his Provenance alike. And when he held enough power, everything else would fall into place. It always had!
As he was thinking about all of this, Thalia had come around in front of him.
Her hand was outstretched, palm up, as if she was asking him for something.
Behind her, on the distant cliff above the radiant river, his mother sat with Seo-yeon, and neither of them was watching the water. They were watching the skies. Because above all of them, something utterly exceptional was occurring.
"Focus on the present," Thalia said softly. "Focus on the now. Look up to the skies."
HUUM!
The skies of THE Infiniverse were blooming.
Dozens of Observable Existences were being born above them. Wherever his people unfurled the Genesis Tesseracts under his guidance, blue-white geometry unfolded and opened, and out of each unfolding a newborn vastness bloomed into being, foundations declaring themselves, nine Prime Causes seating true around the honesty of each founder.
One moment a stretch of sky held only endless blue, and the next it held a young existence turning its first light, radiant and enormous and new!
And after every passing second, another one bloomed. Another, and another, births stacking upon births until the heavens of his home were a garden coming up all at once, hundreds of beginnings unfurling in silence above a farmland, a river, and a fishing cliff.
Compared to any wonder Noah had witnessed across his climb, and he had witnessed many, this was the one that made his eyes shine brightest!
Yes. Even for him, this was surreal. He had stemmed from a single Observable Existence. Even further down, he had stemmed from a single, tiny world.
One world of green and blue among an uncountable many. And now the seeds of Observable Existences were things he conjured and handed to his people, hundreds at a time.
For a human, he had truly come far!
"Regardless of what is happening around you," Thalia said, her hand still open between them, "you need to be the only one who decides how your emotions are flowing. Whether to be happy, or angry, or calm, or just neutral. Not your enemies. Not your circumstances. Not an organization that believes it holds your leash, and not a future that frightened even me. We can fail. Even I failed after coming back here and seeing you again. But..."
Her voice stayed level, and warm underneath. "A man controls his emotions. My Man controls his emotions. My Provenance... controls his emotions."
The faintest curve touched her lips. "So, to anchor you down. Do not leave me hanging too much, and take my hand. Dance with me, while above you, something as grand as Observable Existences constantly budding sits in the sky because of your hands."
Dance? At such a time?
Noah looked at this utterly graceful and exquisite lifeform, her open palm, her patient eyes, the whole composed immensity of her waiting on his answer. And perhaps that was precisely her point!
If a man could dance at such a time, then no time would ever own him!
He took her hands.
DUM! DUM! DUM!
Existence itself began to play a symphony.
The sound rose out of the surroundings with no source at all, a symphony, a melody, deep notes rolling through the grass and the river and the light, and Thalia led him into it.
She drew his hands into place and brought her body close to his, close enough that he could feel her vibrant breath filled with immensity against him, and her feet began to move across the stellar grass, unhurried and certain, and his moved with hers.
They danced.
Below skies budding with Observable Existences, two figures turned slowly through the stellar grass, red hair and crimson gold, while above them beginnings bloomed by the hundreds, and on a distant cliff a mother watched her son dance with a woman from a drowning future, and said nothing at all, and smiled.
And all the while, Noah’s body continued the art.
THE Infinite Provenance Baryogenesis did not pause for the music. In truth, it settled deeper into him because of it. The weight of existence came down as it always came, THE Primordial Source and Infinity and THE Argent Loom and Time and everything imperceivable, and he ushered it seamlessly through the anatomy of his eleven singularities and onto a single quark, and then the next, and the next, bearing and seating and stabilizing in rhythm now, the whole crushing procession moving through his frame without a single thread of pressure escaping outward!
The grass beneath their turning feet did not bend. The river did not tremble. A mountain of everything was landing on him, particle by particle, and from the outside there was only a man dancing.
Was it her doing? Partly, perhaps. With a Provenance Lifeform in his arms, he could feel that her movements were doing something, some quality in the way she turned him and steadied him that his senses could not fully name, and she offered no explanation of it, and he did not ask for one yet.
But between her reminder on emotions, and the art running seamless through him, his Inner Peace, and the power of THE Infiniverse rising by the second as hundreds of newborn existences fed her vastness, something within Noah began to gather!
The music played. The skies bloomed. Her hand rested in his.
And Noah’s eyes changed.
The crimson gold of them drained away, and the singularity pupils faded, and what remained was blue. Endless blue, with no pupils at all, deep and grand and ancient and early all at once, the eyes of something that had been present before frameworks learned their names. He danced on without missing a step, and within him, everything accelerated!
The Baryogenesis surged. Where the weight had moved quark to quark in steady rhythm, it now moved three times faster, four times faster, the bearing and the seating and the stabilizing flowing together into a single continuous motion. And more than the pace, the depth changed. Improvements arrived in him unbidden, one after another, small profundities blooming fully formed: a truer angle for the weight to land, a cleaner braid of Provenance and Telos in the seating, a temper in the remaking that left each Provenance Telos Quark immensely more powerful than the hundred thousand that had come before!
He was not merely converting anymore. He was refining the art while performing it, and the art was refining him back!
|You have entered a Unique State of Existence: THE PROVENANCE REVERIE.|
|A state spoken of among the first Provenance Lifeforms, and attained by the exceptional among them. It exceeds Inner Peace. Where Inner Peace is the absence of argument within an existence, THE PROVENANCE REVERIE is agreement so complete that the existence and its surroundings begin to move as one. Existence itself becomes part of your limbs.|
|Within the Reverie: all processes of your existence are accelerated. Cultivation, generation, comprehension, and refinement flow together rather than in sequence. Profundities and epiphanies arise constantly and unbidden, each one an improvement to what you are and what you practice. Your arts may be advanced in the act of using them. Your perception deepens, and what you perceive, you may briefly wield as though it were your own body.|
|The entry was threefold: a heart that alone decides its weather, an art in seamless motion, and the hand of another Provenance in yours.|
|Cost: the Reverie drains the light of your Provenance Essence and of your existence itself to remain active. To hold it for long is to spend what cannot be easily replaced, and among the first of your kind, the Reverie was a thing of moments, entered rarely and exited poor.|
|However. Your existence holds Infinite Sanguine Mana atop your limited Provenance Essence. No record exists of a Provenance Lifeform sustaining this state upon an infinite reserve. The duration available to you is ?????.|
Glorious prompts, arriving one after another while the music played!
Noah held Thalia tighter in his arms, and they turned together across the stellar grass as wonder bloomed within him and around him in equal measure, quarks igniting by the thousands in his depths, beginnings igniting by the hundreds above!
And through all of it, the symphony went on, old past any counting, filling the surroundings from nowhere and everywhere at once, as if existence itself had drawn near to bear witness to the emergence of something utterly immense!