Chapter 5704: Chrysalis I
Chapter 5704: Chrysalis I
He had to make himself into a meal.
Noah sighed lightly. He craned his neck to one side until it clicked, and then to the other, and rolled his shoulders once, and was ready to get started, because of course that was the method!
|Of course, something like that alone might be too hard to conceptualize. So.|
|Wrap your entire existence in whatever nature your Provenance holds. And while you do so, communicate with your surroundings how you WANT to be consumed. How you are giving yourself away for something grander and greater than yourself.|
|Provenance offered away is one of the easiest ways to get the attention of a Gu of a similar type in THE Chrysalis.|
|But even then, you could be doing that for years and never be picked up. The Chrysalis is not short on meals.|
|Which is where I come in. I have been there before. So I can form a tether from you to THE Chrysalis. You are the bait, and I am the fishing line, connecting you to the jaws of whatever Gu decides to consume you and pull you across.|
|Ready?|
|Imagine you are appetizing and grand. And then say the words...|
|I am filled with determination.|
Noah’s eyes pulsed as he got ready!
He drew his Provenance Essence up out of the depth of himself and let it out, and it came out as waves of blue-gold light that rolled off his skin and rose and wrapped him, layer over layer, until he stood inside a cloud of his own making with ninety suns burning above it!
He envisioned himself as the most appetizing meal in existence. He put his whole will into it, and he told the surroundings without words that here was a Provenance, self-generated, freely offered, given away for something grander!
THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer pulsed!
Waves of endless dreams poured out of him and joined the cloud, dreams of everything he had ever been and everything he had decided to become, and they wound through the blue-gold light until the whole of it shimmered with the soft heavy quality of a thing that is more than half asleep and entirely awake at once!
And Noah said the words.
"I am filled with determination!"
HUUM!
Brilliance pulsed across the whole Realm!
And out of the ring came a sound Noah had heard once before and had hoped not to hear again.
|Haha! Did you really say the words ’I am filled with determination’?|
"..."
|You actually do not need to say that shit! Haha!|
"..."
Noah stood inside his cloud of offered Provenance and dreams, appetizing and grand, and said absolutely nothing at all.
|Alright, alright. I will get serious and tether you.|
The ring on his finger went hot!
|Be ready. Once you are eaten, you will appear in the belly of a Gu related to your Provenance.|
|I hope it is a common Gu that does not metabolize you instantly.|
...!
Noah’s eye twitched.
He hoped it was a common Gu!
Noah closed his eyes, appetizing and grand, and waited to be eaten as he was trusting an ancient lifeform who messed around far, far too much!
It did not take too long before...
Something hooked into him!
Not a hand, not a grip, not any of the shapes that pulling usually took. It was a thread going taut somewhere behind his sternum, and the taut thread was attached to somewhere else, and the somewhere else began to reel!
Noah’s existence left!
It left the Realm, left the bank of the river, left the ninety suns and the layered Elsedimension, and it went out along the thread toward another weaving of existence entirely, and the going was not like crossing a Dimension!
Crossing a Dimension was still travel. This was something stranger, because as he went, he felt himself leaving the weavings of time itself.
Before and after came apart around him.
Duration stopped being a thing that happened and became a thing he was passing out of, almost like how a swimmer passes out of water, and on the far side of it there was no current, no direction, no order to events, only a wide slow place where time had no meaning because time had not yet decided to mean anything!
And then...after what could have been days or years, he felt like he...was being eaten.
His Provenance was being sucked away, drawn off him in long hungry pulls, as existence materialized around him out of nothing and he found himself inside something!
Murky golden clouds of dream surrounded him on every side, thick and soft and warm, and through the clouds ran tentacles, dozens of them, pale and translucent and lined with something that shimmered, and every one of them was fastened to him and siphoning his Provenance into the murk!
BOOM!
Noah withdrew immediately!
He pulled his Provenance in all at once, from the offered cloud, from the dreams he had poured out as bait, from every tentacle that had latched onto him, drawing the whole of it back inside himself in one hard contraction, and the thing he was inside of RUMBLED!
The golden murk convulsed around him. The tentacles whipped loose. Whatever had been feeding found its meal suddenly and violently inedible, and it did what anything does with an inedible meal.
It spat him out!
Noah shot forward through membranes, one after another after another, each one pulsing with heavy brilliance as he tore through it, wet golden light bursting around him on every side, and then the last membrane gave way and he was out, tumbling through open air into light!
HUUM!
And instantly...
Every quark in his existence buzzed.
Every cell. Every particle of the two hundred decillion. All of them thrummed at once with a single unmistakable message, which was that he had arrived somewhere grand.
|You have arrived at an unfathomable place.|
|Nature here is extremely loose and permeable. Reality is entirely fluid and heavily hallucinatory.|
|The sky might rain liquid fire. The ground might turn to event horizons. Time itself dilates and contracts without warning.|
|If you remain in one place for too long without individual thoughts, or without sufficient Trueness, you may assimilate into the surrounding existence.|
|Be immeasurably careful.|
|You have arrived in THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering.|
...!