Chapter 5829: Order! II
Chapter 5829: Order! II
Noah looked over everything thoroughly!
Each rung swallowed the one beneath it whole, and above all of them sat the undersides of existence, the cycles of the Ages, and the outside.
He smiled.
Then the Tree measured him.
|Noah Osmont. THE True Human Emperor. THE Osmontian, THE Dreaming Human Origin.|
|VERITAS: Order I.4. What you dream holds true across many Dimensions near you, and thins toward the far edges of your reach.|
|PROVENANCE: Order I.6. What you make of yourself draws on more than half the power your Order can command, and owes nothing for it.|
|POTENTIA: Infinite. No Order contains it.|
|PONDUS: Order I.3. Your weight bends a third of your reach around you.|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Order I.1. Your hold on fate and narrative has barely entered the first Order.|
|Profundity: ?????|
...!
First Order, every one of them!
So where did the Immense sit on this ladder?
He looked at Poona, and his existence answered.
|Measured against the Orders: a Newly Risen Immensity commonly reaches upper bounds of Order I in its strongest attribute. The Ancient reach far higher. Their full measure lies beyond your present sight.|
"Hmm..." He nodddd at this.
Then he looked at everything else!
Over his existence he had gathered a great deal: Core Capabilities, Authorities, Provenances, techniques, Records, a whole system in his Tree. It worked, but it was cluttered.
He was THE Dreaming Human Origin now. Human, Dreamer, Sovereign.
So everything he had should belong to one of the three.
He reached into himself and began to sort!
It was strange work and very satsifying. Each capability, when he touched it, leaned toward one of the three parts of him as naturally as water runs downhill.
His existence logged it as he went.
|Streamlining your existence.|
|THE Human.|
|What you feel, what you speak, and whom you hold.|
|Your emotions: endless, every extreme growing without limit and feeding your power.|
|Core Capability IV: THE Living Grammar. Core Capability VIII: THE Sanguine Covenant. Egos.|
|Kin: Ling, THE Dancer in the Boundless Dream. Poona, THE Dreaming Hearth. Cocoons yet to open.|
|THE Dreaming Origin.|
|What you dream becomes true.|
|Core Capability I: THE Dream Without a Far Wall. Core Capability II: THE Sovereign of the Lived Hour. Core Capability III: THE Waking Decree. THE Gold Without Pupils. THE Endless Waking. THE Vigil That Wished to Rise.|
|THE Sovereign.|
|What you take, what you build, and what you rule.|
|Core Capability V: THE Rendered Design. Core Capability VI: THE Tide-Crowned Protagonist. Core Capability VII: THE Unkneeling Chill. THE Bow of the Ending Epoch. Authority of the Held Breath. Authority of the Unclosing Hand. Provenances of Ending, Order, and Stillness. Records of an Immense One. THE Feast That Seals: Predation, Auto-Fusion, Judgment, and the Branches of your Tree.|
|Beneath all three: THE One Foundation, Dialetheic Infinity.|
|Streamlining complete. What was many is arranged as one.|
...!
Noah let out a long breath.
Every power he owned now sat in its propper room, ready to his hand.
That left one thing unfinished.
He had given two great gifts on this road: Ling, carried through a sealed door inside his own Dream and made a Dream Immensity, and Poona, drawn out of her own corpse as a last flicker and dreamed back to life. Through all of it, THE Tide That Owes Nothing had not given.
It held weight sitting in the deepest part of THE Tide-Crowned Protagonist, waiting for him to ask.
So he asked!
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has kept count of your giving.|
|Given: a Dream Immensity, to Ling. Given: a Dream Immensity and a second life, to Poona.|
|These were gifts no lifeform has given before. They were given with thought, at great cost, to those you hold dear.|
|THE Tide answers in full, and its answer exceeds your Order.|
...!
Exceeds his Order?
The sky of the Domain darkened, and the first one rose over the hills!
It came up slowly, as a sun comes up, vast and round and gold. As it climbed, Noah saw that it was a shell. A great hollow sphere woven of dream, thread over thread, shining blue and gold, and inside it, at its heart, something burned.
Dreams. Countless dreams, every one a light, gathered into a single blazing core: the dreams of a whole civilization, then another, then thousands, peoples across countless Dimensions all sleeping at once and dreaming into this one place. A child dreaming of the sea. A smith dreaming of the perfect blade.
A city dreaming of its own tomorrow. All of it pouring into the core, and the shell around it catching every scrap of their light and holding it, harnessing it, turning it into power.
A sun made of a civilization’s sleep, and a shell built to drink it.
|Loot obtained: THE Dreaming Shell of Countless Sleeping Peoples.|
|A sphere woven around the gathered dreams of countless civilizations, harnessing the whole of their dreaming as power.|
|Born of the dream you carried through a sealed door. What opened for one, now gathers from countless.|
|Its reach spans the whole weavings of a Legacy. It is of the second Order.|
...!
Second Order!
His whole existence leaned toward it. Every attribute he had sat on the first rung, and this reached a whole Legacy’s breadth.
The second one rose beside it.
This one rose out of warmth. Lamplight first, spilling across the river of light, gold and steady, and the smell of honey and baking bread rolling over the hills so thick that Poona’s eye went wide and wet. The lamplight gathered, and rose, and became a second sun beside the first.
But this sun was made of hearths.
Noah could see them in it, millions of them: the fire under every family’s pot, the lamp left burning in every window for someone coming late, every table where people gathered to eat and argue and be safe. All that warmth burned in a single sphere, and around it turned a shell of woven dream, keeping it.
A whole people’s dream of home, harnessed.
|Loot obtained: THE Hearth-Sun of the Kept Tables.|
|A sun formed of the warmth of every hearth across a civilization’s countless homes, and the dream of a home that waits for each who has not yet returned.|
|Born of the life you dreamed back from death. What returned to one table, now burns at a million.|
|Its reach spans the whole weavings of a Legacy. It is of the second Order.|
...!
Noah stood up.
Two Second Order suns hung over his Domain, and every star in his sky had dimmed around them.
He felt something rise in his chest.
Greed, first. Pure and bright and shameless. He wanted them! He wanted both of them, and everything like them, every sleeping people’s dreams and every hearth’s warmth in every civilization across existence!
His Tyranny and his Quintessence also rose. The core of him. They looked at the two suns and knew, plainly, that they belonged inside him.
|Greed: risen, without end.|
|Tyranny: risen, without end.|
|Quintessence: risen, without end.|
|Your emotions elevate your power.|
...!
He opened his mouth.
The blue-gold brilliance inside it looked up at the two suns, and the event horizons turned, and he pulled. The Dreaming Shell came down first, its woven threads stretching into long ribbons, the blazing dreams of countless peoples streaming after them like a river of sparks. Then the Hearth-Sun, unwinding into lamplight, the warmth of a million homes pouring down out of the sky and into him in a long gold flood.
His Tree drank!
The dreams of the sleeping peoples went into the truth of him and the weave of his fate. The hearths went into his weight and the part of him that generated from itself. His constellations blazed until they lit the whole hill, and the sky of the Domain, emptied of its two suns, burned brighter than before.
|Devoured: THE Dreaming Shell of a Thousand Sleeping Peoples.|
|Devoured: THE Hearth-Sun of the Kept Tables.|
|Second Order loot integrated by a first Order existence. Your attributes surge toward the second rung.|
|Sap risen toward the First Bough: 53%.|
|VERITAS: Order I.4 to Order I.8.|
|PROVENANCE: Order I.6 to Order I.9. Knocking on the doors of Order II|
|PONDUS: Order I.3 to Order I.8.|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Order I.1 to Order I.5.|
|POTENTIA: Infinite.|
...!
Noah read the numbers, and laughed out loud.
Provenance at I.9, pressing against the second rung, with Veritas and Pondus close behind. He could feel the next Order above him now, close enough to touch.
He wanted it. He wanted all of it!
Poona was staring at him with her one great eye very round.
"Master," she said slowly, "Were you a slime before? Your hunger and devouring almost seems grander than mine. We can test this by seeing who can devour Dimensions the fastest..."
...!
She said some ridiculous things as he didn’t reply.
His existence only buzzed as he probed regarding The Judgments and the capability that called forth what looked like a tribulation from existence everytime he used it.
|A clarification, on the Branches of your Tree.|
|A Branch grows only when your Tree itself grows beyond what existence allows, and survives the Judgment for it.|
|When you stand within a Judgment for another, as for Ling’s rising or Poona’s return, the Judgment falls on you and is counted in your Debt. The growth is theirs. No Branch of yours grows from it.|
Okay! It didn’t answer too much, but okay!
He looked at the whole of himself one last time, sorted and counted.
First Order, every attribute, Potentia aside. Three umbrellas. One Tree, one ring lit, Sap at fifty-three percent, a single Branch with an Unsealing on it, and a Judgment Debt of three.
It was a beginning, and only that. The Ancient Ones he had met sat a little above. They had lived longer than him as that was fine.
That meant there was a great deal left to eat!
Noah stood and brushed the dream-grass off his knees. Beside him, Poona stopped bouncing and looked up.
Noah turned toward the far edge of his Domain, toward the threads that ran down out of him into THE Undersnow, toward the frozen dark of the Basal Floor and the rift that split it open in the north.
There was much to be done!