Novel Full Chapter 5233: Oblivion IV
Chapter 5233: Oblivion IV
Vaeltharion looked at him with ancient eyes that had adjusted their estimate of the current situation multiple times across the preceding minutes and were now arriving at an adjustment that sat in a different category than the previous ones.
"What are you?" His voice was cold, containing the genuine inquiry of a being who had moved past strategic assessment into the simpler territory of needing an answer. "What do you want?"
Noah’s eyes remained closed.
When he spoke, his voice carried the unhurried cadence of a being who had thought about this answer for some time!
"There is an old story, perhaps apocryphal, about a man who lived in a palace for years, convinced the gold leaf on the ceilings was a gift from the heavens specifically for him. He never once looked at the foundation. He never once asked who laid the stone. He simply lived in the light of things he did not build and called it his birthright."
He paused.
"For too long, you and your kind have treated Infinity like a bottomless sea at a party that was never meant to end. You have sipped it, bathed in it, and used it to wash the dust off your boots as if it were a common right. A privilege. It is an extravagant indulgence, really, one that has made you soft in the places where a soul should be hard."
His voice did not rise.
"I was born in the dirt. I was born a Bounded Lifeform, without a single speck of energy or a whisper of authority to my name. I had to forge my own light in a dark world while you were busy rearranging Existence to better suit your view from the balcony. But the party is over, and the bill has finally arrived."
He turned his face toward Vaeltharion without opening his eyes.
"Just as THE Primordial Source remains a distant shimmering dream you can never quite touch, Infinity is about to become a memory to you. A new era is upon us, one where the things you have held are being reclaimed by the hands that actually know the value of the forge. I am starting here, in this corner of existence, with all of you."
His voice carried the quiet certainty of a Directive being established.
"You can hold your Pride and your Wrath and your Lust as close to your chests as you like, but you are going to find them very cold comforts when the fire goes out. From this moment forward, unless I personally extend a hand and grant my strict permission, Infinity is no longer yours to command. It is being taken back. It is being reclaimed. You have arrived here with your high Egos and your staggering arrogance, convinced you are the masters of Existence."
A final pause.
"I am stripping you of that capability. I am taking back the ocean and leaving you gasping on the sand."
BOOM!
"I strip you of Infinity."
The gazes of somberness and incredulity that moved through the assembled Gilded Ones were not instantaneous. They arrived in sequence, each being registering the statement’s implications at the speed their respective comprehension produced, with the Sororis Primas arriving first through their Cognitio Cause connections and the Ordovician Scale beings arriving last through the simple mechanism of feeling it happen before understanding what was happening.
Because it was already happening.
|DIRECTIVE ESTABLISHED — THE Infinite Mandates of THE Primus Apeiron are active.|
|Standing Directive, first issuance: Infinity within Observable Existence will no longer respond to the commands, cultivation draws, or existential expressions of any Gilded Lifeform present here unless THE Primus Apeiron’s explicit permission is first obtained and maintained.|
|Enforcement: All beings currently drawing power from THE Bellum Cause or THE Cognitio Cause cannot override this Directive. All beings at Ordovician Paleozoic Scale or below cannot override this Directive. The Directive is enforced by Infinity itself rather than by any of THE Primus Apeiron’s active power, meaning defensive weavings directed against external cultivation attacks will not address this Directive’s mechanism.|
|The Directive is operational.|
The Gilded Ones felt itas a slow terrifying withdrawal, the specific sensation of a being discovering that the resource they have drawn on continuously across their entire existence, so continuously that they had stopped perceiving it as a drawn resource and had simply experienced it as the ambient condition of their own foundations, was no longer responding.
Their Gilded Paleozoic bones, forged from Infinity. Their organs, built through Infinity. Their Causes, expressed through Infinity as their medium. All of it still present in the structural sense of being present, but the Infinity within them no longer listening when they reached for it, as though the ocean had decided it was done being water for anyone who asked it.
Sororis Prima expressions that had held their composed authority across every prior development began to shift.
Vaeltharion’s ancient eyes moved from Noah to his own hands, where three Prime Cause integrations were finding the Infinity they normally flowed through behaving as a medium that had adopted a new instruction set.
The somber expression deepened.
The livid quality arrived alongside it.
They looked at Noah with the specific combination of incredulity and cold fury of beings who had just encountered something they had believed categorically impossible for the full span of their eons of cultivation, and whose response to the categorical impossibility’s occurrence was to want to know who had permitted it!
Nobody had permitted it!
That was the point.
Noah breathed out slowly, and the multicolored Infinity continued to surge toward him from every direction, and he opened his eyes.
He looked at the thousands of Ordovician Scale Gilded Ones. The dozen Sororis Primas. The nine Ragnars. Vaeltharion with his three Prime Cause integrations burning in his ancient eyes.
All of them standing in THE Wandering Territories with their Infinity beginning to empty out of their foundations the way water emptied from a vessel whose seal had been removed.
He spoke again, and the voice came out with the specific cadence of someone finishing a thought they had begun long before this battle.
"You’ve spent eons playing architect with souls that were never yours to mold. You engineer Egos like clothes, cutting away the parts that don’t fit your aesthetic of dominance and calling the leftovers trash. You create these castes and call it order, yet you use them for the kind of vile depravity that would make a vile demon blush. It is a beautifully designed machine of misery, and you’ve enjoyed the hum of it for far too long."
His crown blazed.
" I have already taken your Infinity. That was the appetizer. Now I am taking the doors. You won’t be leaving this Observable Existence, and you won’t be retreating to your golden towers or your shielded dimensions to wait for the storm to pass in THE Braneworld. Observable Existence is closed to all of you here. Information will not flow from this engagement outward. And you."
He looked at all of them.
"You are going to be scattered to the furthest, most inhospitable ends of existence where the air is thin and the shadows are hungry. You are going to be hunted like the animals you have treated everyone else as, and there won’t be a single royal decree that can save you. I want you to feel the cold sharp edge of the fear you have spent eons inflicting on the Bounded. I want you to understand the specific crushing weight of a life that is no longer in your control."
His voice dropped to the register of a Directive being issued.
"So. Scatter."
BOOM!
He commanded the Infinity in the surroundings through THE Infinite Tongue speaking the instruction into the ambient substrate with the Mandate’s authority backing every word, the Infinity in THE Wandering Territories receiving the instruction the way Infinity had always received instructions from THE Infinite Tongue, with the immediate responsiveness of a medium that had been waiting for its native language to be spoken to it.
The Infinity grabbed!
Every Gilded One in THE Wandering Territories felt their coordinates reassigned, the Infinity that permeated the space between their current positions and the furthest most inhospitable reaches of Observable Existence rearranging itself into the specific configuration of a displacement that covered the distance in the interval between one moment and the next.
Ordovician and Silurian alike, Sororis Prima and Ragnar clone and ancient Vaeltharion with three integrated Prime Causes, the magnitude of the displacement operating through the Infinity itself rather than through Noah’s direct cultivation and therefore addressing every being present regardless of their tier.
They were gone.
One by one. Then in clusters. Then all at once, the final disposals of the remaining resisters completing as the Mandate accumulated enough enforcement weight to override even the Silurian Paleozoic Cause-backed resistance of Vaeltharion and the nine Ragnars.
Vaeltharion’s eyes held Noah’s until the displacement took him!
BOOM!
Then he was gone.
THE Wandering Territories were empty.
Noah stood alone at the center of the space where thousands of Gilded Ones had been, and endless rivers and seas of multicolored Infinity surged toward him from every direction simultaneously, filling the vacated space with his own substance, the ambient substrate responding to the removal of every competing claim on its expression.
|Standing Directives active and sustained:|
|First Directive: Infinity unresponsive to Gilded commands within the affected region of Observable Existence. Enforcement ongoing.|
|Second Directive: Information quarantine established. Participants cannot broadcast account of this battle to THE Braneworld Observable Existence while the quarantine holds.|
|Third Directive: Displacement active. Scattered participants have been distributed across the far reaches of Observable Existence to isolated coordinates.|
|Limitation acknowledgment: THE Infinite Mandates are not without constraint. The Directives will hold against any being at Silurian Paleozoic Scale or below operating alone. A being with the backing of multiple Prime Causes simultaneously, or a being drawing on THE First Cause’s direct authority rather than its derived expressions, would possess the sufficient weight to disrupt the established Directives. The quarantine will hold until a being of sufficient power and sufficient motivation investigates its source. Duration estimate: indeterminate but finite.|
|The Mandates are powerful. They are not permanent without further elevation.|
...!
Noah read the limitations gloriously.
Not without limits. Which meant the displacement and the quarantine were buying time rather than providing permanent resolution, and the clock on that time was determined by how quickly THE Braneworld recognized the silence from this region and sent something capable of disrupting a Silurian Paleozoic level Mandate to investigate.
He filed the timeline estimate as a planning variable and closed his eyes again.
He felt his Infinite Cause.
In the empty Wandering Territories, with the multicolored Infinity flowing toward him from every vacated coordinate simultaneously, he felt his Cause in the specific way the Sepulchre’s communion had allowed him to feel it, at a depth of contact he had not accessed before the containment had stripped everything else away and left only the Cause and the Tongue pressed against each other.
Its immensity sat with him.
The Cause his mother had originated. The Cause his own existence was the primary expression of. The Cause that had no Gilded designation because no Gilded engineering had ever been able to produce through its methodology what the combination of a Bounded woman’s specific suffering and a Bounded man’s specific stubbornness had produced through the far older methodology of simply living through things that should have ended them.
He wanted to tell THE Infiniverse something.
He wanted to send the wanting through every connection he held to his internal domain where she was currently enjoying her Calabi-Yau folding and nurturing the three Miniature Causes he had ignited to accelerate her development.
Hurry.
Hurry and grow.
Become an Observable Existence!
Because the more he felt the immensity of what THE Infinite Cause could become when THE Infiniverse finally completed her transformation and the Cause had a full Observable Existence to draw its authority from, the more the current expression of his power, as terrifying as it had become, felt like a preliminary sketch of something that had not yet arrived at its proper scale.
Oh.
Oh!!!