Novel Full Chapter 5340: Action I
Chapter 5340: Action I
As one of his bodies in THE Hallowed Demesne touched THE Primordial Source for the first time and had a terrifying Mesozoic Scale Source Lifeform about to start a spar, all of Noah’s existence shifted with it.
The change rippled across every body he held distributed throughout existence, the budding Primordial Source and the unknown reaction it had begun reaching through the whole of what he was. And at this exact moment, with that reaction beating like an ancient heartbeat through his foundations, he was doing something pivotal with another of his bodies, far away, within THE Braneworld Observable Existence.
He floated in the skies above a vast citadel.
THE Quietus Silvanus. The citadel rose from the Braneworld in towers of silver, and the silver was not decoration. It was the amplified Ego of Acedia made into architecture, the towers built with a deliberate stillness in their lines, their surfaces carrying a muted gleam that absorbed motion rather than reflecting it.
The structures spread across an immense footprint, a civilization rendered in silver and shadow, walkways and spires and vast domed halls arranged with the unhurried confidence of a people who had built across eons and felt no need to hurry.
Within it moved millions of Gilded Ones, their auras a collective hum of Acedia and the other Egos that served alongside it.
Noah was not above the citadel alone.
He had brought Alexander with him, and the two of them were wrapped in the light of his Humilitas Ego of Infinity, imperceptible to everything below, two beings hanging unseen above a city of millions.
Noah wore this body in a simple emperor’s robe, dark and unadorned, the dignity in it coming from his bearing rather than ornament. Alexander wore the same cut in green and white, the colors of the man he had been before loss had hollowed him.
Noah felt the unfathomable changes continuing through his existence as THE Primordial Source budded, and he stared down at the silver citadel and began to speak.
"Existence moves unfathomably fast," he said. "And I love having my own accomplishments. But one does not go through existence alone. It is always better to share in the accomplishments and the disappointments both, with others. I know how you feel after you have faced loss after loss after loss. I know it makes a being want to stop. But that feeling is not an instruction. It is not existence telling you that you cannot do things, that you must do them alone or not at all."
He kept his eyes on the citadel.
"I am not talkative. I am not particularly in tune with emotions, mine or anyone else’s, so I will not pretend to know exactly what to say to you. But I can tell you what I personally love about existence. The wonder of it. The sheer ridiculous fact that everything I know today could be altered and changed tomorrow because I learned something new. New lifeforms. New civilizations. New ways of existing entirely."
"I thought I knew every herb worth knowing, and today I was exposed to Source Herbs in THE Source Lands that I had never imagined. I was exposed to beings of power beyond even the Fourth Scale of Existence. I keep being exposed to ideas and weavings I could not have conceived of weeks ago." He paused.
"The constant change. The exploration. The adventure of it. Existence has so much to offer that it would be a genuine shame to leave it behind just because it is occasionally difficult. Just because it occasionally throws a tremendous weight of adversity at us that tries to break us down."
He turned to look at Alexander.
"I know you carry the same sense of wonder I do. The same love of finding out what you did not know. So I am here, as a friend, to give you a choice. To stand up again, regardless of the adversity. And even if another time comes, even if some future difficulty beats you flat into the ground, stand up again after that one too. Because that is simply what we have to do. That is the whole of it. We stand up again."
Noah waved his hand.
The Enneagram appeared between them, the treasure Alexander had given him to safeguard, the one holding everything Alexander had left of his family. And beside it, Noah revealed a second object, a square of obsidian with a single golden button set at its center.
"I’ll tell you what I believe about existence," Noah said, his voice carrying the flat certainty of his deepest convictions.
"Existence does not care whether you give up. It will not reward your surrender with peace, and it will not punish your persistence with anything worse than it was already going to send. So the choice to stop is a choice that costs you everything and buys you nothing."
BOOM!
"The only move that has ever made sense to me is to keep going. To refuse. To stand in front of the whole weight of existence and decline to fall down. Not because it is easy. Because the alternative is worse and quieter and ends with you having given existence something it never even asked for."
Alexander trembled.
He reached out and took the Enneagram in his hands, and the treasure pulsed and shone, crying out gloriously as if it recognized the touch of the one it belonged to, the light within it surging at the return to its rightful owner.
Noah looked at the obsidian square with the button.
"Today, I plan to start a series of actions against the Gilded Ones," he said. "This is only the first of them. Eon, my woman from among the Gilded Ones, wishes to change her people. She does not want it to be pure destruction and genocide, and I respect that. But she also understands that it cannot all be sunshine and rainbows. A level of destruction is required, and acceptable, to effect real change. Destruction and decimation are actually required for any significant change to take hold." He looked down at the silver citadel.
"So today, I start things off with destruction. The place below holds millions of Gilded Ones. And among them are Third Scale and Fourth Scale Gilded Ones who were responsible for sending down the Ordnances that nuked our Observable Existence. Today, I wish to return that favor."
BOOM!