Novel Full Chapter 5372: Records and Knowledge! III
Chapter 5372: Records and Knowledge! III
The voice warmed to itself, the way it had on the corpse.
|What Vakochev did, what made him so very useful to everyone who came after, was build a streamlined path. A staircase. He looked at the wild trackless climb that beings had always made toward power and he laid steps on it, and he labeled the steps, and he told everyone the order to take them in. Your Civilizational Anchor here. Your Civilizational Forge there. Your Existential Radiation next, your Akashic Civilizational Intent after that, all of it sequenced, all of it Scaled.|
|And do you understand what that means, little vessel? It means that every time one of you sets a Civilizational Anchor, you are following his musings. Every time you forge anything, refine anything, climb anything, you are walking a road someone else surveyed, thinking thoughts someone else thought first and left lying around for you to find. You climb, and he profits, because the road is his and you are all just traffic on it.|
|There is a comfort in that, I will grant it. A road in the dark is a mercy. You always know the next step. But.|
A weight came into the voice.
|To refuse the road. To climb in the dark with no steps laid and no labels and no one ahead of you to blame. That is a different thing entirely. If you stumble there, the catastrophe is entirely yours. No framework catches you. No Scale holds you up. You fail alone and completely, in a way the road-walkers will never even risk.|
The voice was almost tender now, almost proud. |And that is the only path that has ever led to true power. The road leads to where the road leads. Off the road is where the grand things are. So to have a vessel that climbs off the road, a vessel I will eventually wear, I am genuinely happy. I will gladly steer you toward grandness. Consider it... an investment in my future home.|
BOOM!
The words landed heavy, and underneath them sat the surety, the flat certainty that it would, in the end, take him. It spoke of his grandness the way a man speaks of improvements to a house he has already decided to buy.
Noah answered it without heat.
"You’re very confident you’ll take over my existence," he said. "I’ll give you that. But understand something. However much confidence you’ve got that you’ll wear me one day, I’ve got more that I’ll keep you sealed and spend you down to nothing. You’re not a guest in my heart. You’re inventory. And I always liquidate my inventory eventually."
He felt it smile inside him.
And because it was sealed, and caged, and a talkative monster with nowhere else to be, Noah decided to use it the way he used everything.
"But since you’re in there, and since you clearly enjoy the sound of your own voice," he said, "you can tell me a story. You went on about Intents. So what’s yours? What’s the Intent of a thing from before the Scales?"
|Ah.|
The voice was delighted to be asked.
|My Intent. My record, the knowledge folded into it, the thing my whole existence compressed down into force.| It savored the question.
|Records of devouring entire Observable Existences, vessel. Not beings within them. The domains themselves, foundation and First Cause and all, taken into me and gone. Records of eating Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms by the countless, until the counting stopped meaning anything. Records of a path that made existence itself tremble when I walked it, that emptied rooms before I entered them. Records of a thing that came before THE Scales for the simple reason that it needed no Scales, no road, no steps laid by anyone, because it was already where the road was trying to go.|
The pride in it was vast and cold.
|The record of a True Lifeform. A Lifeform that required no guidelines because it was the thing the guidelines were drawn to approximate. And much like my name, little vessel, a small mind would shatter trying to hold the true identity of my Intent. So I will not give it to you. Out of courtesy. I would prefer my future home intact.|
|But I will give you one piece of advice, freely, because we are going to be together a long while and I find I like you.|
The voice gentled into something almost instructive.
|You are on the right path with Infinity and THE Primordial Source. The fusion you are reaching for is real, and rare, and it is most of why I find you delicious. But do not build your Intent on them. Not on Infinity. Not on THE Primordial Source. Those are powers. Powers are things you hold, and a thing built on what you hold can be made to let go.|
A beat.
|Build it on you. On your identity. The one thing that cannot be taken without taking everything, the one thing that is not a power but the holder of powers. That is what I did. That is what every True Lifeform did. After all. It is your Intent. It should be no one and nothing but you.|
BOOM!
It kept talking big, and it kept, even in the talking, letting slip grand weavings of existence that Noah filed away as fast as it spilled them, because a monster that could not help showing off was a monster that taught you things it did not mean to.
And the advice was sound. Noah had already branded his Primordial Source as Osmontian, already bound his identity through everything he held, and the thing in his heart was telling him to take that one step further, to make his very Intent nothing but himself, and it was correct, and he could feel his weavings beginning to turn that way as he considered it, the forming Intent leaning toward identity as its core.
The words of THE Sealed One were good. And...!
BOOM!
In the next instant, Noah’s expression went cold.
His chest cavity nearly caved inward. His heart, the heart that beat with Infinity and Quintessence and held a monster chained behind a swirling rune, buzzed chaotically, the rhythm breaking, the rune stuttering, and then it ruptured. Vibrant stellar blood, thick with Infinity, spilled out of him into the dark of THE Maw, and the pain of it tore through his whole frame as the organ at the center of everything he was came apart around the thing it caged.
HUUUM!
His Infinity roared. He poured it into the wound, into the rupture, steadying himself by force, his identity flooding the heart and dragging it back toward whole even as the blood ran.
And THE Sealed One laughed.
|Forgive me.| It was cruel and it was delighted and it was entirely unrepentant. |I was only testing the limits of the cage you built. It is a good cage. A very good cage, for a thing your age made in a single panicked instant. But you should know what it can and cannot do, and so should I. And what I have just learned is that I can do that.|
The laughter rolled through his ruptured heart.
|Any time I like. A flex of will, and your heart comes apart. Imagine it, vessel. The middle of an advancement. The peak of some hard-won epiphany. The single most critical instant of some battle you cannot afford to lose. And there I will be, in your chest, ready to make things unfathomably difficult for you, at the exact moment difficulty would cost you the most.|
The blood slowed. The rune over his heart resumed its grinding turn. Noah stood in the dark, cold-faced, holding himself whole.
|We are going to have such a good time, you and I,| THE Sealed One said, warm and terrible. |Such a good time, Osmont.|
BOOM!