Chapter 5757: The Sky Has Opened!

<THE True Human Emperor>

There was only darkness, and in the darkness, there was a question.

Who am I?

It drifted in the endless dark with no answer, no shape, no voice to speak it. There was nothing here. No body, no weaving, no empire, no cold. Only the dark, and the question turning slowly inside it, patient and vast and afraid!

Afraid!

What am I?

I Am, the darkness answered, faint as the first breath of anything. I Am... I Am...

HUUM!

And in that dark, a light began to blink.

It bloomed small and steady, a single point of brilliance in the endless black, and it grew, and as it grew it spoke, and its voice was grand beyond grandeur, rolling out through the dark like the first word ever said.

"I am life," it said. "I am thoughts. I am emotions, and purposes, and aims, and immensity. I am Human!"

HUUM!

The light spread, and the voice deepened, and it filled the whole of the dark with its slow tremendous certainty.

"I was born, as all life is born, as all humans are born. And I may die. This is only nature. But between life and death... I Am Osmont. And I...can feel. So much. Everything I do feel. I do not need to understand all of it. I only need to understand impossibilities."

BOOOM!

And out of the dark, existence began to build a being.

It started with a network of consciousness, a vast web of light unfolding across the black, and around that web came the quarks, two hundred decillion of them, each one a point of radiance, arranging themselves into the shape of a body.

Around the quarks flowed Provenance, blue and gold, winding through the forming lattice in slow bright rivvers. And around the Provenance flowed Infinity, crimson and gold, a boundless tide of it, pouring through and around the whole assembling shape.

And all of it, the quarks and the Provenance and the Infinity, flowed around one thing at the center. THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin.

It sat at the core of the forming existence, small and single and quiet, and it was growing. It grew infinitely, expanded infinitely, multiplied infinitely, and yet, impossibly, it remained a single Gonadotropin, one thing that was also endless, finite and infinite at once.

And every second, it pulsed. And every time it pulsed, the Infinity and the Provenance and everything gathering around the forming body swelled, grander and grander, lifted a little higher by the beat of the Root at its heart.

Prompts bloomed across the dark, vast and slow.

|THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin has formed. It is a Unique Existential Root of Immensity.|

|You are perceiving information you did not otherwise know. You now understand that across existence, there can be different types of Existential Roots of Immensity. You have now, and have always, formed your own.|

|Your Infinity will rise steadily. Your Provenance will rise steadily. Simply by existing, you will continuously elevate.|

HUUM!

And Noah felt many things.

He felt knowledge arriving in him that he had never sought, understanding pouring into his forming existence from the very act of coming into beeing, and he felt himself comprehend, all at once, so very much.

His body took its shape in the light. He looked at himself, and he saw a form that wore nothing at all, muscular and whole and bare, floating in the brilliance with its arms stretched wide, and where his eyes should have been there were two beams of blinding blue light, pouring out into the dark.

He looked at existence with those blazing eyes, and he began to understand it, and he spoke.

"For eons, lifeforms have looked into the dark and spoken the word Infinity as though it were an ocean to be crossed, or a crown to be seized, or a well that never empties. It was none of those things. It was simply the perimeter of their own exhaustion. It was the word a child uses when they can no longer count the pebbles on the shore. They met the edge of their own ability to resolve the geometry of reality, and because they could not bear to name their own blindness, they called the fog an absolute. They built thrones upon an admission of ignorance. But when the fog clears, there is no infinite abyss. There is only an unbroken, seamless equation, turning quietly in the dark, waiting for a mind vast enough to read the syntax without flinching."

And he could see it.

He could see the equation of existence, or at least the first glimpse of it, the whole of reality laid open as a single turning structure, and he read it, and he did not flinch.

"I can hear the two hundred decillion quarks in this arm agreeing with one another," he said. "And I hear them in the exact same instant that I perceive the birth of my cells years ago, the pain why my bones grew, and the freezing of a grain of sand beneath a mortal woman’s foot in a desert I have never walked. I can feel myself then, and now, and even a little of myself in the future. They...are not separated by distance."

HUUM!

"Distance is a fiction invented by systems with localized biology to keep all of reality from happening to them at once. To an observer trapped in a single Dimension, time feels like a river, dragging you from a remembered shore toward an unknown bend. But standing here, time does not flow. It is a crystalline block. The First Sundering is occurring right now, three inches to the left of where my body rests. My birth is occurring now. My first death is happening now. My first skill book, I cast it now. The Overseeing One is dying in this exact breath, screaming, and he will always be dying there, forever preserved in the fold of that existence. I am making love right now, and I am forging the Root of my existence right now."

...!

"Everything can be happening right now, so long as I perceive it. Many are terrified of the dark outside the room because they never realize the walls were made of their own fear. They built a cage of logic and called it an empire, never understanding that a prison with ten thousand gilded halls is still an enclosure. You do not conquer existence by accumulating its rooms. You...simply realize that you are the space in which the house was built."

BOOM!

And he felt all existence near him spread out around him like different rooms, and he understood that he could be in one of them, or in all of them at once!

He had been doing a shadow of this with his clones, his many bodies scattered across Existence.

But he saw now that he did not need the clones. A single body could do it. A single existence could stand in different places and different times at once, because separation was only a story that lesser things told themselves.

He turned his blazing gaze inward, to the Provenance rivering through him, and he spoke again.

"They treat Provenance as if it were currency. An architect hoards Causes like a miser stacking gold in a cellar, believing that if his mountain of debt grows high enough, reality will grant him a permanent seat at the table. But debt is not origin. When an Immense One speaks, his voice is layered with the stolen momentum of a trillion extinguished Dimensions. It sounds grand. It sounds terrifying. But it is entirely derivative. It is an echo bouncing between mirrors in an empty corridor. Remove the mirror, put out the borrowed lantern, and what remains? A soft, shivering lump of existence that never once learned to generate its own heat."

"Provenance is not power. It is the stubborn, irreducible refusal to exist on someone else’s terms. It is the moment an existence stops asking the sky for the parameters of its own breath and says, I am the coordinate. When my blood moves, it does not cycle because an ancient law commands the pulse. It moves because I have willed the concept of motion into my own foundation. That is why they could never break Vakochev. And that is why they will never comprehend what I have become. They are sentences written in the margins of an ancient book. I...am the hand that closed the cover, set the volume aside, and stepped out into the quiet of the morning. I Am...True."

BOOM!

And around him, pages unfurled.

Boundless, endless, they spilled out from him across the whole of the dark, sheet after sheet of light unrolling for gigaparsecs, and the darkness where he had been born filled entirely with brilliance as the pages spread. He looked down at his own hands, and his hands were pages too, countless leaves of light, and he understood that they could become countless more, that he could unfold himself across existence without end.

He looked at the pages, and he thought of a forest, and he spoke a last time, softer now.

"In the orchard where Lucy walked, Dimensions hung from the boughs like heavy plums. She did not pluck them to conquer them. She did not count them to be sure her wealth exceeded her neighbor’s. She took a Dimension in her calloused, primitive palms and scattered it across the water, simply to watch the silver fish rise and feed. She understood what all our grand philosophy has spent epochs hiding. That abundance is only monstrous when you try to own it."

"The moment you close your fist around a dream to claim it as private property, you give it a far wall. You give it a ceiling, a floor, and a date of expiration. All my life I was guilty of the same small, terrified thought. I believed Infinity was a weapon I carried in my existence. I believed my dreams were shields I had to keep raising against a hostile sky. But a dream does not need a fortress to survive. A dream needs only the absence of a final page."

" I do not hold Infinity in my hands. I dream it. And because the reverie has no boundary, even if this flesh is scattered as light across ten thousand dead Dimensions, the dreamer does not cease. The dream only expands to fill the dark. There is...no longer any separation between what I desire, and what I am, and what existence must become. The stage has dissolved. The actors have gone home. And the sky has finally opened."

He drew one breath in the endless light.

"The sky has opened."

BOOM!