Chapter 5881: Shinjitsu III

The Primordial Gu of Provenance was targetting Lifthrasir and the one who brought her back.

Noah thought about this with his eyes shining brilliantly as his second Narrative continued to work wonders- good and bad!

With the Keepers gone and the Provenance hunters still somewhere beyond the Ossuary, Noah turned his attention inward.

Lifthrasir sat on Kir One’s obsidian shoulder with her chin in her hands, watching him.

He began with an inventory. To find his Shinjitsu, he had set down everything less than wholly his: the cold of THE Long Night, Vakochev’s Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin that had first sparked his root, the Lesser Kryos, the returns from THE Tide, the administrative authority of the Epitropos seat. They still sat inside him, stacked in his existence like heavy coats on a chair, waiting.

"Well," Lifthrasir said. "Knowing what is borrowed and keeping it at arm’s length lets you barely touch your truth. That is your start. But if you simply pick those coats back up as they were, your Assimilation Rate will stall, or fall."

She swung her bare feet.

"To climb, you must either throw borrowed things away forever, or assimilate them until existence recognizes them as native to you. And assimilating things is fun! Existence is full of wondrous things. You don’t have to stay away from all of it to train your Shinjitsu. Break it down into something purely yours. Or throw it away, if you’d rather."

Throw away perfectly good loot, and a throne that spanned gigaparsecs?

Absolutely not!

He was going to eat all of it properly.

Noah turned his Infinity inward, Dialetheic and Adynatic and Noetic together, and let it read him down to the bottom.

He found Vakochev’s ECG first, an old architectural signature still woven into the base of his Dreaming Human Origin Tree, carrying the thesis it had arrived with: level the playing field, so that the small may stand against the great. Noetic Infinity understood it completely, and so Noah could rewrite it. He stripped the thesis away and rebuilt the signal as something purely human, a starving child’s refusal to stop growing.

The pain came at once! White fractures ran across his stellar skin as Auto-Fusion and Shinjitsu ground the foreign signature down into inert sediment and pushed it out of him.

Next came THE True Walking Winter, and with it the Kryos and all corpses he had swallowed from the Basal Floor and The Evergrave of THE Undersnow. The cold had belonged to the Long Night, to its Hollow Night Lifeforms and the unknown hand that turns the winter.

Noah reached back for a memory of his own instead: a cheap apartment in his childhood, the heating off to save money, Amelia gone on night shifts, and a boy wrapped in every blanket they owned, keeping the place warm by refusing to complain. He anchored the frost there, and the cold turned from an external curse into the quiet endurance of a home keeping itself warm.

He went deeper!

His Teloi, the purpose woven through every one of his two hundred decillion quarks, had been shaped long ago by systems and Causes outside him. He tied each purpose back to the boy in the small room, who got up every morning for no reason but his own dream. The Causes he had once cast out still ran through THE Infiniverse, and he acknowledged their echoes as lessons he had learned rather than laws he had been handed.

His old Infinite Scales were missing from him entirely. He had cast them out long ago on the obsidian sands, the ladder he had built across a time in mimicry of Vakochev’s Scales of Existence, and THE Infiniverse had kept their backbone. Even now, deep in the Dream Engine, Adelaide was rebuilding them, THE Genesis Scale and THE Source Scale, and sketching a Third of her own. Those Scales were a structure he had made by following another man’s blueprint. One day he may take them back, and when he did, they would have to be founded on nothing but his own truth.

The loot of THE Tide went last, Cores and Singularities long since devoured as fuel, now broken down again until nothing of their old owners remained in them.

Each one cost him. By the end, fractures of white light covered his arms and chest, and grey sediment drifted off him like ash.

He had to ensure he didn’t repeat this again as after today, everything would be broken down and filtered out by his Shinjitsu before being made his!

|You have stripped the foreign origin-marks from your foundational hormone and your winter weavings.|

|Vakochev’s signature: dissolved. Your growth answers only to your own hunger.|

|THE Long Night’s cold: re-anchored to a memory from the beginnings of your existence.|

|Lesser Kryos: assimilated. Your frost has no other master.|

|Teloi: re-rooted. Every quark’s purpose now traces back to your own dream.|

|The cast-out Causes: acknowledged as lessons.|

|THE Infinite Scales: Integrated.|

|The loot of THE Tide: broken down to raw mass. No former owner remains in it.|

|The Epitropos seat: its authority remains borrowed. It will become yours only when you have truly carried it.|

|The grain of IT: ?????|

...!

|What was swallowed as loot has been re-forged as memory and biology.|

|Assimilation Rate: 0.1% to 0.2%.|

Noah breathed out, and his breath fell as snow, and the snow felt like his.

Then his existence pulsed again, deeper, and something structural began to shift!

|With less borrowed between them, your Core Capabilities are fusing under Shinjitsu.|

|Redundancy is being removed.|

...!

|THE True Dream Without a Far Wall, THE True Waking Decree, THE True Living Grammar, and THE True Rendered Design have fused.|

|They have become a Shinjitsu Weaving of THE Dreaming Human Origin: THE Dream That Was Always So.|

|What you dream from your truth does not overwrite existence. Existence remembers it as having always been. Your word, your design, and your will are one act, and that act has no seam for anyone to pry open.|

...!

|THE True Sovereign of the Lived Hour, THE True Tide-Crowned Protagonist, THE Unkneeling Truth, and THE True Sanguine Covenant have fused.|

|They have become a Shinjitsu Weaving of THE Dreaming Human Origin: THE Empty Hands That Hold.|

|You hold nothing borrowed, and so nothing can be taken from you. Every hour you live, every bond you keep, and every thread that bends toward you rests on ground that is only yours, and those you choose may stand on it beside you.|

...!

Noah stared at the two names, and slowly, he began to smile!

Eight capabilities had become two, and neither felt smaller. They felt denser, as a fist is denser than an open hand.

Lifthrasir claped softly from Kir One’s shoulder.

Noah raised his eyes to the Ossuary around him to test it.

Before Shinjitsu, his Dream had lain over a region like golden-blue tiles laid across a stone floor. Perfect tiles, seamless to every eye, but tiles all the same, and if an Ancient Immense One had struck hard enough, they would have shattered and exposed the original stone beneath.

Now he reached for the destiny-silk drifting past his shoulder and the obsidian-gold stars rolling in their sea, and he felt the difference at once.

They did more than obey his Dream. Their smallest particles had accepted that being dreamed by Noah Osmont was part of their own native history, as though they had always been this way, and always would be.

The stone underneath was gone, with nothing left to expose!

Noah smiled and looked over to Lifthrasir.

"Lend me Kir One," Noah said. "Hold it under a quarter of its power, and let me learn what I just became."

He wanted to experience just 25%!

Lifthrasir patted the obsidian shoulder she sat on and floated down to Lygara’s side.

"Under a quarter," she told the Giant. "Don’t kill our benefactor."

Kir One stepped out over the sea of stars and opened its eyes, and the black film of its Shinjitsu settled over its skin.

WUU!

All of surrounding existence slowed and quieted as if giving this film of light its respect.This was Shinjitsu!

Across from it, Noah drew inward until his own gold-blue film rose and held, faint and steady, and he stepped back. Every step crossed a light year. His Dream had soaked into this whole region of THE Chrysalis, and he spread the battlefield to fill all of it.

Then he reached through THE Dream That Was Always So, and dreamed.

The dark above the region bloomed into a Dimensional Nebula!

It unfolded across the sky in vast slow coils, and every glittering mote inside it was a Dimension, tens of thousands of them, each one dreamed as having drifted there since before the Sundering. Through every single Dimension ran a thread of his Shinjitsu, thin as hair, so that the whole cloud carried more than his power. It carried his truth, and that gave it a weight existence had to respect.

The Nebula came down on Kir One like a falling galaxy.

The Giant raised its fist, and the black film over its knuckles thickened.

Fist and Nebula met, and the impact rang across the Chrysalis!

BOOM!

Dimensions burst by the thousand, each one collapsing with a sound like a cathedrel bell breaking, and the shockwave tore curtains of destiny-silk loose for a hundred light years in every direction.

When the light cleared, the Nebula was gone, and Kir One stood unmarked.

But it had used its Shinjitsu to break it! The Dream had carried enough truth that the Giant had to answer it, instead of simply walking through.

Noah smiled, and dreamed bigger.

Behind him, Observable Existences and Dimensions rose out of the dark, ten thousand, twenty, thirty, whole existences with their own weavings and their own long histories, each one dreamed as having always stood exactly there. He stacked them into a single spear and threaded his Shinjitsu down through every one of them, end to end, until the spear’s whole impossible length was bound by his truth.

THE Dream That Was Always So agreed that the spear had always been aimed at Kir One’s heart, and Noah threw it!

The Giant turned its open palm toward the point.

The spear struck the black film of that palm and stopped dead. Thirty thousand Observable Existences and Dimensions crumpled down its length one after another, a chain of collapsing stars racing back toward Noah, and Kir One closed its fingers and crushed the point to dust.

Then it moved!

WUU!

It crossed forty light years between one heartbeat and the next and struck him once, a single plain punch wrapped in its own truth as its voice boomed out...

"Are you alive?"

HUUM!

It looked like a glorious massive obsidian titan was smashing down onto a much smaller being.... And yet Noah roared as he looked like an ancient fiend made of dreams as he punched back!

"I AM!"

BOOM!

Noah met it with THE Empty Hands That Hold, and the blow found nothing borrowed in him to break, so it broke the rest!

His constellations scattered like sparks, his hand was pushed aside as his chest caved inward, and he tore backward across a hundred light years, slamming into the edge of the region with a force that made the Chrysalis groan!

Kir One stayed exactly where it was, its arm pulsing.

Noah hung there in the dark, broken and grand, and thought fast.

His truth had reached into every construct he dreamed. That was real, and it was the reason the Giant had raised a fist and a palm instead of ignoring him. But a fifth of a percent of Shinjitsu, spread across tens of thousands of Dimensions and Existences, had stretched thinner than spider silk, while Kir One’s truth sat entirely in one place, in its own fist.

Spread thin, his truth was a mist, but gathered, it might be a blade!

He shot out!

Back in the Ossuary, Lygara watched the distant flashes, and her vast form had gone very still.

|"I don’t know whether the Kirtimukha will be enough for THE Primordial Gu of Provenance and all it has under its disposal..."|

Lifthrasir floated up and laid her small hand against the side of Lygara’s enormous face.

"I chose a hundred years, Little Lygara," she said gently. "Not a hundred safe ones. I chose to live."

She smiled, looking out at the battle.

"And living is also experiencing the adversity. I taught you that, back when you were small enough to fit in my palm. Don’t you remember? It will be okay!"

Lygara looked at her for a long moment, and slowly, the light in her eyes returnd.

Across the region, Noah stopped spreading his truth.

He drew it back out of the scattered Dimensions, out of the broken stars, out of the drifting ruins of the Nebula and the spear, and gathered all of it, every thread of Shinjitsu and every dream it had carried, into a single point at his right fist. The gold-blue film there thickened until it shone like a small, steady sun.

Then he crossed the hundred light years in one step, and threw one punch.

Kir One raised its open palm, and its own film thickened to meet him!

Truth met truth, and existence shook!

Across the entire region, the sea of stars went perfectly still, every strand of silk froze in midair, and for one long heartbeat the whole of the Chrysalis around them held its breath.

The Giant stood unmoved, its palm unmarked and its film unbroken.

But it had needed to gather its own truth into a single place to stop him!

Kir One looked down at him, the faint candle burning far back in its black eyes.

|"You... are alive,"| it said.

Then it lowered its palm, closed its eyes, and stepped back.

Noah hung there with his broken body knitting itself together, light leaking from the cracks in his chest.

|Shinjitsu Weavings, tested under pressure.|

|THE Dream That Was Always So can thread your Shinjitsu through what you dream. Constructs that carry your truth hold weight even against beings with more truth than you.|

|Truth spread wide grows thin. Truth gathered to a single point grows dense.|

|THE Empty Hands That Hold leaves nothing borrowed to break. What remains can still be broken by raw power.|

...!

|Assimilation Rate: 0.2%. Progress toward THE First Unveiling: rising.|

Noah wiped the light from his mouth and grinned up at the untouched obsidian Giant.

"Again!"

He continued!