Read Novel Full Chapter 5127: THE Wyld! I
Chapter 5127: THE Wyld! I
THE Living Emotive had always understood emotions better than most beings understood their own hands.
She fucking knew the shape of longing the way other beings knew the shape of their own faces. She knew the weight of grief, the texture of lust, the temperature at which rage cooled into vengeance. Every color her hair cycled through had a corresponding feeling she could pull from across Observable Existence, siphoning it from whoever was experiencing it most strongly at that particular moment. She understood emotion. Emotion was her sanctuary and her madness both at once.
But je ne sais quoi was different.
Je ne sais quoi was the emotion that hid behind other emotions, the quality that certain beings carried without being able to name it and that certain beings lacked no matter how much they accumulated of everything else. It was a flavor. A resonance. A presence that existed in the gaps between the feelings you could measure. Most across Observable Existence could not accurately gauge it even when it stood directly in front of them, because measuring it required possessing enough of it oneself to recognize the signature.
THE Creature had it.
Sheesh, did he have it. The moment he had burned away his classification, he had become saturated with je ne sais quoi to the point that other Primordial Architects couldn’t look at him without feeling their own emotions rearrange themselves in his presence. A few others across existence held it too, scattered here and there, beings whose names carried a certain hush when they were spoken.
But THE Youngest?
Osmont?
Her fixation?
Anh. Holy shit.
Others needed to look to him for lessons because fuck, he had something. Something that made her hair cycle colors she hadn’t known existed within her palette. Something that made her entire being want to kneel even when he had already stopped looking at her!
Je ne sais quoi poured off him the way light poured off a star, and the terrible beautiful truth was that he didn’t even seem aware of how much of it he was radiating.
She wanted to know what it was.
She wanted to know what it was more than she had ever wanted anything!
---
Prima Indifferentia stretched in every direction around them, its white gold sea holding them in suspension as they prepared for the next step of the journey.
Noah floated at the center of her attention, his fair skin glowing gently against the undifferentiated backdrop, his eyes holding the distant consideration of someone calculating multiple realities at once.
Naldine Manthon floated to his side, her dirty white hair with its rivers of gold catching the ambient light in ways that should have been beautiful and somehow only made Emotive’s hair shift into sour yellows.
Emotive studied her carefully.
The emotions clinging to Naldine’s existence were not subtle to someone who could read such things. Power. Pleasure. Lust. Satisfaction. The residual warmth of a being who had enjoyed her fixation’s favor in ways that Emotive herself had not yet earned. His brilliance had filled her, had saturated her existence, and this average, dirty Primordial Architect had been accepting that favor as if it were something owed to her.
It was okay to feel envy. It was okay to feel jealousy. Those were perfectly valid responses to the circumstances.
But Emotive also recognized the reality of her own position. She had a long path ahead of her before she could enjoy the same favor from her fixation. She had to work hard. She had to prove herself across encounter after encounter, tool use after tool use, until something in his calculation shifted from...I will collapse you if Malphas says so toward something softer and more enduring.
Naldine had earned what she had earned. Emotive would earn her own!
She would earn it by being spectacular.
In these upper weavings of power where emotion seemed to be one of the most important things, she could actualize potential that had always existed within her and never been properly channeled. She was THE Living Emotive. She had claimed Chaos. She siphoned feelings from across Observable Existence at will. If emotion was the critical factor at the peak of existence, then she was sitting on a foundation that most ascending beings would have murdered for, and she had simply been too manic across eons to realize it.
She would show this to her fixation. She would show it to her Everything. Until he could no longer see her as a mere tool.
She turned her attention outward, letting her voice fill the white gold silence.
"Normally, a Primordial Architect would be required to go into THE Wyld."
Her voice held more of the manic singsong than her last coherent monologue had carried, but the coherence was still present beneath the bounce.
"I’m guessing that’s why you brought her here, yes? But...the gateways of THE Wyld are attuned to emotional existential signatures that only certain beings carry. The place decides who walks through its thresholds, and most of the time the place is very picky, very picky about who gets the invitation."
She drifted in slow circles around the two of them as she continued.
"But here is the thing. Oh, here is the thing! Even without being a Primordial Architect, I can imitate the emotional existential signatures of them. I’ve siphoned enough from enough of them across enough moments that I can wear their resonance like a borrowed coat, and the gateways can’t tell the difference. My emotions are already inside THE Wyld, constantly, because the beings inside THE Wyld are constantly feeling things and I’m constantly receiving those feelings. So opening a gateway from this side is easy!"
Her hair shifted into electric golds as she raised her hands.
"Watch!"
Her fingers wove through the white gold sea, pulling at emotional threads that only she could perceive. Pride. Wrath. Ancient hungers. The specific resonances of Primordial Architects engineered into the highest tiers of THE Wyld’s hierarchy. She braided them together, layered them over her own signature, and pressed the composite against the fabric of Prima Indifferentia with the confidence of someone performing a trick she had rehearsed in her own mind a thousand times.
HUUM!
A gateway opened.
It widened before them with a slow green-gold light, the edges shimmering with possibilities that didn’t belong to the white gold sea. Naldine’s brow furrowed as she watched the opening form, her frown calm but clearly unimpressed.
Emotive turned to Noah.
He nodded lightly at the gateway.
That small nod caused her entire existence to buzz.
Oh. Oh!
Today, he was nodding. In a few days, or maybe weeks, he might offer something more. He might look at her with something other than distaste. He might tenderly hold her cheek. The thought crashed through her so vividly that her hair burst into pinks she hadn’t worn in eons, and she had to pull herself back with effort so that her fixation wouldn’t catch the indulgence and revise his opinion of her downward.
Slowly, slowly. She had a lot to do. But she knew how strong emotions were, and she knew the one thing emotions could always do was change. The being who loathed you today could love you tomorrow if the right sequence of feelings was strung together between those two points. She was a master of that stringing. She had eons to refine her craft. And now she had the fixation worth crafting for.
They stepped through the gateway.
THE Wyld received them.
---
The ancient primal forest opened around them the moment they crossed the threshold.
Archaic tall trees rose in every direction, their trunks thick as small realms, their bark patterned with weavings that looked almost alive. The canopy stretched so high that the upper branches disappeared into a sky that wasn’t quite a sky. Rivers of Observable Force flowed between the trunks, glowing in currents of gold and deep bronze, carving pathways across the forest floor that hadn’t been carved by any tool.
The air was dense.
It was dense with pollen that wasn’t pollen, with spores that carried authority instead of reproduction, with the faint hum of countless emotional resonances all pressed close against each other. The light filtered through the canopy in shafts that didn’t quite behave like light should, bending around branches, pooling in places where no opening existed above.
Emotive breathed it in, and her hair settled into deep forest greens.
She loved this.
She loved this region so much. THE Wyld was a primal place, a wild place, a place where possibilities hadn’t yet been carved into the strict definitions that governed more refined domains. Anything could happen here. Anything could become anything. Her manic nature had always been drawn to environments where the rules bent, where certainty dissolved, where a being with enough emotional range could rewrite a small corner of reality simply by feeling strongly enough in that corner. The primal wild held all of that and more. It held potential the way a seed held a tree!
She floated closer to Noah as her breath settled.
Naldine didn’t exist to her in this moment. Naldine was fucking scenery. The gold-veined Primordial Architect was simply another tree in the ancient forest, and Emotive’s attention focused entirely on the one being in this forest whose gaze she wanted to earn.
Her body visibly trembled as she drifted within arm’s reach of him.
"Out of all the Primordial Architects wandering through THE Wyld right now..."
Her voice came softer, more intimate, the manic edge retreating into something almost reverent.
"I’ve locked onto the one who forged THE Primordial Mycelia. Oh, you remember, don’t you? The fungus of Unity. The one Erwin released across Observable Existence. The one you collapsed to make my claiming of Chaos possible as a downstream consequence. The whole tangled chain of causes and effects that led to our being here together today, floating in this forest, about to do something wonderful."
Her fingers wove small gestures in the air as she spoke.
"The one who forged the Mycelia is not alone. He’s traveling with a few others. His power sits at Calymmian Proterozoic Scale, solid but not exceptional by the standards of THE Wyld’s highest tier. But here is the thing, anh, here is the thing! He is among those who have undergone the engineering under THE Gilded Ones. So he is more powerful than those at Ediacaran who havent had any Engineering! The modifications are inside him. The amplified Egos of Existence are written into his weavings. If you peel him open, you see what was done."
Her hair held steady in its deep greens as she looked up at Noah.
"Are they... an appropriate target?"
She looked to him for affirmation, her eyes holding the weight of the question she wasn’t quite asking beneath it.
He turned toward her.
His gaze fell on her fully, and she felt what it was to be looked at by her fixation without distraction. His eyes held infinities. They held the quiet possibility that he could collapse her with a thought or elevate her with a gesture, and both possibilities felt equally real in the moment of being seen. Her existence churned beneath his attention. Power flooded into her organs and bones, and more of her structure shifted into Proterozoic Scale rapidly as the influx of emotion cascaded through her cultivation without her having to direct it at all.
She was ascending simply by being looked at by him.
Had she been a useful tool?
Was he beginning, very slowly, to have a change in emotion toward her?
Her eyes were bright as she waited.
He turned from her after a moment, his gaze sweeping across the vibrant primal forest, taking in the archaic trees and the rivers of Observable Force and the dense possibility-laden air. He nodded once.
"Let’s go."
Two words.
Two words that caused her to brighten so thoroughly that her hair burst briefly into white before she pulled it back into something less conspicuous. She nodded, closed her eyes, and began collecting more information from the emotional currents rippling through THE Wyld. She pulled the information close and masked it beneath a storm of her own feelings, layering deception over discovery, making absolutely certain that nothing would go wrong on her first journey with her Everything.
Nothing would go wrong.
She would make sure of it!