Read Novel Full Chapter 5316: Emotion III
Chapter 5316: Emotion III
Noah looked down through the rivers of terminal infinity.
Past the obsidian gray currents and the warring fronts of definition and Undefinition, he saw her.
A little girl, no older than ten by any human reckoning, curled in a fetal position and spinning slowly in the storm of unstable First Cause that she herself was holding together. Her face was visible in glimpses as she turned. It showed pain. Not discomfort, not distress, but the specific excruciating agony of a being experiencing more suffering than any frame was built to hold, held at a pitch that did not waver because the thing producing it did not waver.
She was small. She wore tattered blue rags that had once been garments of Infinity, the fabric carrying faint traces of what it had been before eons of holding endings wore it down to threads.
Her hair drifted around her in the currents. She looked, in the glimpses Noah caught of her face, like something that should have been protected by everything around it and had instead been asked to protect everything around it.
And she had said yes, because she had been too young to understand what saying yes would cost.
She turned in the storm and her eyes found him.
She looked at him pitifully, the gaze of a child who had been in pain for longer than she could remember, who saw a new presence and felt, beneath the agony, the faint flicker of a hope she had probably learned not to trust. So young. So innocent.
Bearing the endings of an entire Observable Existence in every moment, and looking at him with eyes that asked, without words, whether he was someone who could make it stop.
|Infinite Lifeform — Status assessment.|
|Designation: Seo-yeon. Infinite Lifeform of THE Observable Existence of Chernobyl.|
|Apparent age at First Cause destruction: equivalent to ten years. Actual duration of existence since: incalculable through standard measurement. She has existed in a held state, neither aging nor developing, since the catastrophe.|
|Current function: Living anchor for THE Mortis Cause. Her infinite existence is the sole structure preventing THE Mortis Cause from failing and THE First Cause from completing its unraveling.|
|Current condition: Sustained maximal agony. She is channeling the endings of an entire Observable Existence through her singular existence continuously. The suffering has no intervals. As of recent, her capacity to endure has been exceeded and she is actively seeking release. She seeks death.|
|Dependent population: Incalculable. All remaining life in THE Observable Existence of Chernobyl persists solely because of her continued function.|
|Resolution available through standard means: None. Her release ends her suffering and ends the dependent population. Her continuation preserves the dependent population and continues her suffering. There is no apparent third option.|
Noah gazed at her.
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Far above, in a space held apart from the dying domain and surrounded by THE Primordial Source, another body of Sir William stood observing.
Three Source Lifeforms stood beside him, each of a different lineage, each carrying THE Primordial Source in a distinct expression that marked them as products of separate origins across the vastness of existence.
They watched the region below where Noah hung above the storm, gauging, weighing, the three current Swords of Existence who would render the verdict on whether the trial had been passed.
One of them spoke.
"Why," the Source Lifeform said, its voice carrying the genuine curiosity of a being asking a question it found legitimately puzzling, "is a task meant for a full Sword of Existence being given to a Trial Sword? This is not a trial assignment. This is a working assignment that a seated Sword should have closed." It looked at Sir William.
"Do you want your pick to fail? Have you tired of sponsorship? Because handing a Trial Sword a problem that has no clean solution is not how one shepherds a candidate toward success."
Sir William watched the region below with composed attention.
"I am no longer interested in sponsoring those who have it easy," he said. "I have done that. I have shepherded capable beings through trials calibrated to let them pass, and I have produced competent Swords who handle competent assignments competently, and existence has gained from them what existence gains from competence. It was not nothing. It was also not what I am looking for now."
He continued watching Noah.
"Hardship and adversity breed wonder. This is not sentiment. It is the single most reliable principle I have observed across the full length of my existence. The exceptional are not produced by trials they were meant to pass. They are produced by the moments where there was no clean answer and they found something anyway, where the situation offered only bad options and they refused to accept that the list of options was complete."
His voice carried the weight of conviction settled over a very long time. "I am only looking for that which is truly exceptional now. I have grown too old and seen too much to spend my sponsorship on anything less. If he is what I suspect he is, this trial will not break him. It will reveal him. And if I am wrong, then I have learned something useful about the limits of what radiates from him, and I will have lost nothing but time, of which I have a great deal."
The Source Lifeform considered this.
"And if he simply chooses one of the two answers? Releases the child, or preserves the population and leaves her to suffer? Both are defensible. Both are what most would choose."
"Then he is competent," Sir William said. "And competent is not what I am sponsoring anymore. Existence is vast and filled with terrors, and it needs more than competent Swords. We have seen competent Sword and even ourselves...can be considered competent. What is needed in these times is something unfathomably more. But...let us see. Let us see."
Below, Noah continued to gaze at the little girl spinning in the storm of endings she had been holding back since before she should have understood what holding them back would cost her!