Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5373: Records and Knowledge! IV

Noah healed himself in the dark, and while he did, he fortified the prison.

The heart came back together under the flood of his Infinity, the ruptured organ knitting around the swirling rune, and he did not stop at whole. He poured more of himself into the cage, thickening the folded chains, deepening the layers, taking the lesson THE Sealed One had handed him in blood and using it the way he used everything.

The thing could break his heart on a whim. So he built the cage to hold even through a broken heart, made the seal a thing that did not depend on the organ staying intact, anchored it instead to his identity, which was the one part of him nothing could rupture. If it wanted to make his heart its weapon, he would make sure the weapon cut nothing loose when it fired!

And as he worked, the records surfaced. The knowledge he had been drawing out of the chained thing beat by beat, the slow theft running underneath everything, brought up something usable.

|Recovered Records, drawn from the contained presence. Subject: Intents and True Lifeforms.|

|Before Vakochev laid THE Scales of Existence, there was no road. Beings who climbed toward power climbed without steps laid for them, surveying their own way as they went, and those who walked their own path rather than a given one were designated True Lifeforms. The older word for them, recovered intact, is Etumos Lifeforms. The two terms mean the same thing: a being whose existence is its own, answerable to no framework it did not author.|

|Even before THE Scales, the Intents of these beings could be ranked. Ranking is not Vakochev’s invention; it is a measure that existed wherever Intents existed. But here is the crucial difference, and it is the difference that defines what you are reaching for. For a True Lifeform, the ranking was never locked. It was never fixed. A True Lifeform could elevate their own Intent to a higher ranking through their own becoming, raising it by the growth of their record alone.|

|This is the clear limitation of Vakochev’s Scales. Under the Scales, a being’s Intent is set at the rarity they form it at, Naiad or Nereid or Titan or Olympian or Primordial, and it stays there. It does not rise on its own. To lift it, a being needs an external means, a treasure, a resource like Eridarch Ore, some intervention from outside the path. The road gives you a fixed place and keeps you there. The trackless climb of a True Lifeform gives you a place that grows as you do.|

|Three rankings of True Lifeform Intent have been recovered. THE Egoic Intent, THE Ananke Intent, THE Autarkis Intent. The first is described in full. The other two remain encoded.|

|First ranking, THE Egoic Intent recovered description: It needs only a single description: I Am. It is similar in scope to what the Scales would call a Primordial Intent, the fifth and near-mythical rarity, foundational, with existence reorganizing around it. But it is grander than that, and it differs in its nature. Where a Primordial Intent imposes a record upon existence, the first ranking of a True Lifeform’s Intent is built not on any power or any deed but on the being’s own identity, their own existence as the foundational truth. It does not impose what the being has done. It imposes what the being is. And because identity, unlike any power, cannot be taken without taking everything, an Intent built on it cannot be contested, only destroyed alongside its holder.|

Noah gazed at the prompts hanging in the dark before him, and understood that they had just described the exact thing forming over his heart. His identity at the forefront!

|You call these prompts?|

THE Sealed One again, musing, cruel and curious from behind the rune.

|Words appearing before you, neat and ordered. That is not your own mind talking; your mind is busier than that. So these are coming from somewhere. From someone. Your little helper, is it? The voice that braced you when I came in. Ruination?|

The name was turned over with interest.

|I would like to get to know her too, in time. intimately. We are going to be such close company, all of us. Which part of your existence does she live in, I wonder? Where exactly is she kept? If I just reached, a little, toward—|

|Shut the fuck up.|

BOOM!

Ruination’s voice cut through, cold, flat, and absolute, with none of her usual measured calm!

THE Sealed One laughed, delighted to have gotten a reaction, the laughter rolling warm and pleased through Noah’s chest. But it said nothing more about her.

It had probed, and been answered, and it had let the probe drop. Even a monster from before THE Scales, caged, was still reading the room.

|Apologies, Master,| Ruination said, her composure returning, the cold still under it.

|Your Intent is surging past the rankings the Scales recognize. It is not settling at Olympian. It is not settling at Primordial. It is climbing toward what the records just named, toward what a Lifeform sitting outside the Scales could build. Toward the first ranking, EGOIC.|

Noah felt it as she described it. He felt his Intent drawing together over his healed heart, and he felt what sat at the forefront of it, the thing it was building itself around. Not his Infinity. Not his Primordial Source. Not the nine Prime Causes or the two Observable Existences or any single power he held!

His identity. His personality, his refusals, his record, the whole strange enormous span of who he had decided to be, sitting at the center of the Intent as its foundation, every power he held arranging itself around that core rather than the other way around.

His Intent was becoming him. Not what he could do. Him! HIM!

And just as he felt it culminate toward that, he sensed them arrive.

Noah raised his head.

Dame Seraphine descended into the depths of THE Maw, no longer the dazzling obsidian radiance from the fight above but her armored self again, Andro and the other Fifth Scale Source Lifeforms behind her. She came down through the last of the storms and found him sitting in the abandoned trove, blood-stained, the Intent blazing into shape around him.

A flash of guilt passed through his eyes as he looked at her.

He held it there only a moment, and let it go, and met her gaze calmly.

She gazed at him, and at the Intent forming around him, and something moved across her composed features at the sight of it. Then she set it aside, and came over to him gently, and crouched, and asked the questions she had come down through a dying mine to ask.

"You may be at a critical point of your advancement," she said. "I can see that much. But I need to know. What happened to William? To Botswana, Richard, Lianna?" Her voice stayed level by effort.

"Where is the foreign influence that did this? And how. How did you survive it, when four Titan-rarity Swords did not?"

...!

She asked, and Noah could not answer her. Not truly. The Directives of THE Sealed One sat in his existence like a hand over his mouth, and the First Directive was absolute: he could not speak of it, could not name it, could not share a single piece of what it was, to anyone, by any means.

But he had never needed the whole truth to tell a true thing. He had spent his existence weaving truths into the shapes he needed. He could do it here.

"There was something in the deep," he said, and every word of it was true.

"Older than anything I’ve stood against. It came up out of the bottom of the mine, and it was beyond me, beyond all of us. It killed them, and there was nothing I could do to stop it."

He held her eyes.

"It nearly killed me too. I survived because of what I am, as since then...that thing has gone somewhere."

A pause.

"But I’m sorry. I wish I had been strong enough to stand between it and them. I wasn’t, not yet, and they paid for the gap."

Dame Seraphine grew silent.

She held the silence a long moment, looking at him, weighing the truth in what he had said. Whatever she concluded, she kept it. She nodded, once.

"We have to go," she said. "This place is finished, and worse is waking in it. Can you move?"

Before Noah could answer her, the voice came again, warm and cruel behind his heart.

|Oh, I like this one,| THE Sealed One murmured, considering Dame Seraphine with an appetite.

|Look at her. Mesozoic, and something more than Mesozoic underneath it. Do you feel how special she is? I do. I can taste it from in here.|

The relish in it deepened.

|She rejected a vessel of mine not long ago. And here she is, the genuine article, crouched right in front of you, close enough to touch.| A slow, hungry pause came!

|It would be so very nice to devour her, Osmont. How would her flesh and Intent taste, I wonder? What plots can I devise to harm her and all others around you? Ah, I could make you and all existences around you so miserable. Death and death. Collapsd after collapse. Will your identity still be...quintessential even then?|

...!