Read Novel Full Chapter 5396: Stripped! II
Chapter 5396: Stripped! II
Noah stood in the frost and looked at the wreckage of the Gilded Ones, and let them feel how little their kneeling moved him.
Marxist rose first, because the shrewd ones always recovered fastest, floating up out of the broken foliage with several other Fourth Scale Ealdor Gilded Ones gathering around him, their Intents shattered, their bodies injured, their pride a ruin they were trying to reassemble in real time. The old man’s bright eyes had lost all their welcome. What sat in them now was hate, and beneath the hate, the cold working calculation of a being trying to understand what had just happened to him!
"Who are you?!" Marxist asked, and the fake fucking warmth he had greeted Noah with at the settlement was entirely gone.
Noah regarded him calmly.
"Who I am doesn’t matter," he said. "It’s the wrong question, and you’re too old to be asking wrong questions. What matters is the fate of the Gilded Ones. So let me tell you about that instead, since you came all this way to learn it."
He let his gaze move across the gathered Ealdor, the kneeling and the floating and the thrown-back alike. "For how you engineer yourselves, for how you live, for what you’ve built your power on, you are not fit to hold Infinity. You were never fit. So...I’m going to strip it from you."
BOOM!
He tugged.
He reached into the bodies of every Gilded One in the region and took hold of the Infinity inside them, and he pulled! He pulled and pulled and pulled!
Rivers of blue surged out of them and toward him, Infinity torn free of foundations that had cultivated it across ages, drawn out of the proud and the wrathful and the ancient and into Noah, his Intent exerting itself in a terrible way, his identity demanding that existence comply and existence complying. The Gilded Ones could do nothing! Their Infinity left them in gushing blue streams, abandoning the beings who had spent eternities accumulating it, flowing to the one who had decided they no longer deserved to keep it.
By the time he finished, they were horrified.
They could feel what had been taken. The thing at the core of their power, gone, lifted out of them as easily as a man lifts coins from an open palm, and they stared at Noah with the dawning terror of beings who were realizing exactly how thoroughly outmatched they had been the entire time!
Noah was not finished.
"And your Egos," he said. "Those aren’t deserving either. You engineered them. You cut yourselves down to a single amplified feeling and called the hollowing-out strength, and you fed that engineered pride and engineered wrath on the suffering of beings beneath your notice." He let his own Ego rise, the real one, Superbius drawn from his Osmontian Source Egos of Infinity, pride that had been forged rather than installed.
"Feel my Ego. This is the genuine article. This is what pride is when a being earns it instead of having it built into hollow flesh. And your engineered, amplified versions... I’m taking those from you too. I’m leaving you hollow!"
HUUM!
He pulled again, and the Egos came loose!
The engineered Pride, the amplified Wrath, the cultivated Sloth and Greed, all of it stripped out of the Gilded Ones the way the Infinity had been, torn from the foundations they had been methodically installed in, leaving the beings behind them empty. The Gilded Ones who had defined themselves entirely by their amplified Egos felt those Egos ripped away, and what remained was hollow, scoured, beings who had been their sins and were now simply nothing, robbed of the engineered feeling that had been the whole of their identities!
It was horrific!
Marxist’s hate guttered into something closer to fear! What was this power?! What was this Intent?!
"OOOOH!" He roared his hatred and discontent, but it meant nothing!
In less than 10 seconds, he and many others lost everything that made them who they were!
In the end, the Gilded Ones drifted there utterly defeated, stripped of their Infinity and their Egos both, hollow and powerless, beings who had been among the strongest in the region reduced in moments to husks.
Noah raised his fist, and his Osmontian Source Infinity spread out and covered all of them.
"Back to THE Braneworld Observable Existence you go," he said. "All of you. Go home, and watch. There’s a changing era coming for the Gilded Ones there. Watch what becomes of everything you built."
...!
The cerulean light closed over them, and they began to disappear, the kneeling and the floating and the thrown-back, the proud Ealdor and the hateful Dietrich and the shrewd old Marxist, all of them dissolving out of THE Source Lands and away, sent to Velanthra hollow to witness the unmaking of their kind from the inside!
In the end, only Noah and Eon were left behind at the foot of the frozen mountain.
"..."
He still held her hand as she...was breathless.
"I’ll give you the Source," he said to her. "The Source, and a great deal more, and I’ll do everything I can to help you reach what you want for your people. But...things may get a bit bloody before they get better."
Eon looked at him, and her eyes were full of astonishment, and she shook her head slowly.
"This whole time," she said, "I think part of me still believed it was a dream. That it couldn’t be real. I left my people eons ago because I couldn’t change them and I couldn’t bear to be them, and I told myself there was nothing to be done, that it was too vast and too old and too set. And then you came along as you said what you said but... but I never fully believed it. I thought I was indulging a beautiful impossible thing. A Dream. Even if it was a dream, I wanted to be lost in it..."
She looked at the empty space where the Ealdor had been. "But...I believe it now. I do."
Her voice steadied. "You do what you need to do. I’ll be here to support you, whatever it takes. So tell me. What do you need, if there’s anything at all?"
...!
Noah’s eyes shone at that.
He looked at her, and he did not particularly need anything. But...
"Well," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. "There is one thing. I’ve gained something new called THE Tide That Owes Nothing, and I’ve been curious about its effects in a few areas I haven’t gotten to test yet. One of them being what it does to Dual Cultivation."
"Oh?"
Eon’s eyes lit with boundless Superbius, her own pride rising, and she smiled, slow and dangerous.
"Like I said," she murmured. "Whatever...you need."
...!
A vibrant sea of Infinity bloomed across the region then, deep and concealing, rising to cover everything at the foot of the frozen mountain, because some things did not need to be witnessed by the eyes of others!