Read Novel Full Chapter 5433: Everything!
Chapter 5433: Everything!
The first true spending of Osmontian Biomass was a strange thing to feel.
Under the blue rain falling from the great tree, the mana drops breaking soft and cool against his face and the grass beside him, Noah lay back and gave the command inwardly. Five thousand. He felt the resource move inside him, that granular cerulean store he had been patiently gathering, and he watched it pour toward a single part of his foundation rather than scattering across all of him. It did not feel like swallowing a treasure. It felt like irrigation, like opening a channel and letting something accumulated run exactly where he aimed it, the Biomass draining out of his reserve and into THE Tide That Owes Nothing!
And the Foundation drank it, and rose.
The sensation was subtle and deep, less a surge than a settling, a thing in his bones reconfiguring itself one notch grander. The Tide had always run through him quietly, the engine beneath his giving, and now he felt it widen, the channel of it deepening, the patient machinery of it tuning to a higher pitch.
|Foundation refinement complete. THE Tide That Owes Nothing has risen from F-Rank, Beith, to E-Rank, Duir. The first notch of the stem is behind it. The Birch hardens into the Oak.|
|Effects of the advancement: the return on your giving is no longer fixed near a maximum range potential of one hundredfold to thousandfold. The Tide now operates across a potential range of five hundred to three thousandfold, scaling its answer to the magnitude and quintessence of what you give. Grander acts of giving now reach toward the upper range. Lesser ones still return generously.|
|Consequences worth noting. Should you resuscitate another Terminal Observable Existence, the act would now likely yield more than the single Genesis Tesseract it produced before. The generation and return of extremely rare resources, Osmontian Biomass foremost among them, will also scale upward. The river you fed has begun to feed you faster. The compounding you anticipated has started.|
Noah smiled brilliantly up into the rain.
There was no thunderclap of new strength. He did not rise from the grass suddenly mightier, did not feel existence bend differently around him. And that was fine. He had not bought power. He had bought the thing that made power, deepened the well rather than drawing from it, and a being who understood the difference between feeling strong today and being unstoppable tomorrow was a being who would win in the end. He was investing!
The returns would come, and when they came they would be terrifying, and he could afford to wait for them!
He turned his attention to the screens.
They hung in the soft air around the tree, illusory windows onto his scattered bodies. The body in the Undefined Gaps was arriving at another Terminal Observable Existence, Seo-yeon and Henry and Amelia close around it, the child already gazing out at a dying place with that pained sense of hers. The body in THE Braneworld was deep in its contest with Vularch Sethis, no longer simply fighting but studying, navigating the golden Pantheon, feeling out the seams of a Mesozoic dimension, learning slowly and precisely how to carve it open with his Osmontian Source Infinity and his Intent. And the body in THE Effluvium Sanctum sat in its storm of blue flame, sharpening the Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian against the Sanctum’s lethal pressure, honing and honing! Honing!
Everything, so far, was on track.
He let the screens drift, and he rose from Barbatos’s thighs.
He moved over her instead, easing her down onto her back in the wet grass, and looked down at her, at the dazzling dark of her hair fanned against the green, the dark of her eyes catching the cerulean light, the mana rain beading on her pale robe and her fair skin. He smiled.
"You know," he said, "I’m starting to think you’re my lucky charm right now. My Hamingja." The old word came easy.
"You said a handful of words a little while ago and handed me the whole epiphany for THE Osmontian Tongue. So. What do you have for me now? Any ideas on building a Pantheon? Or something else entirely? Go on."
...!
Barbatos looked off to the side, suddenly shy beneath the body looming warm above hers.
Noah’s smile widened.
"When," he said, amused, "did you become shy?"
"I’m not shy," she muttered, harrumphing, still not quite meeting his eyes. "You just didn’t use to spend this much time with me. These past little while you’ve actually been here, properly, and I’m only adapting to it. That’s all. It’s an adjustment. I am not shy."
...!
He paused as her words were true!
He had not used to give her this much time. Not her, not any of the women who mattered to him, not the people he loved. He had always been climbing, always been at war and solving problems, and the ones who waited for him had learned to wait. Barbatos was not being shy. She was being careful with something she had not been given much of!
His smile faded.
He came down out of his looming and lay beside her instead, settling into the wet grass at her side, and the two of them looked up together through the branches at the slow falling rain.
"Finding my identity this strongly did something I didn’t expect," he said, serious now, quiet under the patter of mana on leaves. "Pinning down my Intent, my identity, knowing exactly who I am. It reminded me what the who is for. It’s not just power. It’s this and much more. The people I climbed for in the first place."
He let a drop break against his cheek. "I haven’t given you enough of me. Any of you. I’m going to fix that. Okay?"
From beside him came no clever reply.
Barbatos only smiled, brilliantly, up into the rain, and water gathered at the corners of her eyes and slid down toward her dark hair. It was impossible to say for certain whether it was the mana rain or something of her own, and she did not explain it. She turned and wrapped both arms around his arm and held it, and stayed there, silent, her cheek against his shoulder.
Existence was vast, and full of terrors, and somewhere across it Citadels burned and dimensions warred and an ancient patient enemy gathered its pieces in the dark.
But here, under one blue tree, in one quiet rain, it felt to Barbatos as though she held in her two arms all the existence she could ever want. She felt like she held...her Everything.