Read Novel Full Chapter 5439: Yes, and No II
Chapter 5439: Yes, and No II
They entered the ancient temple.
Inside stood many statues, and every one of them looked disturbingly lifelike, figures caught in stone with a fidelity that suggested they had not always been stone. Noah’s gaze moved over them as they passed, and Ryaenara spoke, casual and unhurried.
"You know," she said, "sometimes a thing stays safe simply because it never announces itself. It sits in the dark, unremarkable, and nothing hunts it because nothing knows it’s worth hunting. But the moment it’s tested, the moment even a glimpse of what it could become is revealed to Existence, every unfathomably powerful thing that feeds on potential comes running to devour it before it can grow." She glanced back at him.
"That’s what I did to you, I’m afraid. I exposed you without meaning to. I ran my little test expecting a wing or two, and instead you turned out to be someone with Boundless Potential..."
HUUM!
Boundless Potential.
Noah took the words in calmly as Ryaenara led him deeper, past the lifelike statues, until she stopped before a dark one and waved her hand. Light bloomed across it, and the statue illuminated.
It was a man, grand and imposing, carved standing tall. The face meant nothing to Noah, unrecognizable, a stranger’s features. But the eyes had been rendered with something aloof and cruel in them, a terrible arrogance frozen into the stone, and they pulled at him.
"Tell me," Ryaenara said. "Does this statue... remind you of anyone?"
...!
It was an odd question, and Noah studied the statue closely.
The face told him nothing. But the eyes. The longer he looked at the eyes, the more his mind flickered, some deep recognition scratching at him, and then it landed, and he went stern. Blue Intent billowed up around him, his Osmontian Source Infinity blazing to readiness, and he turned a cold gaze on Ryaenara.
Her smile only brightened at his reaction.
"Mmm. Yes," she said, pleased. "This is a statue of another body that THE Sealed One wears. The face changes, vessel to vessel, but the eyes never quite do. Through the eyes, you can always recognize him, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing him."
BOOM!
Yes. The eyes were THE Sealed One’s eyes.
And for such a statue to stand here, in this hidden dimension, meant something Noah did not like at all. It meant that THE Sealed One was entrenched far deeper among the Source Lifeforms than Noah had let himself believe. He had thought he was beginning to grasp the scale of the enemy. He kept being shown he wasn’t!
His gaze went imperious and heavy.
"You," he said. "You’re a Follower of THE Sealed One? I have to hand it to the man. To be this good, this deep, this widely, it’s almost impressive."
He needed to think of THE Sealed One as grander still than he already did. Every single time he adjusted his estimate upward, he turned out not to have adjusted far enough, and damn, but the thing kept earning the fear others gave it!
And yet.
Ryaenara smiled even more brilliantly.
"Well," she said. "Yes, and no. I am a Follower of THE Sealed One, and I am also not."
Her smile turned devilish and grand as she said it, as though she were delivering the finest joke in all of existence.
HUUM!
The words landed like a riddle, and Noah’s eyes sharpened. A Follower, but also not. If she followed THE Sealed One and also did not follow him...
His eyes brightened, and he asked.
"Then who," he said, "are you a Follower of?"
BOOM!
His words were heavy, and Ryaenara clapped her hands together with pure delight.
"Now," she said, beaming. "Now you are asking the right questions!"
She was thoroughly delighted, and in the next moment she snapped her fingers. The statue of THE Sealed One dimmed, and extreme darkness swallowed the temple whole, a dark so total that Noah blazed alone in the middle of it like a single blue candle in an endless night, his Intent never dimming.
Ryaenara’s figure flickered in and out of existence within that darkness. She appeared far away, holding a book, humming as she flipped its pages, and then she was inches from him without having crossed the distance, near and far all at once, and she turned the open book toward him so he could read the page.
|Your next target is designated of the highest importance. Proceed with full priority.|
|Designation: Noah Osmont.|
|Power: confirmed to wield a Primordial Intent or higher...|
|Personality: pragmatic. Tyrannical...|
|Current location: THE Effluvium Sanctum...|
|Known weaknesses: Women. Bonds with family.|
|Exploitation guidance: The subject’s tyranny and composure make conventional leverage useless. He cannot be threatened into anything...|
Noah read the single page with shining eyes.
THE Sealed One had sent this terrifying woman to be a honeypot. A seduction, a soft approach, a thing he would want near him. And she was doing a spectacularly poor job of it so far, so poor that she seemed not to be attempting it at all, seemed instead to be doing something entirely her own!
Her carefree smile returned as she drifted distant again, then near, alternating through the dark, here and gone and here.
"Men," Ryaenara said, amused. "Always so bossy. Do this, go there, seduce that one. They never once consider that a girl might have her own plans." She tilted her head. "Tell me. Honestly. Do you think I’d have made a good honeypot for you? Would you have dipped in?"
She asked it provocatively, and Noah nodded at once.
"Knowing what you were?" he said, calm. "I’d have taken the bait anyway, and gone along with it, and used you exactly the way you meant to use me, squeezing every benefit I could out of the arrangement the whole time. I don’t mind a trap when I can see the shape of it. Traps are just opportunities that think they’re clever."
Ryaenara laughed, bright and genuine, and shook her head.
"Always so confident," she said. "It’s a good quality. It’s also a dangerous one. Well. I would have played the honeypot happily enough, if that were still the assignment. But that little test of mine changed everything, you see. Everything." Her smile sharpened toward something devilish.
"Because THE Sealed One cannot have you, O Osmont. Not now. Not knowing what I know. For you have the potential to reach IT. The very thing THE Sealed One himself came so unfathomably close to attaining before he was stopped. I understand now why he wanted you so badly. And I understand, far better than he does, exactly why he can never be allowed to have you. No, no, no."
HUUM!
Her smile became utterly devilish, and she leaned close in the dark.
"No," she said. "I need you. I need you to walk the path toward IT. Toward Lineage. Toward a grand Inheritance. Toward...Those Who Remain."
HUUM!