Read Novel Full Chapter 5546: What is a Cause?
Chapter 5546: What is a Cause?
Did he believe it was possible?
To move against the Progeny of one of Those Who Remain, and against the very ancient entity that had fathered them across the dark of epochs...
THE Sleepless Fiend of Those Who Remain...!
As the fiendish ancient aura of THE Primeval Osmontian Marrow rippled softly across his hair, Noah evaluated everything, knowing he was already hunted by the Cursed Descendants of THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension and realizing the Fiend’s lineage ran through that exact same cursed blood!
He had already made an enemy of one branch of Those Who Remain simply by existing well! The question was never whether adding another branch was dangerous, but what it actually cost when stacked atop an active war he was already fighting, and as he weighed the outcome in the quiet depths of his mind, the added weight was smaller than it looked.
His existence answered before his mouth ever opened, his Intent leaning forward without hesitation as he looked down at the enormous scarred titan.
"In existence," Noah said, "anything is possible. I won’t make you a definitive promise. But this is something we can work toward."
HUUM!
The veil of severed hands twitched as Damodred bowed heavily, his colossal frame of petrified muscle and calcified scars folding down further than any kneel, sending a tremor through the ruined strata of the domain!
The titan showed nothing aloud, yet Noah could feel the boundless loss and ancient rage churning behind that calm exterior, for this ancient being was also human by its own unyielding definition!
Noah let him have the moment, standing composed amidst the falling ochre dust before asking what he truly sought from this antiquity.
"Tell me about Causes," Noah said, his eyes glowing with the fiendish light of THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard as he looked up into the uncovered gray eyes.
"I know First Causes, and the Prime Causes seated under them. I know Miniature Causes. Now I am hearing of Calcified Causes and Blighted ones. Enlighten me."
The veil twitched again as Damodred nodded, waving one massive, scarred hand as the dark sky and ruined basalt domain thinned away into a clean gray space of absolute nothingness- a realm constructed purely for showing rather than remembering!
"You already know more than most," Damodred spoke, his voice carrying the deep, melancholic resonance of an ancient being.
"So let me begin where the question truly begins."
As the giant opened his great hand, a single point of pristine light ignited in the empty gray space, hovering between them like a living star!
"Before a Dimension or Observable Existence can hold so much as one beam of light, before space can even trouble itself to stretch across the void, there must first be a reason that space is permitted to exist at all. A reason. That reason is what we name a Cause."
The point of light held firm, small and certain amidst the gray expanse!
"In the low realms this is easy to miss, for down there crude matter and crude energy are enough to hold a realm together on their own, allowing a lifeform to spend a whole existence believing power is only a matter of how much Primordial Source or energy it has managed to gather. But climb. Climb high enough into higher dimensionality, and you find that physical law is far too thin to bear the weight it is asked to carry."
As Damodred spoke, the point of light swelled into a small, turning realm, and Noah watched as a hairline crack ran through its fragile physics.
"An Observable Existence carries a staggering conceptual weight, not merely of mass but of meaning, so immense it ought to fall to nameless foam the instant it forms. It does not fall apart only because a Cause holds it. A Cause is the origin point, the true beginning underneath the beginning, the anchor that grants all that weight its permission to stand"
The hairline crack sealed instantly, and the small realm steadied and shone with declared grandeur.
"As lifeforms rise, they learn this truth in stages. First they think power is only pulling on Mana, on Infinity, or on THE Primordial Source. Then, higher, they learn to weave a Cause into their Pulses, their Infinity, their Source, and their Intent, swinging it like an absolute blade to force reality into compliance."
The gray eyes held steady on Noah, reflecting ages of witnessed war.
"And then there are the existences who go past merely using a Cause. Beings whose bones and blood and organs are forged out of these anchors themselves."
Noah thought of the colossal white dragon whose back he rode across dimensional gaps.
"Steeds," Noah said.
"Steeds," Damodred agreed, and the word carried the heavy weight of an ancient ossuary. "I know this because Master’s curing of one is the very reason THE Tide That Owes Nothing pulled me across existence to your side. A living Observable Existence, seated out of pure Causes at the root of its lineage, shaped from the first moment to bear a burden that would turn any ordinary entity to vapor. You ride the proof of it even now. And now..."
The titan raised a second finger as three more points of light ignited beside the shining realm, hovering in the gray space like patient beacons.
"To understand how existence truly moves, you must know that a Cause is not one fixed thing. It can take four states or more."
The first point brightened into a clean, cold, unwavering illumination!
"First Causes. The pristine anchors, seated at the very beginning of a lineage or a framework, carrying the pure and uncorrupted intent of the ones who first carved existence into being. A First Cause does not easily degrade. Its authority is immutable, the original blueprint, untouched by time, holding forever the full weight of the moment it was carved."
The second point began to pulse with a warm, living rhythm, its light shifting from moment to moment like a burning heart!
"Prime Causes. The living anchors seated beneath the First. Where a First Cause is a legacy handed down from ancestors, a Prime Cause is a present will, active and evolving, able to steer its own progression. If the First Cause is the legacy, the Prime Cause is the wielder alive now, still deciding what it will become."
Noah nodded slowly, understanding his own nine Cause weavings with Hvitrmarr with greater clarity!
Then the third point of light changed, and Noah’s attention sharpened as the illumination did not brighten, but sickened into an ochre hue!
A dark, corruptive thread wound through its center, and where the thread passed, the light frayed and wept like an open wound.
"Blighted Causes. A Blighted Cause is not some clean anchor that was later dirtied. It is born to its nature, a kind of Cause the same as any other, save that its nature is rot. It does not stop working. It goes on holding weight, and all the while it leaks rot and agony into the existence built atop it, consuming that existence slowly from the anchor outward while never once failing at its task."
Damodred turned his great hand, and an image formed in the gray, depicting a colossal Laestrygonian titan whose chest glowed with a diseased, burning color as fine dark lines spidered along its calcified frame.
"An example! One of my own bore a Cause we named THE Ember That Eats the Hearth. It anchored him faithfully, and all the while it burned him from the middle out, a low constant fire that never caught and never went out, and he held an entire Dimension upright on that agony for a full age." The gray eyes were unblinking.
"The blight is not weakness. It is a strength that charges you everything, forever."
The sick picture faded as the fourth point took its place, having gone entirely the other direction! It stopped moving completely, hanging hard, pale, and utterly still, and looking upon it, Noah felt the cold density of ancient, petrified bone!
"Calcified Causes..."
"Their nature is stillness, and out of that stillness comes a density I would struggle to describe. It becomes an absolute wall. Force arrives and finds nothing to push, for there is nothing left in it that can move to be pushed."
He conjured a barrier of pale calcified stone, and against it, the memory of a Primeval Lifeform striking down played out, the strike stopping instantly, the way a roaring wave stops against an ancient cliff that does not even know it is being struck!
"A Calcified Cause cannot adapt. It cannot evolve. It cannot yield, which sounds like a virtue until you remember that a thing which cannot yield can also never grow."
The gray eyes returned to Noah, and something in the titan’s old voice turned at last toward the truth it had been circling all along.
"And I am made of these. Many of them. By every law you know, Master, I have no business standing here speaking with you at all, for a being built of Calcified Causes is a being that cannot progress. I ought to be static. Immense, unkillable at my own tier, and frozen...a mountain that will never be anything but the same mountain until existence itself forgets it."
Damodred opened both his great hands, and the two dark images returned side by side...the weeping blighted light and the pale frozen stone.
"My Calcified Causes are stone. But my Blighted Causes are fire, that low agonizing fire that never once goes out. And a stone set against a fire that will not stop does not stay merely a stone!"
The two lights began to turn against one another in a violent, grinding orbit, and where the weeping fire touched the frozen stone, the stone shifted, forced to move by the unyielding pain pressed against its structure!
"The blight spurs the calcification. The agony catalyzes the stone. We could not grow the way the living grow, through nourishment and will, so we grew the only way left to the damned...through pain and endurance, one forcing the other ever forward. The Laestrygonians persevered into grandeur upon nothing but the refusal of two wounds to let each other rest."
Damodred let the images fade, the gray space holding silent.
"That is what I am, Master. A dead pattern that taught its own scars to keep climbing. It is not a gift. But it is mine. And now, in a way, it is yours."
And as the weight of the titan’s ancient truth settled over the empty domain, Noah looked upon all of it with shining eyes!