Read Novel Full Chapter 5624: The Severed Demesne!
Chapter 5624: The Severed Demesne!
The dance ended the way it had begun, with her deciding!
The old melody wound itself down to a last few notes, and Thalia drew him close on the final turn, and rose onto her toes, and kissed him on the lips.
It was a single action, soft and brief and entirely unhurried, and it very nearly broke him out of the Reverie. Warmth moved through his existence with no permission asked, and the endless blue of his eyes flickered once, and steadied!
’This woman...’
"I can sense your Provenance pulsing with momentum," she said, still close. "Continue with what you need to do. I will ensure all those who are potential targets of THE Sealed One finish the emergence of their Observable Existences. I will also introduce myself to Barbatos and the others."
A faint curve of her lips formed. "And I will keep an eye on anything coming across Dimensions and Time."
She said such words, and then she moved away from him like a dream, unhurried across the stellar grass toward the distant cliff, and his mother and his daughter were already waving her over.
Noah watched her go.
Then, with his eyes still shining stellar blue, he spoke to the whole of his home.
"Infiniverse...conduct your first Hearthshift. Take us from THE Ymnaros." He paused. "I will leave one clone behind to brief Anaximander and the others..."
|Understood, Master.|
HUUM!
And there was, of course, a strangeness in what came next, which was that almost nothing came at all!
No engines lit. No skies tore. Within THE Infiniverse, the rivers kept running and the thousand plus young Observable Existences kept turning, because a home does not tremble when it arrives somewhere new!
Only two beings in all of existence perceived the motion itself: a mother gathering the whole of herself, every Realm and foundation and life she carried, and stepping, once, across the dark.
|THE Infiniverse has conducted her first Hearthshift.|
|Departure: the fused Ymnaros Dimension. Nothing perceived her leaving. Nothing can follow.|
|Now drifting across Existence.|
WAA!
|Drifting...|
|Drifting...|
|Drifting...|
WAP!
|Arrival: a wandering Dimension, one of many sundered fringes of THE Source Lands that broke away across the ages over time. Local designation, drawn from the memory of its inhabitants: THE SEVERED DEMESNE.|
|Composition: Source Lifeforms, including True Source Lifeforms. Depth assessment: every living being within this Dimension resides within THE FINITE VERSE. None possess the standing to perceive you, THE Infiniverse, or THE CRIMSON WEFT, under any circumstance, even should you walk among them.|
A severed edge of THE Source Lands!
Noah found it quietly remarkable. He had stood in the Source Lands before. And yet here drifted a piece that had simply broken off it, ages ago, and gone on living alone, a limb that had outlasted its body’s memory of losing it.
’How many such fragments are scattered across existence? How many pieces of eternal things?’
The Weft was already moving. Crimson rivers only he could see threaded out from THE Infiniverse and latched, quietly and completely, onto the drifting Dimension, binding it as an anchor, and through those threads his Infinite Sanguine Mana began to flow outward. But this time, the mana did not travel alone.
It carried glimmers of his Provenance Essence within it.
Since Infinity answered Infinite Lifeforms, and THE Primordial Source answered Source Lifeforms, and his essence was a thing of purity that predated frameworks entirely, the design followed plainly enough.
The mana would be the river. The essence would be what the river carried. And the Source Lifeforms of this Dimension, drawing as they had always drawn on the deep patient foundation of all things, would find their draw answered by something a great deal closer, and a great deal purer, than anything that had ever answered them before!
Noah went to see it done personally.
He appeared above a grand citadel floating in the open dark, and no alarm anywhere in existence stirred.
The citadel stretched beneath him in ordered tiers of pale stone and dense golden light, light years across from its outermost terraces to its radiant heart, and millions of Source Lifeforms moved through it, patient beings of settled luminance going about their hours, markets and sanctums and long contemplation halls where rows of the ancient sat in stillness with their cores glowing softly. And it was one citadel of dozens!
His senses counted them scattered across the Dimension, each one vast, each one old, an entire civilization built by beings who had never once perceived the walls of the vessel holding them.
He descended, and walked among them.
He passed through a market where a Source Lifeform haggled over crystallized Source foundations. He walked the length of a contemplation hall past a hundred seated ancients, close enough to touch the oldest of them, a being whose luminance had the deep worn steadiness of ages, and not one head turned, and not one sense so much as itched. To THE Severed Demesne, nothing at all was happening this afternoon!
And beneath all of them, the threads settled into place.
His Infinite Sanguine Mana, carrying its glimmers of essence, slid silently beneath the point where every Source Lifeform’s draw met its source, and replaced what answered. No pull was interrupted. No draw was denied. The next time each being reached for the foundation of all things, the foundation reached back, and it was him!
The old one in the contemplation hall opened his eyes.
"..."
Around him, one by one, the other ancients stirred from their stillness, and looks were exchanged down the long hall, wondering and quiet, because every one of them had felt the same impossible thing in the same second!
"Elder... did you also...?"
"...THE Source seems Closer..." The oldest one’s whisper barely left him. "It feels... closer! Oh!"
...!
THE Primordial Source felt closer than it had ever felt in the whole of their long lives. Grander. Warmer, if such a word could be used for the deep foundation of existence!
In the market outside, a lifeform sat down in the middle of the street and wept without knowing why, and across dozens of citadels and light years of dark, in a thousand halls at once, the Source Lifeforms of a severed fragment turned toward their own depths in wonder.
And for a rarer few, the change ran deeper still.
|Note: this Dimension contains True Source Lifeforms who also cultivate Infinity. 217 among them actively pursue the fusion of Infinity and THE Primordial Source.|
The fusion path!
Here at the Finite depth it was pursued the way the Finite pursued everything, blindly and bravely and mostly fatally, generations of True Source Lifeforms grinding at a joining that hurt nearly all who attempted it.
And in this hour, all 217 of them stopped what they were doing.
Because it had suddenly become so much easier! The two great currents they had spent lifetimes forcing toward each other now ran, at their deepest point of draw, out of a single wellspring, and currents from one source do not fight their joining. Across the Dimension, many bolted upright in their sanctums and began sensing their own existences with something between disbelief and reverence, feeling a lifetime’s impossibility soften in their hands!
Oh!
No war. No conquest. Not a drop of blood shed anywhere beneath him.
And Noah was extending his rulership grandly.
Minutes passed, and the permeation completed itself. His glimmering essence settled beneath every being in the Dimension that had ever touched THE Primordial Source, and his mana beneath every one that had ever touched Infinity, and where a lifeform cultivated both, both draws quietly became him.
|Your rulership has extended across THE SEVERED DEMESNE.|
|38,114,209 Source Lifeforms now draw upon your Provenance Essence as the wellspring of THE Primordial Source. They perceive nothing.|
|1,120 True Source Lifeforms now draw upon you. 217 now draw upon you through both currents at once. Their pursuit of the fusion has been eased beyond all precedent. Whether this proves a gift or a consequence is unrecorded.|
|Attention: your Provenance Essence is not infinite. Sustaining all current draws consumes 0.0000001% of your essence per second. The rate will rise with every Dimension claimed. As of now, the cost is negligible.|
...!
Noah looked at those last words for a long moment, and his shining eyes were tyrannically heavy.
The cost was nothing, today. But he had not designed this road for one Dimension. He had designed it for existence, and existence would multiply that small number by millions!
A wells that can run dry... is a throne with a crack in it.
So the answer was the same answer it had always been, the one running through his quarks at this very moment. Generate faster than existence could drink. Become a source that made the word finite a stranger!
"Infiniverse..." he said quietly. "Let us initiate the next Hearthshift. Let us...continue on."
|Understood, Master.|
WAA!
And as his home gathered herself for her second step across the dark, the Baryogenesis within him surged faster still. The weight of existence came down and his quarks drank it in accelerating rhythm, and he could feel his Dimensionality rising quicker for what he had done, as though existence itself were adjusting its opinion of where he stood, deepening the water around a being who had become the foundation beneath forty million others!
And at this moment...
HUUM!
His existence rang!
It was not pain and it was not power. It was fullness. Every corner of what he was drew taut at once, his singularities, his organs, his remade quarks, all of it arriving together at some shared brim, pressing outward against a boundary his senses could feel but not name, a membrane at the very edge of everything he currently was!
|100,000,000 Provenance Telos Quarks converted.|
|Your attributes have risen. VERITAS: 20. PROVENANCE: 20. POTENTIA: INFINITE. PONDUS: 20.|
|All of your attributes now stand at 20. None have yet crossed the wall.|
...!