Read Novel Full Chapter 5691: One Word!
Chapter 5691: One Word!
The chains shattered.
Multicolored fragments of scorching authority blew outward across the basin and dissolved into nothing before they landed, and from the devoured coffin’s resting place, something rose!
Noah, hoisted and burning in the grip of the Immense One, could not see it.
No one could see it! Its Dimensionality was too high, a walking wound in what was possible, perceivable only by the way existence flinched around its edges, by the prints that appeared in the luminous soil under no feet, by the way the honeyed air bent aside to let something pass!
An invisible part of a being, imperceivable and immense, standing free.
And the first thing it did was not rise toward the eye.
The invisible presence turned, and crossed the ruined grave, and knelt beside a small obsidian slime.
Masamuk lay at the edge of the torn mound where his devouring charge had ended, and Noah’s crushed perception dragged itself toward him, and what it found made his existence buzz.
The slime... was hazy!
Its small obsidian body, the body that contained countless folded dimensions, was losing its edges! Its deep translucent depths were thinning, its drifting stellar motes going out one by one like lamps down a long street, its entire simple form blurring as if the single nanosecond of that glorious devouring had asked for everything, as if the charge and the feast and the freeing had used up all of its existence at once.
And the invisible being held him.
There was nothing to see, and somehow it was unmistakable! The hazy little slime rose gently off the soil, cradled against a presence that could not be perceived, lifted the way something precious is lifted, and Masamuk’s dim crimson eyes looked up into a face that was not there, and tears fell.
Tears, from a splitter of Chaos.
They slid down the blurring obsidian body and dropped onto the ruined grave, and the slime’s soft rasped voice carried across the silent basin, small and breaking and unbearably gentle.
"If only I remembered. If only."
...!
Noah’s existence clenched around the words.
If only I remembered!
He said this while his existence seemingly faded!
Had Masamuk been teetering at an edge this whole time?! Had the melancholic little thing beside the lake been spending its last reserves waiting for one chance, and this was it, and now it was gone?
Or was this only a body, one vessel of something vaster, falling apart while the true existence endured somewhere folded and safe?
The obsidian slime... surely wasn’t dead, right?!
He could not tell! His Regard was crushed, his perception was bleeding, and the haze kept thinning, and above it all, the sky laughed!
|Oh, how touching,| THE GLOATING JAILER boomed, and its cruelty was unhurried ans entirely unnecessary.
|The little rat spent itself utterly for one embrace it cannot even properly feel. Look at it leaking. Do you know, I could smell something old and sad somewhere in my fields. I assumed it was the grave itself. How delicious to learn my trophy came with a pet.|
The eye’s pressure ground down harder!
|And you, little farmer. You screamed so wonderfully. I do hope the pieces of you remember it, wherever pieces of rats go.|
HUUM!
And then Noah felt something heavy.
Through the crushing, through the grief, through the haze of a dying friend held by an invisible mourner, he perceived the force of nature in the coffin’s wake seemingly RISE.
The unperceivable presence straightened, still cradling the fading slime, and though it had no face and no eyes and no shape his existence could hold, Noah knew with total certainty that it was looking at HIM!
A Piece of Vakochev!
And in the deepest depths of his existence, the crystal shone!
Vakochev’s beacon blazed like a struck flare, pulsing light through his foundations, key and lock finally facing one another across a ruined grave, and an instant later...
The sky stopped playing.
|Enough of this.|
The Immense One applied undeniable force!
There was no wind-up and no flourish! The pressure that had been torture became verdict, the full unveiled seriousness of one of Those Who Remain closing around Noah’s Provenance Dream Body like a hand around a moth, and every defense he had was simply overwhelmed.
The nine-fold golden shields in his quarks blazed and broke! His singularities shrieked in their orbits! His Body, his Precepts, his blazing generated purpose, all of it was pressed past its limits at once, and Noah Osmont, in the last moments of a body that was only a dream, made a choice that no sane existence would make.
He opened himself to ALL of it!
’It is a dream,’ he thought, savage and clear inside the collapse.
’No harm comes to my existence. Which means this, right here, is the only place I can ever afford this lesson. So let me feel absolutely everything!’
And he felt it.
He felt his processes seethe and fight to the last.
The third Baryogenesis cycle roared on through the destruction, tempering quarks even as they burst!
His Teloi shields shattered and REFORMED and shattered again, nine aims refusing to stop standing up! His Sanguine weavings boiled, his Tongue pressed against his teeth wanting to speak Words into a dying mouth, every single system he had ever built raging against the verdict with the full stubbornness of his existence, and he catalogued all of it, every failure-point, every seam that held longest, every defense that died well, a complete map of his own limits drawn in his own destruction!
And here was the wonder that the pain could not drown.
Even applying its full seriousness, even with undeniable force, it still took the Immense One more than a nanosecond to finish him!
More than a nanosecond! His quarks did not crumble, they were overcome, each one holding to the last edge of its purpose, and as the final wave crushed inward, as his existence popped like a balloon at last and the Provenance of THE Human Dreamer scattered into radiant blue-gold mist across a ruined Dimension!
The sky spoke over his scattering, and its words were the cruelest it had said all day, because they were not even aimed at him.
As if THE Immense One gad simply killed an insignificant ant.
|Look at that. Yet another lifeform that moved for you, and lived for you, killed senselessly. You really are the worst, Vakochev. So many little ones dying for your sake. That little slime. That old granny. That black spider... so many avoidable deaths. So many...|
...!
The words burned themselves into Noah’s dissolving perception.
His perception guttered. The Dimension smeared. And through the last thinning window of the Dream, Noah saw the eye of the Immense One gain more definition.
Its vast obsidian iris sharpened! Its gold-threaded depths clarified, texture and terrible detail resolving as if the gaze were descending, as if the being behind it had finally decided that watching from above was no longer sufficient, as if it were coming DOWN!
And in the next instant, the part of Vakochev that had been unleashed from the coffin... spoke.
It said a single word, with utmost coldness.
"Persevere."
...!
HUUM!
One word!
One word, and Noah’s scattering perception was granted one final, perfect clarity, as if existence itself insisted he witness this properly.
He perceived every inch of the isolated Dimension at once, the terraced fields, the folded distances, the pale halls, the gold citadel stacked against the layered sky, the thousand lakes with their drowned suns, the hundreds of masked Provenance Lifeforms turning their golden smiles upward in dawning horror as...!
All of it disintegrated.
DISINTEGRATED!
The entire Dimension came apart in a single silent breath, soil and sky and citadel and lakes unmade together, the leashed sovereigns of the eternal Burial dissolving mid-turn with their harvests still in their arms, an era-old jail and every hand that had tended it erased between one fraction of an instant and the next, until nothing remained of the amputated Dimension at all!
Nothing, except a cold eye above!
The obsidian gaze hung alone in the formless dark where a Dimension had just been, stripped of its trophy, its fields, its farmers, and its joke, and only then, only after witnessing that single word do all of that, did Noah entirely feel his perception of this Dream ending!
BOOM!
Noah woke violently!
His body convulsed upward out of the scorching golden waters of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring, a wave of liquid gold crashing off him as his entire body SHOOK, tremors rolling through him from crown to heel, his hands trembling against the warm rock edge, his breath tearing in and out of lungs that did not need air and demanded it anyway!
The steam pressed close and hot against his skin. The faded skeletons slept below. And his existence rang like a struck bell, because the effects of the torture, of the needles, of the collapse of a body by an Immense One’s undeniable force, had reached all the way back to his TRUE self!
It was several long moments before the shaking stilled.
And then the surge came!
His Provenance and his immensity rose, swelling through his foundations like a tide answering a moon, and prompts cascaded across his vision in radiant waves!
|The Provenance Dream has ended.|
|The Dream Body was destroyed. Your existence is unharmed. Everything felt was retained.|
|Accounting of the Dream begins.|
|Boon: THE Obsidian Journal of Masamuk remains keyed to your existence.|
|Boon: the crystal left behind by Vakochev is TRANSFORMING. Its purpose stirs.|
|Boon: the third cycle of THE Infinite Provenance Baryogenesis advanced tremendously under the tempering pressure of an Immense One.|
|Grandest Accounting: you stood beneath the direct torture of one of Those Who Remain. Your Records were assaulted, and you remained yourself. Your existence was crushed, and you remained yourself. Remaining true to what you are before a force that unmakes truth is a terrifying difficulty. It has been overcome.|
|Living truly is advancement.|
|VERITAS has risen to 86.|
|PROVENANCE has risen to 86.|
|PONDUS has risen to 78. POTENTIA remains INFINITE.|
...!
Eighty-six!
His attributes had leapt, storming through the seventies in a single accounting, VERITAS and PROVENANCE striking 86 each, the twin measures of what he was and what he generated rising together like two hands of the same body, because he had carried both of them intact through a verdict meant to erase them!
Noah sat back slowly in the golden waters, and let the steam roll over him, and thought about everything.
The grief of a slime that might or might not still exist.
An invisible mourner who had knelt before it had risen. A casualty list spat as a taunt, an old granny and a black spider now etched permanently into his vault of unanswered things.
An eye that had begun to descend. And one word, spoken with utmost coldness, that had unmade an entire Dimension and every leashed sovereign in it faster than his perception could track the unmaking!
Persevere!
The word Masamuk had clung to across an era of emptied rooms. The word the fractured titan had spoken as annihilation. One word, worn two ways, and Noah suspected he had just witnessed the smallest possible fraction of what the maker of the Scales had once been!
He raised his hand, and drew both treasures out of his existence.
The crystal and the grimoire floated before him in the steam, side by side, the strangest pair of inheritances in all of existence! The crystal turned slowly, and it was changing, its obsidian depths swirling with new veins of light that had not been there before, its long silence visibly ending, and yet when his Regard swept across it!
Question marks. Once more, still, rows of question marks.
But the book.
His endlessly blue eyes settled on THE Obsidian Journal of Masamuk, worn round at its edges by an eternity of small handling, filled with the musings of a being who had shaped the first Domains and loved a woman whose name had been stolen from him, and unlike the crystal, unlike the collar, unlike every waiting treasure in his hoard...
The book, he felt, would answer him. From the book... he could at least gain something!