Chapter 5342: Action III
Ruination tracked it as a cascade, the wave of authority sweeping through THE Quietus Silvanus and reaching into the millions of Gilded Ones within it, and one after another, in numbers too vast to record individually, they were emptied.
Their Infinity, the foundation of their power, torn out. Their amplified Egos, the Superbius pride and the Acedia Ego stillness and the scattered Luxuria that had been cultivated for pleasure, pulled free. Their Observable Force, their Civilizations, the full accumulated weight of their existences, extracted in the storm of the detonation!
The Third Scale beings’ defenses, formidable against any conventional assault, could not stop authority that operated beneath the level their defenses were built to address. They flared, and they failed, and their wielders were hollowed!
|Progress: 40% of citadel population stripped. 60%. 75%. 90%. The defensive capabilities of Third Scale beings are confirmed insufficient against the deployed authority. They cannot stop it. They can only experience it.|
|Final assessment of population effect: 99% of all Gilded Ones within THE Quietus Silvanus have been stripped of power, Egos, Observable Force, and Infinity. They survive as bodies reduced to raw foundation, their progression on the Scales of Existence decimated entirely.|
Ruination noted the survivors with precision.
|Survivors of full extraction: 59 Fourth Scale Gilded Ones. The authority reached them and extracted a vast portion of their Infinity, but their power remained standing. Fourth Scale standing, with its Akashic Civilizational Intent, was sufficient to resist total stripping.|
...!
Then Ruination turned her attention upward, toward her master and the man beside him.
Above the ravaged citadel, where Noah and Alexander floated wrapped in the Humilitas Ego of Infinity, the extracted power was arriving. It came up from THE Quietus Silvanus in seas!
Seas of weavings of existence, the torn records of millions of Gilded lives. Seas of golden Observable Force. Seas of Infinity, the foundational power of millions, flowing upward in shimmering currents. And the amplified Egos, the Superbius pride of countless prideful beings and the Acedia stillness of countless slothful ones and the few Luxuria Egos and other Egos, all of it rising together, all of it pulled from the millions below!
And all of it flowed to Alexander.
The man who had wanted to stop, who had given away the last treasure of his family, who had been talked back from the edge by a being who claimed to be bad at emotions, stood above a decimated citadel and received the extracted power of millions of Gilded Ones into himself, the seas of weavings pouring into him, his existence drinking in everything THE Genesis Disinheritance had torn free.
Her master had given him this at the push of a button. The decimation of those responsible for the Ordnances that had nuked their Observable Existence, and the devouring of millions’ worth of stolen power, handed to a friend who had stumbled, as a reason to stand back up.
Ruination held the full record of it as a Gilded Citadel burned with mushroom clouds of infinity.
Her master...was always so thoughtful of others.
---
In THE Infiniverse, as another of his bodies nuked a citadel of Gilded Ones across the Braneworld, Noah sat beside the humanoid manifestation of THE Infiniverse on THE Early Veiled Shore.
He looked at her, and between them he waved his hand to reveal a small budding sliver of obsidian brilliance.
THE Primordial Source.
They had been chasing this for some time. In all of existence, there were two main authorities, Infinity and THE Primordial Source, and every entity that ever climbed reached toward one or the other. More often than not, a being held only one.
Infinity ran through the Infinite Lifeforms and through beings like himself who had grasped it across long effort. THE Primordial Source ran through the Source Lifeforms, native to them, present at their emergence.
He had encountered exactly one existence who held both as a foundation, Seo-yeon, the progeny of an Infinite Lifeform and a Source Lifeform, and her dual nature was rare enough that the frameworks of existence had no comfortable category for it.
At a structural level, the mixing of these two grand authorities was unfathomable. At a structural level. As the basis of one’s Foundation. Source Lifeforms could still utilize and did utilize Infinity still.
Noah turned the question over the way he turned over every question that touched on the foundations of power. The Gilded Ones amplified their emotions and their Egos specifically to handle Infinity without going mad, the engineered pride or wrath or sloth giving them a stable framework to hold an authority that would otherwise unmake a mind.
The Source Lifeforms held THE Primordial Source, and he wondered whether the Source itself gave them a resistance to the madness of Infinity, a different foundation that did not require the engineering the Gilded Ones relied on.
And then there were the Infinite Lifeforms. Were they mad? Were they made entirely of Infinity, with no identity left to lose? He had his own answer for Infinity, and the answer was his identity.
Osmontian Absolute Infinity. He had put his identity first and Absolute Infinity second, deliberately, refusing the version of Absolute Infinity that dissolved the self into a state of infinite perfection. He suspected the Infinite Lifeforms sat below that threshold, holding Infinity without crossing into the absolute state that would have taken their cognizance for perfection.
Many questions. Few answers. But at this moment, he had grasped THE Primordial Source, and grasping it meant he had not done it alone. Whatever he held, THE Infiniverse would hold too.
She was already an astounding construct, a weaving of existence built on a glorious Cause and Infinity at her base. He wondered what she would become with THE Primordial Source behind her as well.
Noah cradled the sliver of THE Primordial Source in his hand.
"We came from a landmass floating in the skies of an apartment’s dying world, and we grew into an Observable Existence," he said to her. "If THE Primordial Source flows through you, will you remain an Observable Existence? Or will you get closer to the qualities of the regions and domains I saw in THE Source Lands?"
He looked at the sliver. "We do not truly understand THE Primordial Source. We grasped it moments ago. We have to learn it now, the way we learned everything else."
He had obtained Infinity, or a semblance of it, years ago when he first cast fireballs behind a dying apartment complex, and only recently had he obtained Absolute Infinity and truly grasped what the authority meant. THE Primordial Source would be the same. He had connected himself to it. Now he had to understand exactly what he had connected himself to.
So.
"Let it flow," he said.
HUUM!
From his hand, he gave THE Primordial Source through his connection to THE Infiniverse.
She grasped it. Her fair hands turned obsidian, the color climbing her arms, and an instant later her entire figure had turned to scintillating radiant obsidian, the manifestation of an Observable Existence taking THE Primordial Source into her foundations. She looked at her master with decisive eyes, and a thought moved through her that she did not voice aloud.
She would become something out of his wildest dreams.
She would make sure of it!
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