Chapter 5136: Dissection! III
Chapter 5136: Dissection! III
Octavius’s eyes burned colder.
The defiant light in them sharpened into something almost glacial, the Greed behind it refusing to give Noah the satisfaction of a verbal response. Noah didn’t need one. The eyes were answer enough!
He got started.
He waved his hand, and on his palm boundless multicolored Infinity converged together. It braided into a sharp point. It elongated into a blade. It settled into his fingers as a scalpel of pure Infinite light. He twirled it once between his fingers, the way a surgeon might test the balance of a new instrument.
He lowered the scalpel to Octavius’s chest.
The tip touched the skin of a supposed fucking Chosen One, and the skin parted.
The Ego of Greed holding his flood of Infinity in place flickered in response to the wound, and Noah watched that flicker with the close attention of one who had just been shown the first useful data point of the session. The skin peeled back along his scalpel’s path. The deeper tissues followed. Engineered weavings came into view, and they were beautiful in their way, architecturally beautiful, the kind of work Noah could respect even while he was disassembling it.
As he cut, seas of Infinity converged around the region.
In the next instant, multiple bodies of his own materialized into being, each one glowing with the soft blue of concentrated Infinity, each one forming above a different bound Primordial Architect along the row of floating blue tables beneath him. Each duplicate held its own multicolored scalpel. Each duplicate lowered its blade to the chest of its assigned specimen at the same moment. Valeria’s body opened beneath one of them. The Abomination’s body opened beneath a third. The entire research archipelago became, in a breath, a landmass running every dissection at once.
Noah kept his primary attention on Octavius and The Abomination.
As his scalpel moved, his mind drifted.
Ubergulden Adelheid.
THE Gilded Ones.
If they were leaning into emotions as the biggest thing to combat the madness of Infinity, and if he was finding the amplified Ego of Greed written all over this engineered Architect, then a pattern was starting to trace itself across the data. He’d been hearing Ego of Pride, Ego of Wrath, Ego of Passion. Now Ego of Greed was in his hands literally. Emotions being amplified deliberately, cultivated as the channels through which Infinity could be held without triggering THE Gamaidjan.
The pattern was familiar.
Seven deadly sins. That was what was lining up in his head. Pride, Greed, Wrath, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth. Before, they’d been moral categories and warnings. The dark configurations a human life could fall into if it let its Egos run unchecked.
The Gilded Ones had taken those exact configurations and turned them into engineering specifications. The darkest emotional categories inflated into cultivation foundations grand enough to hold floods of Infinity.
And he’d already had these concepts lodged deep inside him for ages. He’d already actualized them within his Pillar. He held all of them at once, every one of them amplified to functional intensity, every one of them sitting alongside every other without conflict.
The next question was whether the Gilded Ones stopped at sins.
Did they do virtues too? Charity, Patience, Kindness, Humility, Temperance, Diligence, Chastity. The counterweights. If the sins made good channels for Infinity, the virtues should have made good channels as well, and any engineering program worth running would have tested both sides of the equation.
Had they? Was there a whole second category of engineered Primordial Architects out there running on amplified Charity, amplified Patience? Would he find one of those next?
And where did Ubergulden Adelheid fit in any of this?
Which amplified Ego had the Gilded Ones wired into her foundation? Which configuration was she running on, underneath the seal, underneath the surface of the being who’d looked at him with calm golden eyes?
He could find out.
He could connect with her through his Quintessence Infiniforce again!
Octavius’s body splayed open further beneath his scalpel.
The chest cavity parted fully. The engineered weavings laid themselves out for his inspection. The Ego of Greed pulsed in visible patterns across his exposed foundations, a gold-green lattice woven into the deeper substrate of his existence, the channels of his Infinity reservoir clearly defined against the darker weavings beneath.
Noah leaned closer as he began to see!
---
Minutes passed.
Naldine stayed behind him and watched him while monitoring everything in the surroundings, the good girl she was. Her singularity-dotted eyes swept the edges of Emotive’s emotional blockade and her own Hadean Barrier of Infinity at steady intervals, her vihuela humming softly against her back. Nothing was getting in. Nothing was getting out!
She was handling what he’d asked her to handle, and she was handling it without needing further instruction.
Emotive, the tool, had kept her creepy gaze on him completely the entire time. Her hair had cycled through more color combinations than most Civilizations held in their entire lexicon. He could only imagine the craziness going on inside her mind. He wasn’t particularly interested in imagining it closely.
But right now he paused over the opened and dissected bodies of the Primordial Architects, and his eyes shone brilliantly.
THE Gilded Ones were truly grand.
The engineering laid out beneath him was, professionally speaking, extraordinary.
They hadn’t only amplified an Ego. They’d altered the very makeup of existence in Octavius and the others from the ground up. Greed was the foundation, yes, the emotion they’d selected for cultivation. But the amplification wasn’t a single inflated channel. It was a network. Intricate, layered, woven through every stratum of the subject’s Bounded Lifeform existence.
They’d taken an ordinary Bounded Lifeform and designed within it a latticework of Greed so dense and stable that Infinity could pour through those channels without triggering THE Gamaidjan. The Ego had been made extreme enough to overcome the madness. The flood had been given specific, engineered rivers to flow down!
Oh!
That alone would have been grand work. But they hadn’t stopped there.
Layered beneath the Greed network, written into Octavius’s existential foundations with the kind of quiet precision that only hands grander than his own could have managed, were additional modifications. Silent ones.
The kind a subject would never be able to detect within themselves because the modifications had been branded onto the Civilizational Anchor itself, fused into the very Civilization the subject had anchored their Second Scale to.
Those modifications altered the subject’s thoughts.
Nothing as blunt as commands or compulsions. The modifications made Octavius and his peers genuinely believe they were Chosen. It wasn’t something they had chosen to adopt out of pride. It had been written into them before they’d even known what they were, so deeply that by the time any of them could reflect on the belief, reflection could no longer separate the belief from the self. If any of them ever stood before a Gilded One, immense reverence would pour out of them automatically!
They would do everything they were commanded. Their entire existences could be shut down by the ones who engineered them, because a kill-switch had been woven into the same Civilizational Anchor that held their power together.
It was nasty stuff.
Genuinely nasty! Well-designed, efficient, beautiful in its craftsmanship, but nasty in every moral direction the word could point.
Noah looked down at Octavius and the others and shook his head slowly before he waved his hand.
He understood the intricacies well enough now, and he wanted to apply what he’d learned before he moved on from this island. Towards the peak of power, self-identity was critical.
There were no sages of enlightened minds!
Egos had to be amplified. Many beings did this as a last resort against the madness of Infinity, though he didn’t have that issue himself, not the way they did. But that didn’t mean he had nothing to learn here. His own identity, his own Ego, was another avenue of cultivation he hadn’t fully leaned into, and there was still much to grasp.
Because from everything he’d gathered...from Naldine, from THE Beholder, from THE Creature and from the Living Emotive. From the memories he was currently harvesting out of Octavius and the others on their floating tables. Infinity was only part of the equation. The part that was difficult but ultimately accessible to enough beings with enough cultivation.
There was still THE Primordial Source. And nobody he’d met yet knew what it was or how to access it.
He’d take it slow. He was still getting a grasp of Infinity, and Infinity alone was unfathomably vast, the kind of ocean that rewarded patient swimmers and drowned the impatient ones. He’d engineered his own Scales of Existence using Infinity as the foundational substrate, which meant he could do things Vakochev’s preset Scales couldn’t.
His Scales were infinite! He could change them. He could transform them as he went. He could fold new stages into the existing ones or bolt new stages onto the framework entirely, and the framework would accept those additions because it had been designed to.
He’d established THE First Infinite Scale already and three Demarcations inside it. Infinitas Corpus, completed. Infinitas Architectura, in progress. Infinitas Causa, waiting.
He could alter any of these. If Ego turned out to be critical, he’d include it. If something else worthy came up, he’d include that too!
So the plan was simple. Learn all avenues of Infinity. Grasp as much of it as he could. Keep building his Hadean Pillar of Infinity toward Absolute Infinity in Infinitas Architectura, which was the immediate goal, the milestone he was working toward even as the Pillar blazed above him now. It was one way his power was continuing to rise. If amplified self-identity and Ego was another way, he’d delve into that too.
But first.
He waved his hand, and all the dissected bodies of the Primordial Architects floated up before him.
The Abomination drifted up last, still silently roaring behind its sealed jaw, its chest cavity split open alongside many other things, its glistening mad eyes rolling uselessly inside their sockets. Still alive and still frozen by his Infinity holding its sea of THE Gamaidjan in place.
Noah looked at it and smiled grandly.
"I know what you’re made of now."
His voice carried across the floating island with calm certainty.
"So I’m going to break all of you down. I’ll integrate you into a singular being. I’ll amplify that Greed even further than the Gilded Ones bothered to amplify it. And I’ll rewrite the engineering written into your existences so that it answers to me instead of them. Hang in there, all of you. We’ll see just what you’re made of when I put you back together."
...!