Chapter 5183: Crack A Gilded One! I
Chapter 5183: Crack A Gilded One! I
Noah looked at this terrifying woman in front of him with a sense of cold serenity as he thought about her words, wondering if the same existential overwriting he’d seen in Bounded lifeforms applied to the masters themselves.
He’d seen how the Gilded could rewrite the very minds of those they touched, forcing even the most powerful Primordial Architects to revere the Superbius as a fact of nature, and he couldn’t help but speculate if this entire civilization was just a massive lattice of engineered obedience where even the strongest were bound by the strings of their caste.
It was a dark, pragmatic thought that most wouldn’t dare to entertain while standing before a Sororis Prima, but Noah wasn’t most people, and he watched the Maharanis with the detached curiosity of a man looking at a particularly complex and monstrous puppet.
As he was thinking this, Sororis Prima Prabhavati continued to look at him up and down before she shook her head and let out a long, weary sigh that suggested he was a burden she’d rather see discarded.
"While I cannot fathom what Ubergulden Adelheid sees in you, I will keep my promise to her and design a new identity for your existence, because she doesn’t have much time before THE Magna Sorora will demand an answer from her regardless of her noble house. You have to go now, for I have to remain among the other sisters to close off the bases of this Observable and observe the process, since it seems we cannot leave Bounded lifeforms alone without them becoming ungrateful. We tried to give you an entire existence to yourselves while we remained in the Braneworld, occasionally coming down to bless you with our presence, and yet you’ve chosen to house a Relictus among your ranks."
She adjusted the golden silk of her sari with a sharp, dismissive movement that caused her radiant jewels to chime with a hollow resonance.
"Ah, it’s no matter, for my Custos will finish everything I’ve set up, and since the both of you are technically Custodes, she can get you up to speed on exactly what you need to be and do to survive the crossing. Little Rani, come out and take charge of this Weaver."
The skies above the Wandering Territories shattered once more with a sudden, crystalline violence that made Noah raise his eyes to the heavens.
Someone pristinely powerful began to descend from the fracture, her presence casting a soft pink radiance that contrasted sharply with the multicolored chaos of the region. Sororis Prima Prabhavati saw his reaction and offered a cold, thin smile of her own as the figure approached.
"What, did you think Custodes could only be men? This is mine, and I assure you she’s more capable than any Ira Custos you might encounter, for she’ll be the one to ensure your successful transition into the Braneworld."
The Custos who descended was a unique existence, a woman radiating a calm and overwhelming beauty while draped in flowing pink robes that clung to a figure that was curvaceous and full in every proportion. She possessed a physical allure that could likely topple civilizations if she chose to weaponize it, her ears being slightly pointy and delicate while hazy pink-white wings unfurled behind her to stabilize her descent.
Her eyes were perhaps the most striking feature of all, for they shone like clusters of galaxies held within a sea of violet.
She smiled and bowed toward Sororis Prima Prabhavati with a deep sense of reverence, but then she turned to Noah and shockingly offered the same smile and a respectful bow to him as well.
A Gilded One, especially one of this tier, bowing at him was a development he hadn’t fully anticipated. He watched her calmly, for while she was undeniably beautiful, he’d seen beauty in every form imaginable throughout his life, and in his current state of THE Humilitas Ego of Infinity, the seductive charm of the Luxuria designation did absolutely nothing to his internal focus!
She stood upright and gestured toward the horizon where the boundaries between domains were beginning to blur.
"Please, follow me, for I’ll be the one guiding your path from this point forward. Maharanis Prabhavati, you can trust me to take care of everything from here and ensure the Weaver...reaches his destination as intended."
After those words, the Custos waved her hand upward in a grand, sweeping motion, and a shimmering rainbow-colored river began to ascend from the valley toward the shattered skies above.
Noah looked at Sororis Prima Prabhavati, who continued to gaze at him with a cold and judgmental focus as he stepped onto the multicolored flow, and Rani followed closely behind him after offering one final, subordinate bow to her mistress.
The moment he stepped onto the river, Noah felt his perception uniquely changing. He actually felt a sensation of power that he most closely remembered to be stemming from a grand Cause, as if A Pulse of THE Scales was being activated to pull from a segment of THE First Cause itself.
Reality twisted and distorted around him until his body felt like it was disappearing from the Territories and from every region he’d grown familiar with, his surroundings dissolving into a blur of speed and authority.
HUUM!
In an instant, he found himself traversing across a domain of tumultuous crimson-pink clouds, feeling as if he were traveling within a vessel made of the very clouds themselves, and he realized the substance was a direct manifestation of the Custos’s power.
His smile of humility remained fixed even as dazzling system prompts began to appear in front of his eyes, the text glowing with the weight of a new and sovereign jurisdiction.
|You have entered a personalized domain backed by THE Desidero Cause.|
|Your existence has temporarily ceased to reside within the standard coordinates of Observable Existence.|
|You are currently traversing a transitional space covered by the light of the aforementioned Cause inside a pathway designed to bring you to The Braneworld Observable Existence.|
He was in a space between spaces, a transitional area between where he’d been and where he was going, yet in the next moment, the domain around him began to churn and solidify with a sudden violence.
The clouds coalesced into a wide area filled with crimson-pink skies and a white sea below his feet, the edges of the space stretching out for a single light-year before being cut off by a wall of tumultuous vapor.
Everything came to a sudden, jarring stop as the forward momentum of the rainbow river vanished entirely, leaving Noah standing at the center of the silent, pink-lit void.
Noah kept his calm smile and turned around to see Custos Rani, his head tilted slightly in a gesture of unassuming curiosity.
"I wonder why we’ve stopped, for I was under the impression that we were on a very tight schedule."
Behind him, Custos Rani was no longer bowed in a gesture of service, for she was now floating with a devilish light in her galaxy-filled eyes while a crimson aura began to fill the entire space.
She offered him a dangerous smile that carried the full weight of her engineered Lust, her posture radiating an authority that was no longer hidden beneath the mask of a guide!
"Maharanis Prabhavati gave me very specific instructions for you, because she doesn’t trust a Bounded lifeform to ensure that her closest friend stays safe during the coming hours. I, Custos Rani, was deemed ideal for the task of bringing you under our total control, and within this space, we’ll make the required modifications and engineering on your worthless Bounded structure. We might even fuse you to the body of a dead Ira Gilded One to make you a decent enough shell to be a Custos of the great Ubergulden House, for a Bounded man has no place in the higher domains as he is."
BOOM!
Her smile was cold and deadly and filled with a seductive malice that would have shattered the consciousness of any other Bounded lifeform, for her aura was designed to make the mind surrender before the body was even touched.
And yet, Noah, in his boundlessly surging humility, couldn’t help but smile brilliantly in return!
Adversity had come for him once again, and yet his heart blazed with the expectation of what he was about to do to this Gilded doll.
"Fusing me to a corpse?" he murmured, his voice as soft as a summer breeze. "What a fascinatingly shitty idea."
HUUM!