Chapter 5242: THE Source Lands! I
Chapter 5242: THE Source Lands! I
A glorious opportunity.
That was the framing Evangelina had used, and Noah did not find it dishonest. The framing just had context around it that she had not emphasized. Ealdor Gilded Ones had stopped entering because the risk to their lives was unacceptable. Many prior entrants had died. By any honest accounting, the Wall was a place where the most powerful beings in the current arrangement of existence had encountered a ceiling on what their power could protect them from.
He was excited!
Not despite the danger. Because of it. Because challenge and risk and adversity compressed progression the way nothing else did, and an unknown space where Ealdor Gilded Ones refused to go was precisely the kind of danger that produced the kind of growth he could not manufacture through any other means. He wanted it to be as dangerous as possible.
And he had THE Infinite Tongue. He had two integrated Prime Causes. He had THE Infinite Cause, which was not a derived expression of THE First Cause but something adjacent to it in a way he had not fully mapped yet.
He thought about THE Creature, who had grasped THE Primordial Source from the lower Observable Existence without transforming into a different category of lifeform, operating through his rebuilt foundations, and who had killed a Gilded One with those tools.
Whatever THE Creature held now was not a small thing.
Infinity and THE Primordial Source together.
If Noah could get his hands on both, the question of what he would be capable of did not have a clean answer.
He was still thinking about this when he became aware that Adelheid’s Infinity, which flowed through her constantly from their bond, was carrying something different in its current. Not words. Something beneath words, a tension in the substrate of what she was generating, slight enough that most beings in his position would not have felt it.
He sent a small mental message through the connection.
’Hey. Don’t worry too much. With me here, I will take care of you.’
He said it calmly. The way a person stated a fact they had no particular investment in debating.
Adelheid did not turn around. But he saw the line of her shoulders shift by a fraction, and he saw the edge of a small smile at the corner of her profile before she composed it back into the regal neutrality she had been maintaining since they left the vessel.
She rolled her eyes!
Ahead of them, the Maharanis delegation had moved into position as well. Arjun floated at their center, unhurried, carrying himself with the specific composure of someone for whom this was simply the next item on a long agenda of grand things. Behind him, a Custodes with bright sparkling bearing and green hair stood close, her power at full Silurian Paleozoic baseline, two additional Silurian Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones flanking the pair.
Noah looked across both groups.
Objectively, he was the weakest being standing before the Wall. Every other person here outclassed him by tiers.
He thought about how many of them would survive the filtering. And of those who survived the filtering, how many would survive what came after.
The math became more interesting from that angle.
The Custodes behind Arjun turned her head toward him.
"Luxuria shell." Her voice carried the bored certainty of someone not expecting pushback. "Look ahead and stop staring at greatness. Some men are too great to be looked at by lesser men."
...!
Noah’s eyes turned sharp.
He smiled.
By this point in his existence, smack talk from dumb extras produced approximately one reaction, which was patience. Not patience out of restraint. Patience because extras who inserted themselves into a story they did not understand tended to encounter consequences that arrived without him having to manufacture them. Through existence or through his hands. Either way was fine.
He did not reply.
He turned his gaze fully and deliberately toward Arjun and held it there, the exact gesture the Custodes had told him not to make, performed with the serene composure of a being who had heard the instruction and found it interesting rather than binding.
The Maharanis group frowned.
He was the only Luxuria standing in a formation of Superbius and Ira, wearing features in an environment where every other being present was operating at tiers that dwarfed his own, and he was holding eye contact with a Silurian Paleozoic Royal Gilded One with four Prime Cause integrations as though the framing of the situation had simply not occurred to him.
Adelheid’s hand closed around his as she pulled him toward the Wall without waiting for whatever the next moment would have produced, turning her head toward Evangelina as she moved.
"We simply need to touch it to begin the process?"
Evangelina’s face was taut. "Yes. A sliver of your existence will remain here. We will hold it and wait for any information you can send back."
Adelheid did not wait.
She brought her free hand to the Wall and pulled Noah alongside her, and he put his hand against the obsidian-gold surface.
WAP!
Both of them were gone.
Where Adelheid had stood, a golden river of light remained, pulsing with her aura, the sliver of her existence that the Wall had retained as Evangelina had described. It breathed slowly in the domain’s inky dark.
Where Noah had stood, nothing remained.
No river. No pulse. No sliver.
The space was simply empty!
Evangelina and the Ubergulden delegation stared at the empty space with the heavy expressions of beings running calculations they did not want to reach the conclusions of.
Behind them, Sororis Prima Pritta laughed.
The laugh was genuine and carried no attempt at discretion.
"He didn’t even leave behind a sliver?" She looked at the empty space with the delighted expression of someone receiving information that confirmed a prior opinion. "Was that Luxuria scorched out of existence at entry? And now an Ubergulden walks in there alone without a Custodes?" Another laugh, shorter, sharper. "Why would you even bring a Luxuria here? They’re only good to fuck and break, and nobody’s fucking here so what exactly did you expect? Haha."
...!
Ubergulden Dietrich’s expression said several things simultaneously and none of them aloud.
He looked at the empty space where Noah had been standing. He looked at the golden river that was all that remained of his sister.
He moved toward the Wall.
The other Silurian Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones followed his lead, each one approaching the obsidian-gold surface with the composure of beings who had committed to their descent and were executing the commitment without allowing the empty space where Noah’s sliver should have been to produce further hesitation.
One by one they touched the Wall.
One by one the domain grew quieter.
The golden rivers of their retained existence slivers accumulated along the space before the Wall like a luminous tide of those who had gone somewhere that only their echo remained behind from, each one pulsing with the specific aura of the being it had been left by.
And where Noah had stood, the space remained empty and untroubled, carrying no echo at all!