Chapter 5425: I AM! II
Chapter 5425: I AM! II
The letter kept paying out, and the numbers kept climbing!
Noah sat back beneath the blue tree and watched the count settle, and the count was already significant, because the inception of a thing was always richer than its maintenance. A letter spoke for the first time bled existence harder than a letter merely sustained, the way a river cuts its deepest channel in the first flood. The emergence of I AM had been exactly that flood!
|Since the inception of THE First Letter of THE Osmontian Tongue, I AM, you have accrued +50 Osmontian Biomass. This is a substantial early yield, owed to the emergence of the letter itself. A foundational truth costs existence the most to first accept; the surplus from that initial acceptance has precipitated into Biomass at a rate that will moderate, though never stop, as the letter settles into steady assertion.|
|Osmontian Biomass is a granular, spendable resource. It elevates specific facets of an existence in measured increments rather than requiring whole breakthroughs. You direct it precisely. A catalog of current expenditures available to you:|
|THE Estuary Eye, upgrade: 1,000 Osmontian Biomass. Widens the mouth of THE Devouring Estuary, increasing intake rate and refining alignment. Each tier unlocks a fork: a wider draw, a longer reach, or a sharper claim. Forks taken cannot be untaken.|
|Osmontian Source Infinity, upgrade: 100,000 Osmontian Biomass. Directly elevates the concentration and density of your fused authority by a full measured tier, bypassing the slow accumulation of becoming.|
|THE Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian, upgrade: 100,000 Osmontian Biomass. Sharpens and deepens your Intent by a full tier, opening forks toward greater reach, greater bindingness, or greater concealment.|
|Pantheon Weaving and Epiphany: 1,000 Osmontian Biomass. Purchases a genuine insight toward the enaction of a Pantheon, or something of your own to stand in its place. Repeatable. Each purchase yields a true structural understanding rather than a guess.|
|THE Osmontian Tongue, next letter: 10,000 Osmontian Biomass. Funds the transcription of a second letter, building from I AM, accelerating the language’s growth past the pace of unaided contemplation.|
|Foundation refinement: 5,000 Osmontian Biomass each. Elevates any one of your nine Passive Osmontian Principium Foundations by a tier, deepening its passive effect.|
|Body proliferation and reinforcement: 2,000 Osmontian Biomass. Strengthens the integrity and independence of your simultaneous bodies, reducing the strain of acting across so many fronts at once.|
Noah read it all, and felt the deep satisfaction of a system made quantifiable. He had spent some time growing by instinct, by identity, by loot and adversity and giving. Now there was a bit more structure. Fifty was not much against a hundred thousand, but fifty was the first fifty of a river that would never run dry, and the letter would keep precipitating more every instant it asserted him into existence, faster the grander he grew!
He thought of turning a portion of it over toward the Pantheon Epiphany, because that was the cheap and useful thing, the insight he actually needed, but he allowed the points to accumulate toward the larger purchases. There was no rush. The letter did not stop.
But the better part of the yield, he saw, was meant to be shared, and the sharing was its own kind of power.
|Distribution to your people, along the bonds of your Infinite Cause:|
|Osmontian Biomass accrued by those bound to you may be spent to elevate them along a simplified route of your First Infinite Scale, THE Genesis Scale. This route is deliberately accessible. You did not climb so that your people would have to climb the same brutal way. The thresholds are set low, so that even modest Biomass yields meaningful ascension for them.|
|Simplified Genesis Scale, tier one, the equivalent of crossing into Vakochev’s Third Scale of Existence: 100 Osmontian Biomass.|
|Tier two, equivalent to a refined Akashic Civilizational Intent of the lower rarities: 500 Osmontian Biomass.|
|Tier three, equivalent to a being approaching a powerful Triassic Scale proper: 2,000 Osmontian Biomass.|
|Higher tiers scale upward from there, but the early ascension of your people from Bounded weakness to genuine standing is intentionally cheap. A single being need only gather a hundred to begin. The letter generates a share for each of them continuously. Your people will rise simply because you exist, and because you declared, in the first letter of your own Tongue, that they are yours.|
HUUM!
That was the part that made him smile a bit more!
A hundred Biomass to lift one of his people off the bottom of existence. The letter generating shares for all of them, every instant, drawn from Existence that had no vote in the matter. He had spent so long being the one who climbed while everyone he loved stayed fragile beneath him, the one who had to come back and protect and rebuild. And now the bare fact of his existence, written down, would lift them on its own. Henry, Amelia, Seo-yeon, Barbatos, Skoll, Adelaide, all of his people and his peoples, rising by measured increments toward real standing, paid for by the same existence that paid for everything else about him. He did not have to do anything. He only had to keep being himself, and the letter would handle the rest!
He let the catalog fade, content, the numbers tucked away to grow.
And he lay back down across Barbatos’s thighs.
She welcomed him without a word, one hand returning to his hair, the other still idly turning over her own share of Biomass like a woman counting jewels she had decided to enjoy slowly. The illusory screens still hung in the air around them, the war across THE Braneworld grinding on, Citadels falling and Pantheons rising and an entire Observable Existence changing hands. But here, beneath the tree, none of it pressed on him. It was simply something he was doing, on one of his many fronts, the way a man might leave a pot to simmer.
And his fucking pot was gloriously simmering!
The rain of mana came down beautifully across them both, cerulean drops breaking soft against Barbatos’s pale robe and Noah’s upturned face, beading in their dark and blue-touched hair, the slow endless drizzle of the tree he had grown in the domain he had grown.
And above them, patient and self-sustaining and fed by all of existence, the first letter of THE Osmontian Tongue remained.
I AM.
It shone brightly, and it did not flicker, and it would not!
It! Would! Not!