Chapter 5551: A Challenge!
Chapter 5551: A Challenge!
His obsidian flames guttered low and ragged around a frame that had taken real damage. The Blank Caudal dragged behind him through the ochre dust, white hair matted dark, and along his left side ran a wound that had gone all the way to something structural, a splitting seam where one of the Cenozoic ones had gotten an Intent into him before dying badly for the privilege.
Calcified stones lay in ridges across the whole broken domain. The air was thick with the released corpses of nine ruptured Gu, ages of stolen bearing hanging in the red light with nowhere left to go, and beneath his feet the strata ran down through crushed pyramid stone and petrified bone into layers of older ruin still!
He breathed!
And behind his ribs, and behind him, and somehow also very far away, the statue spoke.
|Two hundred and six.|
The ancient voice arrived from the direction time came from, calm and vast as it always was, and THE Creature said nothing, because two hundred and six was not a thousand.
Then the statue did something it had never done.
It smiled.
He felt it happen inside himself, the seated colossus of worn gray stone shifting its faceless face into an expression, and it was not the serene ancient nonchalance he had carried since the thing first came to him. It was brutal. It was the smile of something that had been watching a fight go on too long and had decided, quite suddenly, that it was bored.
|You are not learning.Two hundred and six. At this rate the trial completes, and you will have learned nothing from it that you did not already know when you began. You are merely doing what you are good at, thoroughly, for a long time.|
"...!"
|Existence did not seat this trial in you to watch you excel at something you have already mastered.| The statue’s voice deepened, and the whole ruined district seemed to lean in around it.
|A trial that only measures is a ledger. A trial that changes the one measured is a trial. So Existence will up the stakes.|
THE Creature straightened out of his heaving, obsidian flames pulling in tight around the split in his side.
"Explain."
|There is a reason the Farms of this Dimension are so rich.|
The gray of the statue’s voice shifted, and images came with it now, pressed into him rather than shown: the pyramids, the chained lines, the Gu at every peak, and beneath all of it something else, something enormous and buried and slow.
|The masters did not discover this art. They inherited the conditions for it. Beneath the Fields, deep in the oldest strata of THE Ghor-Vazhal, a Primeval Lifeform is dying. It has been dying for ages. Its lifeline was cut by a Progeny of Those Who Remain, and what was cut did not sever cleanly, and so it has been bleeding out across an entire Dimension ever since.|
"...!"
|The sacrifices feed it. The offerings feed it. Every life that climbs those steps and enters a Gu is rendered down, and the masters take their profit, and what they do not take drains downward through the strata into the thing beneath, which cannot live and cannot finish dying and so simply drinks, age after age. Trillions of lives. Not spent on greed alone. Spent on keeping a corpse from becoming a corpse.|
THE Creature went very still.
The whole architecture of the place reorganized itself in his understanding as the words landed. He had been razing districts. He had been tearing the roofs off a house without once asking what the house was built on. Every pyramid he broke, every Gu he ruptured, every master he put his heel through, and beneath all of it the actual engine had gone on drinking, patient and enormous and entirely untouched by anything he had done.
|Collapse it, and the Farms die with it. Not one district. All of them. The reason this Dimension eats will be gone, and what remains will only be beings who are used to eating, which is a far smaller problem and one that largely solves itself.|
"What...is the cost of this one?" THE Creature said.
The brutal smile came back into the ancient stone.
|One hour.|
"...!"
|Find it, and collapse it, within one hour of this moment. It is buried in the deepest strata of a Dimension that has no measured end, and it is guarded, and you have already been bled today. That is the point. Existence is not interested in whether you can carry a weight. It knows you can carry. It wishes to see whether you can commit and persevere.|
"And what is offered?"
The statue was quiet for a moment, and when it answered, something in the ancient voice changed.
|What is offered is not power.|
"...!"
The stone eyes burned in the far dark of him. |Succeed, and you receive the first portion of the inheritance of the previous bearer. What it is, I will not say, because I am not permitted to say, and because you would not understand it before you hold it.|
THE Creature’s flames rose.
The previous bearer!
His eyes were immensely cold as he only nodded
"I accept," he said.
He did not take long about it!
And the statue smiled brutally a second time as if it had attained something, as if its words were not done, and it was now finishing!
|One hour. And if you fail, you will willfully give control of ten percent of yourself to Existence as a cost.|
...!
A tenth of his Existence itself, the whole of what he was, handed over willingly to this thing!
THE Creature remained entirely unfettered.
His flames steadied. The wound in his side kept splitting and he let it. He looked out across the shattered ninth district, across the ridges of calcified stones and pyramids, out toward a butcher-red horizon that went on past any counting, and he understood exactly what he needed to do!
One hour.
To find a dying Primeval One buried in the deepest strata of an endlessly vast Dimension, a Dimension crawling with horrid True Lifeforms who by now all knew precisely what he was and what he had been doing to them for nine domains running, and to reach it, and to break the thing that an entire civilization of monsters had spent ages feeding.
He rolled his shoulders once. The Blank Caudal lifted out of the dust behind him, white and gold and patient.
"Then let us begin," THE Creature said.
And he shot downward into the deeper strata of this Dimension!
...!