Chapter 5566: Ignorance! I
Chapter 5566: Ignorance! I
The singularity rose with him!
That was the first thing Noah understood about it, kneeling in his own blood with the weight of a sky on his back. It did not sit inside him the way the ocean had sat, or press outward the way Intent had pressed. It rose as he rose, moved as he moved, and it was, without any close competition, the most calm and stable thing he had ever felt.
Internally, it was blinding. A point of incandescent blue burning in the emptied dark of him, bright past looking at directly!
Externally, it was nothing. Not one glimmer of aura left his body. Not one wave of anything crossed his skin. The instruments of existence, had any been pointed at him, would have found a bleeding human kneeling in sand.
And the moment it bloomed fully, what arrived with it was not power!
HUUM!
It was capability. Power was a quantity, and he had held quantities before, oceans of them, and this was not that. This was the wordless knowledge that he was capable. It generated from him completely. It had no upstream. It was his.
His Provenance!
’PROVENANCE!’
...!
And then, without one glimmer of authority leaking from anywhere on his body, Noah began to rise.
It was the strangest sensation of his entire existence, and he had died once, so the competition was real. The weight above him did not lessen. Nothing about the stone changed at all. His body simply decided, joint by joint, that it could handle it, the way a body decides it can stand after illness, not through any surge of force but through a quiet reassessment of what was possible, and the reassessment kept arriving, and he kept rising!
His back straightened beneath the load!
One knee left the sand. Then the other!
The stone that had crushed Primeval Ones rode on his back, and then, slowly and deliberately, he brought it up onto his two raised hands, and stood beneath it holding the underside of a sky at arm’s length while his blood dried on his face.
Then one hand.
Then his fingers!
And then Noah pushed up, once, and the stone rose!
HUUUM!
It left his fingertips and climbed, the whole colossal landmass of obsidian gold ascending back into the heavens where it had hung, and it settled there and did not come down again, and across the entire domain the pressure released like a held breath finally let go!
The Ancestral Voice said nothing.
For the first time since the doorway, the voice that had narrated, insulted, mourned, and confessed through every step of this road had no words at all, and the silence stretched across the black sands, and Noah stood in the middle of it, small and bleeding and empty of everything, beneath a sky he had just put back.
Obsidian gold light filled the heavens.
It poured off the risen stone and down through the air and across the dunes, the whole domain igniting with it, and Noah closed his eyes and simply let himself feel.
The singularity hummed.
A constant, heavy hum, new and ancient at once, resonating out from the blue point through every layer of what remained of him, and where the resonance passed, things began to change!
He felt it at the smallest scale first, in the makeup of his cells, in the very structure of his atoms, the fine architecture of a human body beginning to break down and transform under a frequency that belonged to nothing else in existence.
And from the pores of his skin, filth began to leak.
Obsidian-gray sludge, thick and dark, welling up and running off him in slow rivulets, and Noah understood what he was seeing without anything explaining it. His Foundations, perfect across the Depths. His Physiology, rebuilt from Primeval Cells. Everything he had held and refined and elevated across the whole climb, and all of it, this entire time, had carried defects in it!
Murky filth folded into the joints of even his finest work, impurities so deep in the making that no elevation had ever reached them, because every elevation had been performed with borrowed instruments, and borrowed instruments left their fingerprints.
The Provenance hummed, and his existence expelled everything unworthy of it.
There were no prompts.
No analysis followed, and nothing anywhere was explaining to him what was happening!
It was just him. He was the one figuring it out, understanding it as it occurred, naming it as it moved, and it came to him that this was not an absence of the prompts.
This was what the prompts had been imitating all along.
And as his existence transformed, as the hum deepened and the filth ran, Noah felt an answering hum from far ahead.
He opened his eyes, and they wept gray filth like the rest of him, and he looked across the sands.
THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity.
It hung around the golden obelisk in the distance, wrapped in its sphere of impenetrable light, and it was humming back at him, and with his transforming eyes it looked entirely different than it had looked an hour ago.
He could see something on it now. Something that had been there the whole time, invisible to every eye that had ever looked at it, and Noah stared across the distance at what the collar actually was and understood, in a single cold drop of clarity, that not even the people of THE Ymnaros knew what was truly here!
Not even, perhaps, the being that had failed twice to take it.
And as he watched, the protective barrier around the obelisk began to disappear.
The sphere of obsidian gold light thinned, and paled, and came apart from the top down, dissolving the way the doorway light had dissolved, because the trial was passed and the way was open, and the collar hung in the clearing air with nothing between it and the sands at all.
|You are exceptional.|
The Ancestral Voice boomed across the domain.
And Noah’s eyes flashed, because the voice had not come from everywhere.
It had come from ahead.
Far in the distance, at the base of the golden obelisk, inches from the hanging collar, in a space where only Noah should have been able to stand, a figure had appeared.
Tousled hair. White robes. Hands no longer folded behind his back.
Anaximander.
His mild face was raised toward the collar, and his eyes were glazed with a cold and ancient light that had never once belonged to the scholar, and when the mouth moved, the voice that came out of it was the one that had narrated this entire road.
|You are exceptional. But I...|
|I have lived for too long to stand idly by.|
|I thank you for opening the door. I will do the rest from here.|
BOOM!