Chapter 5570: Four Numbers! III
Chapter 5570: Four Numbers! III
Noah stood in the settling winds with the Status Panel still hanging in his sight, and he read it again.
|VERITAS: 10|
|PROVENANCE: 1(???)|
|POTENTIA: INFINITE|
|PONDUS: 5|
Four numbers. His whole existence, broken down by his own existence, into four numbers!
He wanted to understand them properly before he moved another step. So he raised his eyes across the dark sand, and he gazed at Anaximander.
HUUM!
The moment his attention truly settled on the scholar, his new sight went to work. The weavings of Anaximander’s existence rose into view, dense and strange and layered with things that should not have been there, and his obsidian singularity pupils drank them in as Ruination translated everything into the one System of Measurement that belonged to Noah alone!
|STATUS PANEL: ANAXIMANDER|
|VERITAS: 3|
|PROVENANCE: 0|
|POTENTIA: UNDEFINED|
|PONDUS: 1|
"..."
Noah went still, and his analysis began.
VERITAS 3!
This was Anaximander. The man whose identity made existence conform! Noah almost wanted to say this number may be low, but he had just advanced himself as he didnt know how high he was compared to more...normal lifeforms.
But Noah remembered what was inside Anaximander now. The Ancestral Voice, suppressed but present. Failed candidates, the remnants of collapsed existences, all of them packed into one body and held down by one will.
The panel was not measuring Anaximander the man. It was measuring everything currently answering to that name, and most of what answered to that name right now was not him. A muddy mixing of many selves, weighed as one. Of course the number came out low when Anaximander was so unique!
Which meant VERITAS as a measure...could fall. It could be diluted by what a being carried. And if it could fall, then it could climb, and Noah did not for one moment assume that his own 10 sat at any ceiling!
The numbers would go higher. He could feel it in the hum! A 10 today was a floor he happened to be standing on, nothing more.
He then thought about Anaximander’s Provenance.
That one required no theory at all!
Anaximander generated nothing of his own. Neither did anyone else Noah had ever met. As for the Undefined potential of Anaximander...this continued to be his own mystery!
Noah turned his sight inward, and laid his own four numbers beside his conclusions.
VERITAS was how true he was to himself, and it could climb without limit.
PROVENANCE was how much of himself he generated, and only he could generate it.
POTENTIA was what he could still become, and his read INFINITE.
PONDUS was what he could bear without breaking, and bearing more was a matter of becoming more!
And every one of them pointed the same direction. Not outward, toward treasures and grades and the frameworks of ancient beings. Inward, toward how he lived.
His eyes opened fully, and he his voice boomed out because he felt like it!
"If I live gloriously, tyrannically, Quintessentially... I will advance, as I will be living truly as myself. My VERITAS increases... so will my PROVENANCE, and PONDUS, and everything else follows. Based on my actions, I will generate more Provenance. I will be more true, and my immensity will increase as external authority... won’t do anything to me! External treasures won’t do anything to me! Only that which I generate myself, from my own existence!"
HUUM!
The singularity in his chest hummed grandly at the declaration, and the obsidian sand for miles trembled once and went still!
That which he generated from his own existence.
His mind went automatically to THE Tide That Owes Nothing.
It sat among his Nine Foundations, and the Nine Foundations had survived the casting out because they were fusions nobody had conceived before him, carved from his own thinking. And the Tide’s whole nature was generation through his actions.
If anything else in what remained of him could be considered truly from him, could generate returns that fed VERITAS and PROVENANCE both, it may be the Tide. One more engine to further accelerate his progression, waiting to be tested against his new existence!
But then his eyes flickered.
Because he thought about Mana.
He thought about Infinity!
Both of them gone from him now, resting in THE Infiniverse with everything else he had set down, and their absence raised the question his existence had already answered and not explained. His POTENTIA was INFINITE. But how could he use his potential?
He felt the hum of Provenance inside him, steady and vast, and the answer it gave was not words. It was certainty. He would not be limited when it came to expressing his power. The concepts he had cast out were external things, and external things had external limits, but Provenance generated. Whatever he needed, he would not borrow it back.
He would learn to express and generate his own type of mana!
His, from nothing but himself, shaped by no one’s framework. The thought opened outward into a hundred others, arts and expressions and possibilities stacking up behind his eyes, and he breathed once and set them all aside.
He would be able to understand many things about himself. There would be time for all of it!
But for now, he had to grasp that unique treasure lying in the open for him before anymore accidents occured.
Noah breathed in.
He took another step.
And existence no longer creaked around him.
The sand held flat under his foot. The air stood calm. His weight moved with him instead of ahead of him, and Noah smiled and nodded to himself.
Then, in an instant, he was in front of the obelisk.
The golden pillar rose above him with its wrapping of obsidian gold light peeled away, and THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity hung there in the open, rows of tubular gold beads and a teardrop fringe and a front plate that no eyes in THE Ymnaros had ever read, holding the thing upon it that only his transformed sight could see. The treasure that had eluded many across the ages, with nothing left standing between it and his hand!
Anaximander stood close by, steadier than before, though the cold ancient light was gone from his eyes and the sadness was not.
Noah looked at him first.
"Are you feeling okay?"
Anaximander smiled wryly.
"I have to digest a number of old things, and get myself back to my baseline. I should be okay." He tipped his head toward the hanging gold. "Go ahead, and see what this whole thing has been about. The thing that even ancient lifeforms became so greedy about."
Noah nodded.
And he reached out!