Chapter 5571: Remnant!
Chapter 5571: Remnant!
There are beings who reach for the treasures of the ages with trembling reverence, and there are beings who reach for them the way a man reaches for his coat. Noah belonged to the second kind!
His fingers closed around THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity as he breathed out.
"I have felt young all this time...." His thumb moved slowly along the gold. "And today, for the first time, I can almost say I feel old. As if I have passed a significant milestone."
He turned the collar slightly in his grip.
"And just as I get that feeling. Just as I settle into it, start to enjoy it, maybe. I come across something so ridiculously old that I almost feel young again."
He gave a small, unhurried smile.
"That is what this Collar is."
...!
Anaximander listened closely, and as the words settled, his expression gradually normalized, as his curiosity won out.
Noah said all of this because of what he had felt at the first instant of contact. His Provenance Essence, that single singularity seated in his existence, had released a heavy, droning hum the moment his hands came against the gold, and through that hum he affirmed something the legends of THE Ymnaros had never once suspected.
The collar was made of bones.
HUUM!
Then the collar asked its question!
An invisible wavelength erupted from it, soundless and total, and Noah’s hand trembled against the gold, almost as if the item were asking him, plainly and without malice, whether he could even hold it!
And his Provenance Essence answered tyrannically.
It pulsed within him, once, and roared through the whole of his being with an answer that required no thought at all.
Fuck I can!
BOOM!
A fiendish, silent aura unfurled across the whole area, pressing outward through the dark sands in a wave that made the domain itself sit very still, and the trembling in his hand stopped!
Beside him, Anaximander, a man who had spent his entire long life loving nothing so much as exploring and understanding and grasping new things, leaned in.
"What is it, exactly?"
Noah closed his eyes.
And for the first time, truly, he began utilizing Provenance Essence.
The blue glow within him pulsed, and pulsed again, finding a rhythm, and the rhythm resonated with the collar in his hands. His own essence, generated from nothing but himself, reached into a thing older than every framework in existence and asked it what it was, and information began to feed back into his existence, direct and wordless, his to understand because he was the one generating the understanding.
Even he was astonished at what came back.
He confirmed it twice before he spoke.
"Existence is unfathomably old, and unfathomably vast," Noah said, eyes still closed. "Older than any Scales. Older than the Dimensions the Scales were built to measure. Older than every Tongue and Law and Source that beings like us spend our short, ambitious lives collecting. And at the very beginning of all that vastness, before any of it had names, there lived THE First Lifeforms. THE Provenance Lifeforms."
His voice slowed, giving each piece its full weight.
"They lived grandly. They lived with unfathomable power, the kind that was never granted and never borrowed, because there was nothing yet to borrow from. And this collar...." His hands tightened slightly on the gold.
"This collar stems from the chest bones of a Provenance Lifeform. It has been deemed a Remnant Existential Treasure. But... It is, and it isn’t. It is simply the cluster of bones of an extremely terrifying lifeform, put together. And that alone is enough to make it a treasure. And also, somehow, not."
...!
Noah sighed as he finished, and Anaximander came closer to look at the thing, his eyes moving across the tubular beads and the teardrop fringe as though rereading a book that had just changed languages.
Then the scholar shook his head.
"All my life, I ask the question of where things come from. Where things began. I want to understand." He gestured at the collar, at the obelisk, at the hanging landmass above them, at everything.
"But it is like existence does not want to be understood. It is frustrating." A pause, and the smallest wry lift at the corner of his mouth.
"Even though I will never stop asking."
Noah smiled at these words.
Then he turned his focus back to the terrifying tool in his hands, because he knew, as of this moment, that he had only grasped an initial understanding of it. The bones of a Provenance Lifeform were too unique to be read in one resonance. And there was something heavy within the collar, something he could almost sense at the edge of the feedback, close enough to know it was there and far enough to have no shape. He needed to spend just a bit more time with it, and...
HUUM!
At such a time.
The domain began to shake and tumble.
Above them, the skies tore open as if they were pages, ripped crudely along seams no sky should have, and the color of blood permeated everything, drowning the obelisk light in red!
What came through the torn skies was horrific.
Rivers of corpses gushed out of the wounds in the sky.
Rivers. Of corpses! Superpowered Lifeforms, the exemplifying kind, the kind that carried the weight of Observable Existences in their bare bodies, now tangled dead in their thousands and pouring downward in thick red torrents, limbs and faces surfacing and sinking in the flow, and the sound of it arriving was a wet, rolling thunder that this domain, which had held silence since before the Scales, had never once been asked to hold.
And riding on these rivers of corpses came Infinite Lifeforms.
Dozens of them, gliding down the dead as though the dead were a road, and all of them followed behind one figure at the forefront. A red robed entity whose gaze was extremely old and extremely callous, the gaze of something that had been looking at things like this, and arranging things like this, for longer than most Dimensions had existed.
Noah and Anaximander raised their heads to see all of it.
The river of corpses smashed into the sands!
BOOM!
Red sprayed across obsidian. The dead settled in heaps and drifts. And the old lifeform at the very forefront came to a leisurely stop in the air, and looked, first, at the object in Noah’s hands.
Then at Noah himself.
He blinked, incredulously.
And then he laughed.
"You cannot possibly be serious." The laugh rolled out over the corpses, genuinely entertained. "Really? How could you have possibly arrived here, and gotten swept up in this?"
BOOM!