Chapter 5586: Unperceivable! I
Chapter 5586: Unperceivable! I
Noah rose from the threshold of his hall, and looked out over his Realm, and felt the wall come down!
It came down one grain at a time and then all at once, and the two attributes that had pressed against it for so long, his VERITAS and his PONDUS, moved past 10 together, side by side!
He stood very still while it happened as he had to sense everything.
The first change was growth. Actual growth, as parts of his body...grew!
His existence was generating Appendages.
Of course, Appendages were his thing for a little while now. When he cast everything out beneath the falling sky, he had assumed that whole Chapter of his anatomy had gone into the bubbles with the rest. But that assumption, it turned out, had been selling them short.
Because the backbones of the Appendages had never been external at all.
The Pinion Vigil had watched because he was a being who watched. The Estuary Eye had drunk the weavings of past and future because he was a being who refused to be surprised by time. The Hepatarch of the Undying Root had rebuilt him from a single pulse because he was, at his floor, a thing that did not agree to end!
The boons had only ever been scaffolding around instincts that were his from the start, and his existence had quietly preserved those backbones through the casting out, waiting for when they could rebuild them out of proper material.
That time was now, and the material was him!
He felt THE Estuary Eye emerge first, reopening somewhere in the depths of his existence, and it was now an eye of incandescent blue, its currents running with his own light!
THE Pinion Vigil unfurled second! And THE Hepatarch came third, settling back into its deep seat beside the Telos of Existence like an old guard dog lying down next to a young one!
And then, with the three old instincts generated, his existence built something new.
It began across his shoulders and his back, though calling it a location was already a simplification.
He felt a vast structure condense out of his crossed PONDUS, invisible and immense, a yoke of blue gold force settling across shoulders that were suddenly broad enough for it, and when it finished settling, Noah rolled his shoulders once, slowly, and the ground of his Realm flexed beneath him in sympathy.
|Your VERITAS has crossed. VERITAS: 11.|
|Your PONDUS has crossed. PONDUS: 11.|
|Your existence has begun generating PROVENANCE APPENDAGES: anatomy grown from nothing but yourself, in the manner of THE First Lifeforms.|
|Three Appendages of your old existence carried backbones that stemmed truly from you. They have been preserved, and are reborn: THE ESTUARY EYE, THE PINION VIGIL OF THE UNBROKEN GAZE, and THE HEPATARCH OF THE UNDYING ROOT. They are currently transforming as their elevated capabilities are not yet known.|
|A new Provenance Appendage has been generated from the crossing of your PONDUS.|
|THE YOKE OF THE STANDING SKY.|
|It is the appendage of bearing. What cannot be lifted, you may take up: a wound, a curse, a dying Cause, a burning region, A Dimension, an Observable Existence, the weight pressing on another’s existence. What you take up, you carry, and while you carry it, it presses on no one else. What you carry, you may set down where you choose, and what you set down, you may take up again. The limit of what the Yoke may bear is the limit of your PONDUS.|
It was...somewhat a unique one as its usage was not entirely clear!
He had once knelt under a descending sky with his palms against its underside, and pushed it back up. This appendage seemed capable of allowing him to bear such a heaby weight like that freely!
Could he lift an entire Observable Existence or Dimension freely with this? And just lift, or do much more?
But the prompts were not finished, and neither was the crossing, because beneath the new anatomy, he felt a different kind of power rising!
It felt like something...inviolable.
|The crossing of an attribute past 10 grants a PRECEPT.|
|A Precept is an undeniable rule that an existence writes about itself. It is not a technique, and it is not an aim. It is a standing rule, always in force, which the surrounding weave of existence must simply work around. Precepts are not chosen. They are earned: your existence drafts them from how you have actually lived. They arrive as COMMON, RARE, or UNIQUE.|
|Two attributes have crossed simultaneously. In place of two lesser Precepts, your existence has written one law of the highest order.|
|THE PRECEPT OF SOLIPSISM. UNIQUE.|
|You are imperceivable to any lifeform whose VERITAS and PONDUS do not both stand at 10 or above. And what cannot perceive you, cannot harm you: from all such existences, you are immune to harm in every form it takes. In turn, what was imperceivable to you begins now to be perceived.|
...!
What?
Noah stood with that for a long moment!
SOLIPSISM!
He felt it settle over him as an invisible glow of power, sourceless and total, wrapping his existence!
But more than that, and stranger than that, was the last clause on this newly budding Precept. What was imperceivable to you begins now to be perceived.
Because everything around him was growing unfathomably brighter.
It came in gradually as his vision expanded. The blue gold hills stayed the blue gold hills. The river of light stayed the river. But through them, over them, woven among them at every height, he began to see something new: shimmering stellar white rivers of light, flowing all around.
They were everywhere!
They ran through the air of his Realm in slow braided currents, some as fine as thread and some as broad as roads, crossing the hills, pouring soundlessly over the standing stones, threading between the orchards, a whole second geography of white brilliance laid over the first, and it had all been here the entire time.
He had walked the full breadth of his home, first hill to last, at peace, observing everything. And he had seen none of it!
He reached out toward the nearest current, slowly.
And he touched it.
|You have perceived THE ARGENT LOOM.|
|It is an authority present throughout nature, flowing across Dimensions, Observable Existences, and the spaces between: the loomlight from which the higher weave is threaded. It is perceivable only to lifeforms of extremely high Dimensionality. To all others, it does not exist.|
|Those who perceive it use it. Some forge with it: constructs, domains, armaments, and treasures threaded from raw loomlight. Others, who are not Provenance Lifeforms, draw it into their existences and refine themselves upon it, ascending their Dimensionality through what they take in.|
|You are perceiving it for the first time. You are not the first to perceive it, far from it.|
HUUM!
The current ran over his fingers, cool and dense and old!
Something he didn’t even know about flowed here! In his Realm, born moments ago from his own weavings, and the Argent Loom already ran its white roads as though it!
Which meant it likely flowed across THE Infiniverse, through her seas and her thousand realms, past the bubbles of everything he had cast out. It flowed, presumably, through THE Ymnaros, over tbr Observable Existences within it. and over the Golden Expanse and its citadel of millions, past his floating clones....
It had been there through the whole of his existence, and he simply had not known it was there!
He drew his hand back slowly, and looked out across his Realm at the white rivers threading through everything.
With this new sight, what else was flowing, right now, through the places he thought he knew?
And if one authority this vast had been running invisibly through his whole life, right before him, close enough to touch...
What things existed out there, right before him, that he still could not see?