Chapter 5761: Grand!

Noah opened his eyes upon himself!

|THE True Human Emperor / THE Human Dreamer|

|VERITAS: 500|

|PROVENANCE: 500|

|POTENTIA: INFINITE|

|PONDUS: 500|

|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 500|

|Provenances: THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer (native, generated), THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign (claimed).|

|Infinity: DIALETHEIC INFINITY. A truth that is also its opposite; finite and infinite at once.|

|Existential Root: THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin. A Unique Existential Root of Immensity. A clear determination has not been made on whether it is Conceptual or Physical. |

He looked at the numbers for a while, and then he smiled. But...was his Root not a Conceptual one?

"..."

He only hung on this for a moment before he moved to the numbers.

Five hundred! Across the board, save for the Potentia that had always been Infinite and always would be. He had walked into that darkness carrying attributes in the two hundreds and walked out with five hundred, and the jump alone should have staggered him.

It did not, quite, because some part of him beneath the numbers already knew he was no longer the thing that had gone into the dark. The count was only existence catching up to a fact he had felt in his weavings the moment he reformed.

He turned the panel over. Two Provenances threading through him now, the Dreamer’s warm and his own, the Immense Sovereign’s cold and borrowed. His Infinity, which had stopped being merely endless and become Dialetheic, true in two directions at once. And under all of it, turning and pulsing and refusing to stop, the Root.

He reached in and tapped THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin, and it answered him, and more of it opened.

|THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin: preliminary functions.|

|TONIC DIMENSIONAL HYPERTROPHY (passive growth without effort).|

|Through the Root, your existence behaves as an embryonic system undergoing spontaneous expansion. It continuously secretes new layers of dimensional thickness. It increases the mass of individual quarks without the ingeston of any foreign energy. It raises your baseline Provenance, Veritas, and Pondus through metabolic background alone. Approximate range: an increase of 30 to 50 or more across all attributes per day, scaling upward as the Root grows. The range depends upon your state. Slumbering or passive, you grow at the floor. Actively moving to influence existence, you grow at the ceiling. You may grow without effort. But existence remains full of adversity, and the fastest climb is still to meet adversity and expand your knowledge.|

...!

Noah read that twice, and then he laughed!

He could sit still and grow. He could lie down in the snow and slumber for an age and do absolutely nothing, and he would rise regardless, thirty to fifty points a day welling up out of him without a single act of will, and more than that as the Root deepened.

He read on.

|THE PREVENTION OF CAUSAL LUTEOLYSIS (inhibition of structural decay).|

|An existence that ceases to fight, cultivate, or refine itself normally suffers structural atrophy, bleeding density back into existential entropy. Your Root constantly pulses to reject this. Your foundation will never regress, never degrade, and never leak authority back into the surrounding existence, no matter how many epochs you spend motionless.|

|CAUSAL INFORMATIONAL ANGIOGENESIS.|

|Your Root passively communicates with the bodies of existence around you and draws information from them. It may be prompted to reach as far as your existence can bear, to receive more.|

...!

So he would grow, and never rot, and drink the knowledge of wherever he stood without asking. A hard thing not to feel pleased about!

He let himself feel pleased about it for exactly a moment, and then he made himself set the pleasure down.

His power was grand, and it was terrifying, and he had genuinely not expected the leap to be this large. But then, he had not done this alone. Vakochev had handed him a gateway and called it an adversity. A single unit of the hormone that grew titans, pressed into his hands with a warning and a shrug, and Noah had done the only thing he had ever known how to do with adversity, which was to build something of his own out of it.

The Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin had never become his power. It had become fuel, folded down into a Root that was entirely his make.

Whether he would have formed the Root at all in so short a span without the favor, he could not say. Perhaps in a month or year. And looking now at the weavings of time in the strange new way his existence perceived them, he found he could no longer see Vakochev as a chance encounter.

The Fallen Hero had been a piece of a puzzle, and so had Noah, the hand that saved the a part of him that rose and cleaved the Train and killed an Immense One. He saved a piece of Vakochev, and it led to all this!

But the power changed everything about how he could move.

He held a Root of Immensity. And it was, for now, exactly that, and no more. A root. A seed cracked open, not a tree. It had to grow, endlessly, until it bloomed into something Immense, and until then he was a very strong sapling in a forest full of things that ate saplings.

So caution. He told himself, because the feeling underneath it did not want to hear it.

The feeling was invincibility!

It flooded his whole newborn existence, above everything else, an absolute conviction that he could do anything.

Lucy had named it to his face not long ago.

In the beginning, all of us feel this way. The sense of having finally seen the whole shape of things. He felt so grand and so untouchable that his mind was already racing ahead of his good sense, wanting to hunt down every vessel of THE Sealed One across all of time and space at once, wanting to fling his existence after the Immense Ones who had chased Vakochev into the dark, wanting to do a dozen mad and glorious things and feeling, in the weavings of his new Root, that he could do every one of them without a shred of worry.

He breathed in. He paused. He held himself still.

His people were safe. He was safe. His empire was sealed in a space that answered to no one but him. So why go kicking over stones the moment he had learned to walk again, before he had digested a single thing about what he now was?

He could hunt the truth of The Long Night without lighting a war he was not yet built to survive. Because he could feel what his Root allowed, and in the same breath he could feel where it stopped.

He counted himself lucky, honestly. The Immense Ones gathered here had never once looked twice at him, their whole attention on themselves and then on Vakochev, and a masked eye at the rim had been beneath their concern.

But a few more minutes of any one of those gazes settling on him would have made it clear enough that he was not one of them. That he was something else, wearing the shape of a harmless watcher. He had survived on being small. He would keep being small a little longer.

So. For now...

Noah smiled, and raised his hand, and countless illusory pages flickered off of him and drifted through the falling snow.

"I could find and grasp rare Gu easily now," he murmured, "and see whether that path has anything in store for me. And when it comes to Atlas and Time..."

His eyes shone.

Because after his cessation and his reforging, he had chosen a few places across existence for his newborn self to occupy at once, and Atlas’s Elsedimension of shattered hours was one of them.

Even now a part of him stood among the broken clocks and the numbered meteorites, and he turned that attention there, and he compared. The Existential Conduits that threaded those frozen hours. The Conduit Lifeforms drifting through them. He set them against what he saw here, in the veins of existence above the sundered Train, and read the differences between them, and learned.

And then his gaze settled on the illusory ring he had worn all this while. The ring that was Atlas.

He could see it clearly now! For the first time, Noah could see the ring for exactly what it was!