Chapter 5766: Legacy! III

<THE True Human Emperor>

Poona led him up through the mountain as they crossed many intricate Existential Conduits.

Now, even as they moved, he continued to collect information as he didn’t take Poona’s words as law. He knew very well how in existence, nobody did anything without reason. Everybody was selfish! Even Atlas had his aims.

So he simply had to grasp what the aims of Poona and this Legacy were, even if they didn’t mean him harm.

After going deeper into the Elsedimension Mountain filled with Existential Conduits leading the way...

Noah felt a whole sealed reality shaped into the form of a peak open up, Existential Conduits running through it like veins of light through stone, and at its heart, in a great open hall, waited the thing that ruled it.

It was...an octopus.

Noah stopped where he floated and simply looked.

A vast titan of dark coiling flesh sat at the center of the hall, tentacles moving through the drifting air with unhurried precision, and around it wound slow rivers of white and gold, currents of pure authority threading between islands of nothing.

Whole Dimensions floated in the space above it like lanterns. Snow drifted down through all of it, impossible and constant. And upon what passed for the creature’s face perched a pair of small, neat spectacles, absurd against its enormity, catching the gold of the rivers.

This would be the one Poona said was...Sir Moriarty?

Before it lay the corpse of an Immense One!

It was splayed and pinned in the drifting air, opened and parted and studied, and Moriarty’s tentacles worked through it calmly.

"Sir Moriarty," Poona said. "This time I reached in time and brought back another Root for the Legacy. This earns me some points, yes? The Fiend and another were ready to sniff him up..."

The octopus set down the thread of authority he was holding.

He turned, and the small spectacles turned with him as his eyes settled upon Noah with undisguised interest.

"So you did. Come in. Gaze upon everything as I am sure it must seem odd and interesting..." Moriarty said!

Noah stood in the drifting snow of the hall and looked at the octopus. There was power, first, an ancient and terrible depth of it that Noah could not find the bottom of. Question marks upon question marks!

"You are wary," Moriarty said, watching him. "

This is good. Wary is how the young survive long enough to become old."

He waved a tentacle, and a thread of the white-gold river coiled up and offered itself as a seat, which Noah declined.

"Let me guess. You do not trust where you are, you do not know what I or others want, and you are even suspicious we dragged you here to eat you as well. Am I close?"

"You are... close." Noah said.

"Hmm."

Moriarty adjusted his spectacles with a delicate curl of one tentacle. "So let me spare you the suspense. This is THE Acharya of Immensity, Lucy’s Legacy. These are the Empyros Immense Legacy Mountains. Yes, this is a real sanctuary. No, there is no catch you have not already guessed. Yes, some of the beings here are Immense Ones, and no, they will not eat you, because Lucy built this place with laws in its very structure and even the greediest thing here honors them, partly out of respect and partly because breaking them is a great deal more painful than they would like."

Noah listened intently!

"This is where the ones who care about legacy bring the young to grow. It has been here for a long time."

He turned one bright eye fully upon Noah then.

"So. Since we are getting to know one another. What kind of Root did you form?"

It was asked lightly, but it was heavy!

And Noah did not have an answer. His own weavings could not sort him into either box.

He deflected.

"I have only just formed it," Noah said. "I am still learning what it is."

It was somewhat true.

"Fair enough," he said mildly. "A Root is a private thing when it is new, and you would be a fool to unwrap yours in front of a stranger. Poona, head back for now. I will finish the introductions with The Stranger."

...!

"Okay!" Poona didn’t delay as she waved her hands and disappeared!

Sir Moriarty set his tools down and fully looked at Noah as with just the two of them here and a corpse of an Immense One behind, the air became heavy!

"There are two kinds of Root in all of existence," Moriarty said. "Only two. Every awakened Lifeform you will ever meet is one or the other."

He drifted on. "The first is the Conceptual Root. A Root of idea. Of law, of narrative, of dream, of pure concept. It grows into what we call an Empyros Immense Lifeform, and an Empyros does not fight Existence as much as rewrite it. The Conceptual path is grand, subtle, and terrifying in the way a well-written sentence is terrifying, if you understand what a well-written sentence can do."

"The other." Moriarty’s spectacles caught the light. "The Physical Root. A Root of body, of flesh, of appetite, of raw dimensional mass and force. It grows into a Fiend Immense Lifeform. And a Fiend does not rewrite Existence A Fiend simply is larger than Existence’s ability to argue with it. THE SLEEPLESS FIEND you just came across is exactly what his name says he is. A Fiend of the Physical path, grown vast. He is a decently powerful one that is nigh unkillable..."

Noah’s eyes shone brightly!

"This is why the paths matter," the octopus went on. "It is not a category. It is life and death."

Noah could not say for certain which he was!

Everything about him said Conceptual. He was a Dreamer. An author. A thing that had spent its existence imposing narratives, dreaming realities true, bending stories to his will, all of it concept, concept, concept.

But his Root had refused to say so!

He thought of his Infinity, the thing at the root of his Root. Dialetheic. A truth that is also its opposite. Finite and infinite at once, holding two contradictory things and being true in both without choosing.

What would a Root born of that principle be? Conceptual, or Physical?

Both. Neither?