Chapter 5782: Impossibilities! II

On the Glacial Mountain, the snow continued to fall.

It lay a hand deep on the golden eaves of the monastery and drifted against the arched door, and it filled the air so completely that the far slopes had gone grey and then simply vanished.

A few Conduit Lifeforms sheltered under the roof, their light dimmed to embers.

Out on the open shelf, two figures sat facing each other, and only one of them was comfortable.

Noah wore nothing heavier than thin garments of his own Provenance, and the snow slid off his crystalline shoulders as if it had been a feather all along.

Across from him, Achilles sat buried in a coat of many-colored authorty so thick it looked like armor, and still, every little while, a shiver ran through him.

Noah closed his eyes.

His Provenance moved around him in slow blue-gold rivers, and he let himself feel all of it, the turning of his Root, the weight of his existence settling deeper into itself. What he felt was simple.

It felt good!

A human felt good after a meal, or among good company, or at the end of a day’s work that had turned out well. Understanding existence felt exactly like that to Noah. Every time he stood a little higher than the day before, the same warmth rose in him that a farmer might feel looking over a field he had planted himself.

For some, that height wore that feeling out of a climber. That past a certain point the view stopped being beautiful and became merely tiresome, and whoever stood there grew bored, and cold, and looked down on everything smaller.

And yet here he was, higher than he had ever stood, and he loved it more than ever!

He put that down to the human at the center of him.

Humanity, as far as he could tell, was the part of a being that kept being glad. Without it the climb became a hunger, and at the end of that road waited an emotionless thing. He would much rather stay the kind of being who could sit in the snow and enjoy a hard day’s work.

And this was a hard day’s work. A Root of Immensity was a thing a being had to grow for itself, by every account in existence. He meant to start one inside someone else. At home, in his Existential Root Domain, the same work had already begun with THE Infiniverse and Ruination, but they were bound to him and would come easier. Achilles was a stranger’s existence, built in a stranger’s grammar.

That was what made it worth doing!

Nothing complicated was needed. His own template, built from studying an Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin, would not be copied into the king. Instead his two Provenances would take what made Achilles himself, his genome, his Assimilation Factor above all, and press those into the shape of a signal that was Achilles’s alone.

It would only work on an existence tall enough to carry it. Below a hundred in any measure, the forming alone would tear a being apart. A Root formed on its own only somewhere near four or five hundred, in Trueness or Pondus or Provenance.

Achilles should have enough to survive the attempt!

Noah opened his eyes.

"This will strain you," he said. "It may collapse you. Whatever happens, hold on to what you are."

A smile moved at the corner of the king’s mouth, the first Noah had seen from him on the mountain. "I have been holding on to what I am for weeks now, let’s go!"

Two rivers of Provenance left Noah and went into the king!

The first moved through Achilles like lamplight through a dark house, room by room, and in every room it found something that had once belonged to someone else and now belonged entirely to him. A First Cause from a fallen Observable Existences. An Infinity drunk from a dying sea. A thousand authorities, and not one of them sat in him like a stone. They had all become Achilles, as rain that falls into a river becomes the river, and at the heart of it all turned the thing THE Sealed One had wanted: the Assimilation Factor.

Noah’s second river closed around it and began to press.

He did not wrench it. He coaxed it inward, steadily, toward the turning, self-feeding form of a becoming-signal, and after a long moment of resistance, the Factor began to follow.

Light gathered at the center of the king!

A knot of many colors drew in on itself beneath the heavy coat and brightened as it drew. A quarter formed. A third. Half. For one held breath it turned bright and nearly whole, and Noah let himself think it might simply finish.

But...

It broke!

BOOM!

Dark lines split across Achilles’s existence like fractures through ice under too much weight! The signal was grander than the vessel that held it, and the vessel was coming apart, and Noah began to draw his Provenance back before the cracks could reach the edges of the man.

He never finished.

Achilles turned on the failing signal and did what he had done his whole life to everything that threatened him. He took it. He assimilated the collapsing Chorionic Gonadotropin whole, and the cracks slowed, and sealed shut.

The king lifted his head, old eyes burning as blood spurted from his nose and mouth!

"Again!" he roared into the snow. "Do it again!"

Noah pressed the Factor a second time!

It came together faster, because a piece of the first was already woven into Achilles, and it climbed past half before the dark lines came as it fell apart. The king did not wait for them to spread. He swallowed the second failure himself and bared his teeth for a third.

The third broke at two thirds, and he took it.

The fourth broke brighter, throwing the shadows of the eaves across the snow in long gold bars, and the Conduit Lifeforms woke under the roof and turned toward him.

By the fifth, the snow around the two of them had melted in a ring from sheer pressure of existence!

By the sixth, Noah’s Provenance was running hot, and Achilles’s coat had split along one shoulder, and beneath the tear his skin shone with a light that was not quite any color.

Everytime a blank Chorionic Gonadotropin tried to form, it failed!

He caught the seventh at the very edge of collapse, with a sound like a man lifting something far too heavy and refusing to set it down.

The eighth failed closer still, and he took that too!

He was heaving at this point as a distant Rose stood imperiously trying not to show any emotion!

On the ninth, the signal reached the point where every other had cracked, and...it did not crack.

There was nothing left in Achilles for it to strain against. Eight failed becoming-signals were woven into him now, and the shape was no longer a stranger to his existence. The ninth did not have to force its way in. It only had to finish.

It finished!

The Assimilation Chorionic Gonadotropin held!

A pillar of light tore out of Achilles Adrastia and struck straight up into the falling snow, every color he had ever assimilated turning through it at once! The snow above the shelf blew outward in a vast ring! The monastery’s golden walls hummed!

|An Assimilation Chorionic Gonadotropin has formed within the lifeform, Achilles Adrastia.|

|Stability: LOW. The foundation is uneven. It was built from nine attempts, and eight of them remain visible in it.|

Noah could see them now: eight ragged seams running through the turning signal, eight places where the whole of it might one day split.

So he spent more.

He ran his Provenance along the seams one by one, smoothing each into the next until they lay flat in a single foundation, and the pillar brightened as he worked! Its ragged edges drew in! Its hum deepened into something clear and certain, and the drifting flakes caught fire in a hundred colors as they fel!

His own Root had been built around a true piece of an Immense One’s becoming, pressed into his hands by Vakochev.

Achilles had no such piece, only his own Dimensionality and Noah’s help, so his Root would begin lower. But lower was not small.

Starting from a king who had swallowed the powers of a dozen lineages and a hundred rivers of time, lower was still very high indeed.

And Achilles, alongside many others, could be seen as lifeforms with their own grand dreams and stories, but it did not bother Noah for being able to help such beings.

One did not grow grander alone. Nor was it shameful for one to receive the help of another to get to where they were.

Did he not receive help from Vakochev with the Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin? Did he not help Vakochev himself to have one of his bodies freed?

He did not doubt that in time, Achilles would be able to form a Root by himself. After all, the fucker could Assimilate anything. What he was doing was giving a guiding hand and accelerating the entire process.

Nobody was alone in existence as connections made many things possible and allowed for progress to be much faster, and Dreams...connected a great deal of beings as Noah would freely do whatever he wanted to do to expand his Dream, and any dreams of those around him.

|A Root has been induced and formed in another lifeform.|

|The Assimilation Chorionic Gonadotropin has formed in the lifeform, Achilles Adrastia. It is a Unique Conceptual Root of Immensity.|

|For guiding the dream of another and allowing it to bloom to fruition, your Provenance has increased by +50.|

|THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer will continue to gain Provenance depending on how far the Dream of the lifeform, Achilles Adrastia, extends across existence.|

...!

Yes. There was also his own selfishness as he would benefit from this!

Achilles sat inside his pillar of light with his coat torn from one shoulder, breathing hard, staring at nothing Noah could see. Something inside him had just begun to grow, and he did not yet know how large it meant to become.

Noah’s eyes shone!

He looked at the king and the pillar and the shining result of an afternoon’s work in the snow, and he saw it for what it was. A piece of glorious engineering, finished well.

Impossibilities would only remain impossibilities for others.

Not for him. Never for him!