The Primordial Record - Chapter 1838: The Price of Knowledge
Chapter 1838: The Price of Knowledge
One moment, Rowan stood facing Eosah, the consciousness of Reality pulsing with ancient, grave knowledge. The next, the very fabric of her being was violated in a way that should not be possible.
Eosah’s body bent at the waist, as if every bone inside her torso had been shattered, the hand that shattered her head twisted like a snake and began to head towards Rowan as the voice that had previously sounded cold as it condemned Eosah transformed into a tone that was almost sickly sweet,
“Oh, Eos, do not let the small minds of the fallen twist you from your path. Everything will come in its own time; it is left for you to wait for the right moment. Come and rest in my darkness. Inside here, there are no troubles, just the bliss you deserve.”
Rowan, who had been retreating even before the arm of darkness violently burst out of the chest of Eosah, had not gone far before the arm began to reach for him.
To his amazement, his body stopped moving as if he had become a fly trapped in amber. This should be impossible; at his present level, nothing should be able to just hold him in place.
It was not a matter of power; it concerned the laws he controlled.
His metaphysical weight on reality was so potent that Rowan could literally punch through Primordials by utilizing his weight alone.
To be held in place was like a mountain falling from the sky, and unexpectedly, the cloud was able to hold the weight of it.
The arm moved faster than anything that Rowan had ever encountered, and he knew without any doubt that if this hand grabbed him, he would be lost.
He may not be here physically, but his Incarnation was a pipeline to him. Rowan had refined the process of creating his Incarnation to its limits, and among the features he gave them, it was complete separation from his main body.
If, for any reason, his Incarnation was corrupted or affected by an unknown power, even on the scale of the Altar of Unmaking that had the power to gather all the scattered pieces of their target, his Incarnation would be able to fool this process long enough for Rowan to completely sever all ties he had with this copy.
After acquiring the Altar of Unmaking and realizing its enormous potential for destruction, Rowan had seen the weakness of having multiple Incarnations in different locations.
Although he did not have the weakness of the Primordials inside of Reality, if a Primordial were to use the Altar of Unmaking against him, he would lose too much energy too quickly to be regained, and if he did not try to interrupt the process, he would be killed on that Altar.
Knowing this weakness, Rowan had been tweaking his Incarnation with every moment that passed. If an outside observer were to watch all of Rowan’s Incarnation that was scattered across Reality, they would witness something truly amazing.
His Incarnations were constantly evolving and changing, and sometimes these evolutions were so drastic that to compare his incarnations from a minute ago to the present one would be like comparing the intelligence between an ape and a man.
Rowan’s battle against the Primordials inside Reality was largely done by the combination of his Incarnations and his soul; only in his first battle with Primordial Soul did he entirely use his body to combat her.
Becoming a Reality came with many benefits, but the weight of his existence was something that he had to be careful about; hence, he broke the shell of Eosah.
However, all of his progress on his Incarnations meant nothing against this hand; he had been rudely thrown from his throne of power to the bottom of the trench in a single moment, from an unstoppable god to a wide-eyed infant.
This was a power that had clearly exceeded the boundary of Origin!
The power radiating from this hand was not merely greater than his own; it was of a different category entirely. It was a power that existed before the context of “power” had even been defined. It was beyond Origin.
In this instant, Rowan’s senses came alive as he channeled the collective consciousness power of all his incarnations, coupled with his flesh and soul.
If the consciousness power of his Incarnation here had previously been at a thousand, it immediately exploded to at least a billion!
The hand headed towards him stopped a micrometer away from his face, not because Rowan had succeeded in holding it back, but because his consciousness was burning with so much power that even if time was still, to him, it was still going too fast.
His consciousness was blazing with so much power that his Incarnation would not last a tenth of a second under this condition, but he needed all of these resources he had allocated to this body to understand what he was dealing with.
First, he turned all that power inward; he did not flinch or try to run from the disaster heading towards him.
Panic was a luxury for beings who operated within a system of cause and effect. Rowan felt only a cold, razor-sharp clarity, beyond anything he had felt up till this moment.
With that clarity came truth—he could not escape the power emanating from this hand.
He could not move his body, for the concept of movement had been suspended. He could not summon his power, for the laws that allowed for summoning were being overwritten.
This hand had fixed him in place. It did not pin him in space; it pinned him in the narrative of his own existence. He was rendered a static image, a character in a story who could no longer turn the page. His will, which could shatter dimensions and reverse cause and effect, met an absolute boundary. He was trapped not in a cage, but in the definition of himself.
If Rowan were not on the edge of experiencing total defeat, he would be admiring the process by which he had been undone.
Still, he did not give up, because there was only one thing left that this force, for all its overwhelming supremacy, might not have fully accounted for: the nature of his own unrecorded mind that had bloomed in a way that could not be accounted for or documented.
The stage had been set, but it was always up to him to determine the manner by which he played upon it.
He abandoned the internal consciousness and, with an act of madness, Rowan pushed his consciousness… outward.
He was not going to try to fight this power… he was going to read it!
He pushed his mental awareness, the unique, anomalous spark that was his un-inscribed self, against the edges of the force that held him. It was like trying to read the source code of the universe with a single, flawed synapse.
Agony, of a kind Rowan had never known, erupted through his being. This was not pain of the body or soul, but the pain of a mind being forced to process data streams that were fundamentally incompatible with its operating system.
A part of Rowan would have been laughing at cataloging a new type of pain in his diary, but that part had been swallowed by all of his consciousness campaign that was focused on a single task… to understand the enemy!
