The Primordial Record - Chapter 1848: Final Form (2)
Chapter 1848: Final Form (2)
Sometimes it was impossible to fully conceptualize the scale of a thing until you witnessed it properly for the first time.
The mind had a limit; both mortal and immortal minds suffered the same constraint, and Rowan was among the few, if not the only one, to have a mind that would continuously grow until it encompassed all things.
But for now, he was still limited, after all, in a particular perspective, he was still a child. Because of the fragility of Eosah’s Reality, Rowan had been stopping himself from growing, and if someone were powerful enough to see all of Eos’s body, they would see he was still in the form of a baby.
Still, it would not matter if he had allowed himself to grow to his mature state as a Reality, because the powers of Primordials were like nothing he had ever seen before.
Rowan did not know when it happened with the Primordials, but sometimes in the past, after they had consumed so many Realities and integrated so many Origin Sources in their bodies, quantity had become quality, and to refer to them as Primordials any longer was doing them a disservice.
They might not have reached the level beyond Origin, but the effect of stacking so much Origin into a single form was clearly not natural, and a perverse change had come upon them that was truly scary to behold.
Rowan stopped the forceful absorption of the hand of Enoch, and it howled and retracted into the body of Eosah, its presence instantly vanishing.
The broken corpse of Eosah shuddered and began to heal itself, and in no time, she was whole, and her eyes slowly blinked open, filled with pain and confusion, and she instantly froze when she saw what had surrounded her.
To her credit, beneath the fear and shock lay deep rage. These were the bastards who had killed and violated her corpse.
Rowan’s eyes, which were clouded by the haze of collecting so much information, cleared up, and he became a bit puzzled at the escape of the hand; it was as if it was not just fleeing Rowan’s mad attempt to devour it, but the presence of the Primordials here was also something that it feared.
Looking around him at the immensity pressing down against all of existence, Rowan could not blame this hand, because for the first time in a long time, he felt truly small.
“Rowan,” Eosah whispered, “What… how can this happen?”
Rowan turned to her, his body still bathed in the light of his Final Form, and he shrugged, “I pushed too hard, and everything broke. The end we have always feared is here.”
Eosah gasped as she looked around, being surrounded by eyes bigger than Realities in number beyond counting was enough to drive even someone like her to madness. She glanced at Rowan briefly, wondering how he could remain so calm, before returning her gaze to the Primordials that surrounded them.
Suddenly her head whipped back towards Rowan, her eyes wide with shock, and she pointed at the light that surrounded him,
“How can you have the light above Origin shining in you, Rowan? What are you?”
Rowan did not give her the answer she wanted; instead, he pointed towards the eyes that were just staring at them,
“Why are they silent? We should be dead, but they are not attacking.”
It took a moment for Eosah to shrug off her shock and reply to Rowan’s question,
“You must have sensed it, Rowan, the price the Primordials are paying for becoming so powerful in a form that was never meant to hold such power.”
Indeed, Rowan could feel only a fraction of the sheer power wielded by the Primordials, and it was deeply frightening, exceeding all boundaries of common sense.
The Primordials were never meant to be this powerful, and if they were mortal or even the average immortal, containing so much power in their form would lead to death, like a mortal trying to swallow a sea; their stomach would inevitably burst, but the Primordials, their nature prevented them from dying to their greed.
The curse of evil that pervaded their bodies gave them an endless hunger and an appetite that nothing in existence could imagine, but they had been stuffed to the brim many Cosmic Eras ago; their hunger prevented them from stopping their ceaseless feasts.
Rowan recalled the many visions he had of the Primordials, and he understood that in the past, these entities were glorious and terrible, but they had a grand vision, and whatever it was they pursued, the end result they craved was not to be abominations with endless hunger they could never satisfy.
Perhaps if the Primordials could control their appetite, they would be able to stop eating and digest all the meals they had collected; in this manner, they could begin to evolve, but their hunger prevented them from doing such a basic thing.
Rowan recalled the desire of the first and greatest of the Primordials, Nyxara, the First Thirst, the Primordial of Soul, who had desired above all to be free of their endless hunger.
“So, they have become trapped in their own hunger,” Rowan muttered, and he chuckled darkly,”
He still vividly recalled the arrogance of the Primordials when they sat around the fires and butchered the Torch Dragon. They might have believed that when they began slaughtering Realities, they would be able to not just gain Origin Sources, but also push that Origin Source to the limit, before they moved onto the next.
The first time they tried to do this, they succeeded, and the Primordials were able to gain the Origin Sources of Soul, Time, Chaos, Life, Memory, Light, and Demon.
Then they began their reign of terror and began butchering Realities, pushing their Origin Powers to limits that were unnatural.
If a normal Primordial should have a base Origin Force of a hundred, through their act of butchering Realities for their Origins, the Primordials were able to push the limit to a million.
Rowan could imagine that they must have been ecstatic, and they would have wanted to retire to some far-off corner of Limbo and fully process this power before beginning their hunt for the next Origin Source to acquire.
However, even in a short span of time, they had butchered too many Realities, and the stench of Evil and rot had pervaded existence, transforming it into Limbo.
To their shock, they could not settle and digest their bloody spoils; a hunger without limits had taken hold of their bodies, and they became golems of pure destruction.
Reality after Reality were plundered, even after they had eaten their fill, they could not stop themselves from gorging on more. With time, their bodies began to mutate and transform, to the extent that their consciousness became suppressed under the endless tide of hunger.
In his previous life as Rowan Carter of Earth, he recalled a peculiar trap used to hunt and kill wolves in the Arctic.
A hunter would coat a knife blade with their blood until the blade was hidden under a solid layer of frozen blood, then they would stick the blade to the ground. A wolf attracted to the smell of blood would see the frozen blood, and it would begin to lick it until there was no longer any of the hunter’s blood left, but strangely, the wolf would not stop licking the blade, even as its tongue was sliced to ribbons.
You see, due to the cold that would quickly numb the tongue of the wolf, it would not realize that the blood on the blade was gone, and the blood it was still lapping up came from its shredded tongue.
It would continue in this manner until it bled to death. The wolf and the Primordials were the same, Rowan thought.
