Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5129

Chapter 5129: Greed! I

The floating island hung in the golden air of THE Wyld like a table raised toward heaven.

Its surface held the geometries of an archaic laboratory, built from pale stone veined with threads of gold that pulsed faintly in time with the work being done upon it. Towers of bone and brass rose at its four corners, their tips holding arrays of polished lenses that stared inward at the central platform without blinking.

Flasks hung suspended in mid air, held by nothing, their contents churning with liquids that refused to settle into any single color. Rivers of Observable Force were diverted from the golden currents flowing between islands and piped into the laboratory through channels cut into the floor, feeding the apparatus with a steady hum of siphoned power.

The air smelled of old copper and older ambition!

At the center of it all stood a golden table, and on that golden table lay a corpse that was not quite a corpse.

The body belonged to a Primordial Architect.

It had once possessed power that would have let it topple realms without effort, but now it lay stretched and opened across the golden surface, its chest cavity parted neatly, its Proterozoic Organs arranged around it on smaller trays like specimens at a feast.

Fungus-like attachments had been grafted into the exposed weavings of its flesh. Pale tendrils wound through its Proterozoic ribs. Bulbous growths clung to its major organs, pulsing with bioluminescent greens and sickly whites.

Rivers of Infinity flowed across the subject in slow visible currents, being pulled in through the feet and channeled out through the crown of the skull, the whole body acting as a conduit for something vaster than itself.

And yet the corpse breathed.

It was alive. Barely, and in a manner that its original self would not have recognized as living.

Standing over the table was the one who had arranged all of this.

Octavius Kraethos wore robes of deep emerald threaded with gold, the cut of the fabric matching the decorative severity that all the Primordial Architects of this floating island seemed to share. His frame was tall and lean, built in the proportions of an ancient sculpture that had refused to accept the passage of time.

His skin held a pale bronze sheen, unblemished across eons of careful self-maintenance. His hair was cropped short in the fashion of an archaic scholar, iron grey at the temples and deeper black through the crown, and his jaw carried the clean precision of someone who had long ago decided that his face was another instrument requiring proper calibration.

His eyes were the telling feature.

Pale gold rimmed with a deeper amber, pupils that held the focused intensity of a being who never stopped calculating even when his mouth was speaking of something else!

His hands moved across the exposed weavings of the corpse on his table with the steady patience of a master craftsman.

Around the laboratory, other Primordial Architects moved through their own assigned tasks. Two Calymmian Proterozoic Scale entities adjusted the apparatus at the corners, their own emerald and gold robes marking them as his peers in this endeavor. A Rhyacian Proterozoic Scale figure stood near one of the bone towers, her hands deep in a basin of churning Observable Force, her attention fixed on some reading that only she could interpret. Every one of them wore the colors of their shared engineering. Every one of them had been amplified along the Ego of Greed!

A greed for advancement. A greed for knowledge. A greed for the next answer that lay one experiment beyond their current reach. It was a hunger refined into discipline, an appetite channeled into research methodology, and it had taken them farther along the paths of cultivation than most of their kin had ever traveled.

Near Octavius, a crimson-haired Calymmian Proterozoic Scale Primordial Architect stood with her arms folded across her chest.

Her hair fell in long dark red waves down her back, braided at the temples. Her robes matched the emerald and gold of the others, though hers held additional threading at the cuffs, fine embroidery in the shape of opened seed pods. Her eyes were the deep wine color of someone who had watched many experiments fail and had stopped being moved by the specific shapes of their failures.

Her name was Valeria.

"I’ve watched three of these now, Octavius."

"Three subjects on that same table. Three attempts to replicate what THE Gilded Ones do to us as a matter of casual engineering. Every one of them has failed in ways that were instructive, I’ll grant you, but failed nonetheless."

"What makes you think this one will succeed where the others didn’t? You cannot do what the Gilded do to us. None of us can. The engineering they write into our existence operates on weavings we haven’t been permitted to touch. You’ve been reaching for their methodology for eons, and every time you’ve come away holding something that was not quite it."

"You misunderstand the design, Valeria."

"I know exactly how far the Gilded are beyond what I can replicate. I have known this for longer than you’ve been studying my work. What you’re watching me build here is not an attempt to match their engineering. I stopped trying to match them after the second failure. This latest product... is meant to be something else entirely."

"This is meant to be an abomination."

BOOM!

"All prior attempts were meant to succeed along a single axis. Amplify one Ego. Stabilize the infusion of Infinity around that amplification. Match the cleanness of what the Gilded achieve with their subjects. Every subject failed because the cleanness is the Gilded trick, and that trick is not available to me. So I stopped reaching for cleanness. I reached instead for controlled corruption."

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