Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5200

Chapter 5200: The Custos, Osmont! IV

The first requirement was foundational standing. Ordovician Paleozoic at minimum. The second was designation standing, restricted among the Luxuria to those holding the rank of Prima Serva, and among all other designations requiring explicit Magna Sorora authorization.

Both of those conditions were administrative.

The third condition was the interesting one.

The entrant had to want to understand. Not to acquire, not to weaponize, not to accumulate. To understand. The Sanctum assessed this condition at its threshold through a mechanism no Gilded One had ever successfully mapped, and beings who arrived carrying motivations other than genuine comprehension were turned back with the same patient insistence as those who simply lacked the proper standing.

That was why the some Superbius Gilded Ones had been turned back.

Pride didn’t want to understand things. Pride wanted to possess things, to deploy things, to demonstrate things. The Dominion Cause that underpinned their engineering produced beings who approached knowledge the way they approached territory: as something to be claimed and administered. The Sanctum, apparently, did not respect that orientation. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Noah spent a moment considering what his own orientation toward the Sanctum actually was.

Genuine curiosity. Practical application, certainly, but genuine curiosity first and the application second. He wanted to understand what was inside because not understanding something that existed felt like a personal failure of attention. That seemed like it might satisfy the third condition, though he supposed he’d find out at the threshold.

Inside the Sanctum stood the Dreamstones.

Dreamstones that held...knowledge of The 9 Prime Causes that comprised THE First Cause!

Nine primary stones, natural crystalline growths that had emerged from the Sanctum’s ground during the earliest eons of THE Braneworld’s existence, predating every structure the Gilded had subsequently built around them.

Each stone had been shaped by the Prime Cause energy it contained rather than by any engineering methodology. The forms were organic expressions of foundational truth rather than designed artifacts, which made them the only things in THE Braneworld, from what Custos Rani’s sparse knowledge suggested, that the Gilded had not managed to put their engineering fingerprints on.

The Nine Prime Causes.

He turned each one over in his mind as the memories offered them to him.

THE Desidero Cause: existence wants. THE Dominion Cause: existence arranges hierarchies. THE Bellum Cause: existence fights. THE Cognitio Cause: existence learns. THE Vigilia Cause: existence is watched. THE Immutis Cause: existence endures. THE Consumptio Cause: existence converts. THE Mortis Cause: existence concludes.

And then the ninth.

THE Genesis Cause: existence emerges.

The only Prime Cause to which no Gilded designation had ever been connected, because the Gilded were born into their power rather than forging it through the painful emergence the Cause demanded as the price of genuine connection.

They had built their entire civilization atop an experiential gap where THE Genesis Cause should have been, and the gap had remained unfilled across all Seven Ages because filling it would have required them to suffer, and suffering was the one thing their engineering had been specifically designed to exempt them from.

But as of now...Noah knew very little about The Nine Prime Causes since he only had memories of Rani, and now Dante, to go off of!

THE Cause Incorporation.

Most who attempted Incorporation failed. Their existences were not sufficiently aligned with the foundational truth they sought to incorporate, their personal Civilizations too individually configured to subordinate themselves to the Cause’s broader axiom without fracturing under the pressure.

Very few had managed to incorporate even a portion of a single Prime Cause’s power. Those who succeeded shared one common characteristic: their Civilizational Access exceeded twenty-five percent.

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