Noah opened his eyes.
Crimson rings circled his forearms in slow independent orbits, each one carrying the compressed density of a Cause that had just agreed to recognize him as a valid conduit. They were warm against his skin.
|THE Bellum Cause integration is active.|
|Your existence has established a direct link to THE Bellum Cause. This link has bound itself onto your Hadean Pillar of Infinity, anchoring the Cause connection to the structure you have built.|
|Power from THE Bellum Cause is feeding continuously into your Pillar. Your actualized Civilizations within the Pillar are receiving and metabolizing this power, each one growing grander as the Cause’s foundational truth amplifies whatever truth each Civilization was already expressing.|
...!
He looked up.
His Hadean Pillar of Infinity rose above him in the invisible interior dimension only he could perceive, blazing with its accumulated Civilizations in their layered tiers, the crystalline blue forest of THE First Tongue at its base and the eternal storm of Civilizations at its apex. At the midpoint of the Pillar, something new had arrived.
Two massive crimson swords had materialized, each one burning with the pure expression of THE Bellum Cause, their blades holding the specific quality of things forged from the foundational truth of conflict rather than from any physical material.
They spun around the Pillar in opposing orbits, their rotation steady and patient, and from the paths they cut through the space around the Pillar, tendrils of crimson light gushed outward in continuous streams that fed back into the Pillar’s structure. His actualized Civilizations drank the power eagerly.
Each one that touched the crimson tendrils grew subtly denser, subtly grander, the Cause’s authority amplifying the existing expressions within the Pillar the way a rising tide amplifies every vessel floating on it.
The two swords spun. The tendrils fed. The Pillar grew.
|Integration is ongoing. New weavings are forming within your existence as the Bellum Cause settles into your foundations. Comprehensive quantification of changes and new capabilities will require approximately a few minutes before a full feedback assessment becomes available. Continue to observe.|
...!
He was about to look at his forearms more closely when something descended.
He felt the power of it before he perceived the source, the specific pressure of a being operating at a tier significantly above the Ordovician Paleozoic. This was something beyond that!
The density was different, the way deep ocean is different from surface water, carrying the weight of everything above it in addition to its own substance.
An Old Man descended from the floating landmass above with the unhurried pace of a being who moved at his chosen speed because no circumstance had yet arisen that required him to reconsider that choice. His white hair moved loosely in the ambient currents of the Sanctum.
Noah gauged him.
Silurian Paleozoic. The second tier of THE Third Scale!
This being felt so powerful that Noah instinctively knew he could not fight this man. Not with his current configuration. The assessment arrived cleanly and without the sting of ego because it was simply accurate, and accurate information was more useful than comfortable inaccuracy regardless of what the comfort would have felt like.
The old Gilded One looked at him.
"You came from nowhere."
"I won’t ask which house. But how did you resonate with Bellum like that?"
Noah looked at the old man calmly, Infinity and Pillow Talk buzzing in his ear as information flowed. Old Man Zeke, Silurian Paleozoic Scale!
"I have just gone through a lot of adversity. It matched well with war and conflict."
"Adversity. Good. Good." He settled into a position near Noah with the ease of a being making himself comfortable in a space he had occupied for longer than the conversation had existed. "You actually don’t know how right you are."
"There is a secret of existence that someone young like you might not know. Becoming stronger, climbing the Scales of Existence, one is capable of going further based on adversity. Difficulty. And one is able to rise across the Scales faster depending on the risks and challenges they face and their convictions as they go through it."
"The more challenges one faces. The more dangerous those challenges are. The more terrifying the risks of what one could lose if they fail, all of these accelerate progression at rates that ordinary cultivation cannot replicate. They can make one’s growth extremely fast. They can allow a being to touch a Dreamstone and resonate with a Prime Cause as though they have been working toward that resonance across an entire civilizational span, when in truth they have simply faced enough genuine danger that the Cause recognizes them as a being who has already been living its truth."
"This knowledge sits with only the more powerful Superbius Gilded Ones. Most of the broader population does not have it, because the broader population does not need it. They progress along their engineered pathways at the rates their engineering permits. The deeper principles of what accelerates progression beyond those rates are not information that serves the arrangement to distribute widely."
VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse