Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5378

Chapter 5378: Amaranthine I

THE Braneworld Observable Existence held hundreds of Citadels, and every one of them was a monument to a single feeling.

The Gilded Ones did not build the way other beings built. They clustered themselves by Ego, gathering the like with the like, and so across the vast spread of THE Braneworld there rose hundreds of Citadels sorted by the sins they cultivated.

Superbius in some, the proud. Ira in others, the wrathful. Avaritia, the greedy; Invidia, the envious; Gula, the gluttonous; Acedia, the slothful; and Luxuria, those of pleasure.

The Superbius controlled almost all of the major Citadels, because pride climbs and pride takes, and the proud had spent ages ensuring the highest seats were theirs. But not all of them.

There were Citadels like Velanthra where Luxuria dominated, and others where one Ego or another held sway, pockets of the realm shaped by whichever feeling had won the long quiet war for that particular ground.

A single Citadel could hold millions. The vast majority of them sat at the peak of the Second Scale, the broad foundation that everything else stood on. Thousands and tens of thousands at the Third Scale in any given Citadel, the established and the dangerous.

Dozens at the Fourth, the ones who reshaped the territory around them. And sometimes, rarely, one or two at the Mesozoic, the Fifth, though to find a Mesozoic being you usually had to look to one of the nine Prime Gilded Citadels, where the true powers of the Houses kept their seats.

Between the Citadels ran the routes.

Massive Gilded Ships and vessels moved along them constantly, carrying resources from Citadel to Citadel, the arteries of a civilization that had spread itself across an entire Observable Existence. And among the resources, listed in the manifests alongside ore and essence and matter, were the Luxuria.

They were moved like cattle. Engineered in their own Citadels and vessels, grown for the purpose, and then shipped out across the routes to the other Citadels to be used for pleasure, loaded and transported and delivered and consumed.

It was not even truly about the pleasure. That was the part that made it obscene rather than merely cruel. At the highest stages of power, where identity grew critical and the Gilded Ones engineered their Egos to amplify their emotions, the ones whose amplified emotions were pride and rage and envy lived in these obscene manners deliberately, methodically, to feed those Egos and make them grander.

A Superbius who indulged grew prouder, and a prouder Superbius could hold more Infinity, and more Infinity was more power. So they did it for the power.

The hollowed Luxuria shipped across the Observable Existence were not even indulgence. They were fuel.

In a crimson-gold hall in Velanthra, THE Living Emotive stood over a map of all of it.

Dozens of Fourth Scale Luxuria Gilded Ones surrounded her, and before her the map laid out every route, every shipping lane, every path along which Luxuria were moved across the Citadels of THE Braneworld to be used and emptied and discarded.

She read it. She took in the full scope of it, hundreds of Citadels and the lines running between them like the veins of something that fed on its own children.

"My identity," she said aloud, to the map, to the hall, to herself, her voice carrying the manic unstable lilt that was always in it. "They want to talk to me about identity, existence does. As if I don’t know. As if I haven’t known the whole time."

"My identity is emotion. That’s my name. THE Living Emotive. I am the emotions. I have lived as the emotions, every one of them, anh, all of them at once sometimes, which is its own special kind of hell, let me tell you. My record is emotion. My being is emotion. Everything I have ever been, every terrible and beautiful thing I have ever done, it was all emotion, lived purely, lived completely, lived louder than anything else in existence has ever dared to live it." Her eyes shone.

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