Chapter 4201: Powerful! V

Noah’s gaze was calm, but a universe of calculation was happening behind his eyes.

Beside him, Khor’s mysterious eyes narrowed. Servants of THE Living Emotive... her thoughts were a private whisper to Noah as she said..

’I did not know Emotive was doing this.’

...!

Malphas nodded regally, acknowledging their silent contemplation before continuing. "I have one clear memory," he said, his crimson eyes clouding over. "A day when my Master returned to our domain, their entire being a tempest of incandescent fury. Their form was a swirling storm of colors I had never seen before, each one a different flavor of violation and rage."

He took a slow breath, and the scene painted itself in the air from his words.

"’I will not amount to much?!’" Malphas’s voice shifted, taking on the resonant, multi-tonal quality of his former master. "’Do they truly not know how much weight I hold?! How much of these Folds I support?! How much of existence would crumble without me to give it meaning, to give it feeling?! Why do they do this?! WHY?!’"

HUUM!

The remembered anguish was so potent that the Radiant Shore itself seemed to dim in sympathy.

"At that time," Malphas said, his own voice returning, "I and the other servants went to them. They were bubbling with negative emotions, on the verge of a cataclysmic release. We knelt, and we did what we were made to do. We opened our own existences, and they began portioning it out. The Everything of their Hatred, a torrent of burning acid, flowed into one of us. The Everything of their Rage, a storm of pure, destructive force, filled another. To me, that day, I received a portion of their Sorrow and their Insecurity."

He touched his own chest, a gesture of profound, remembered pain. "We took it all, until they calmed. Until the storm passed." He looked up, his eyes meeting Noah’s. "And when they had calmed, when their form had returned to a state of serene, melancholic beauty, they looked at us, their loyal vessels, and said something I will never forget." His voice dropped to a chilling whisper.

"’Okay. I will show them. I. Will. Show.’"

BOOM!

The words hung in the air, a promise of vengeance so cold and so absolute it made the warmth of the Shore feel like a lie.

Noah looked at Malphas, his eyes shining with a tyrannical light. "What did THE Living Emotive plan?"

Malphas bowed, his form a perfect expression of regretful ignorance. "I do not truly know, Master. But if you are suspicious whether THE Living Emotive had a hand to play in what is coming... I can decisively say..." He raised his head, his crimson eyes holding a universe of terrible possibility.

"Maybe."

BOOM!

The word was another detonation, another piece of a puzzle so vast and so terrifying that it threatened to overwhelm all other concerns.

Malphas’s expression softened, a deep, abiding respect coloring his features. "My Master was not a monster," he said, his voice a soft, mournful defense.

"They were graceful, kind. They treated us, their servants, with a respect that the other Living Existences rarely showed to anyone. But their power... their power was different. It didn’t just affect matter or space. It resonated with all existences. Every being that feels, from the smallest insect to the grandest Creature, is, in some small way, connected to them."

He paused, a terrible, logical conclusion forming on his lips. "They were, I believe, likely the most powerful of all of them, if they had ever lived up to their full potential. Maybe even stronger than the one deemed the strongest... THE Living Paradox. And maybe... maybe that was why the others treated them in such a way. Out of fear."

His gaze became distant, lost in the what-ifs of a forgotten age. "But if my Master did finally snap... if they truly decided to ’show them’... then nothing could stop them."

The words were a death knell. Noah and Khor exchanged a glance, a silent acknowledgment of this new, terrifying variable.

They had been preparing for the Fallout, for the inevitable decline of existence. But what if it wasn’t an inevitable, natural process?

What if it had been... orchestrated by a select few? A lesson in suffering, delivered by a being who had been taught that lesson better than anyone else. If they could figure out excatly what was done, aas there a chance to reverse it?

"..."

What had THE Living Emotive done? The question was a new, dark star in the constellation of their worries, and its light was cold, and vast, and utterly terrifying!

—

Jealousy...that delightful emotion that has toppled more empires than war, ruined more relationships than infidelity, and caused more poor decisions than alcohol and online shopping combined.

Consider the hero’s party entering a terrifying dungeon. The hero, because this is how these stories always go, is surrounded by beautiful priestesses, mysterious rogues, and various other women who have inexplicably decided that sharing one man between seven of them is a perfectly reasonable arrangement.

They laugh at his jokes (which aren’t funny), swoon at his muscles (which aren’t that impressive), and generally make the dungeon crawl look like a mobile harem anime.

In the shadows, a lone goblin watches this display.

Now, this goblin had been content with his life...a little stabbing here, some treasure hoarding there, maybe a nice mushroom stew on his off days.

But seeing this mediocre human surrounded by such devotion while he, a goblin with excellent hygiene for his species and a respectable collection of shiny rocks, remained alone?

Jealousy took root.

"That’s it," the goblin muttered, adjusting his loincloth with newfound determination. "No more playing around."

We don’t need to discuss what happened after that. Let’s just say the hero’s party learned that a motivated goblin with nothing to lose and everything to prove is significantly more dangerous than a demon lord who’s just going through the motions.

But this was hardly the first time jealousy had catastrophic consequences!

In the Earliest Folds, in a memory that existence itself had tried to forget, THE Creature had sat down with THE Living Dimensional in what passed for intervention at that level of being.

"Must you treat THE Living Emotive this way?" THE Creature’s voice carried the particular weight of someone trying to prevent a disaster they could see coming from several eons away.

"Just out of your own jealousy?"

THE Living Dimensional snorted...a sound that created three new types of weavings that immediately regretted existing.

"I hate his Way of Existence," THE Living Dimensional said with venom that could have dissolved concepts.

"I hate that without having to do anything, Emotive has all that power. Joy, sorrow, rage, love...they all just flow to him naturally. He doesn’t have to calculate dimensions, doesn’t have to maintain spatial integrity, doesn’t have to work for any of it!"

The bitterness in those words could have curdled time itself.

"And You...You do not need to insert yourself in our matters, O Creature. We are inherently different!"

THE Creature had regarded THE Living Dimensional with something that might have been pity if pity could exist at that scale.

"Different, yes. But that difference isn’t what bothers you. What bothers you is that THE Living Emotive’s existence makes yours feel like effort. You see his natural state and interpret your own work as inadequacy."

"He doesn’t even appreciate what he has!" THE Living Dimensional’s form flickered through seventeen impossible geometries in agitation.

"Do you know how much concentration it takes to maintain even basic three-dimensional stability? And he just... feels things into existence!"

"And so your jealousy will poison both your existences," THE Creature observed. "You’ll spend eons trying to prove your Way of Existence is superior while he wonders why you seem to hate him for simply being."

"Good."

That single word, delivered with such spite, would echo through existence in ways that wouldn’t become apparent until much later.

Jealousy.

Oh, the terrifying things jealousy could bring!

It could make a goblin take down a hero’s party. It could make fundamental forces of existence sabotage each other. It could make beings who should be allies become enemies over perceived inequalities that were really just differences.

It was the emotion that whispered, "Why them and not you?"

The feeling that transformed admiration into resentment, respect into rage, appreciation into destruction.

It was perhaps the only force in existence that grew stronger the more you fed it while simultaneously making you hungrier.

Jealousy had probably killed more beings than death itself...at least death was honest about its intentions!

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