Chapter 5125: Ego! III

Noah turned the information over within himself.

Emotive’s singularity of emotions had unfolded inside his perception like a flower made of stolen feelings, and within it lay everything she had gathered across THE Wyld. Names, configurations, weavings of authority, the signatures of beings who had been reworked at fundamental levels by hands grander than their own. He held it all in a stillness that the multicolored seas around him couldn’t disturb.

THE Gilded Ones engineered their chosen ones differently than he engineered his.

His own work with Existential Engineering replaced lattices, pulled Bounded Lifeforms across the threshold into Nascent Hadean, gave them access to Infinity through transformation of what they fundamentally were. THE Gilded Ones did something else entirely. They didn’t transform the foundation. They amplified specific Egos within the existing makeup, inflated emotions until those emotions became the very channels through which Infinity could pour without triggering THE Gamaidian. Pride as a vessel. Wrath as a vessel. Passion as a vessel!

Two different philosophies of ascension, two different paths toward the same forbidden well.

"I may need to see the engineering of THE Gilded Ones firsthand."

He spoke the words almost to himself, his gaze still resting on the floating singularity of information.

THE Living Emotive’s eyes shone the moment the words left his mouth.

Her hair surged into electric pinks and feverish golds, the colors crashing against each other with the kind of excitement she clearly couldn’t contain. She drifted closer through the air, her bare feet still not touching the shattered Shelter beneath them, her smile stretching into something that bordered on giddy.

"Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Why don’t you make a trip to THE Wyld then?"

Her voice came out faster, the manic edge slipping back through the coherence she had been holding so carefully.

"I could mask you! Anh, you could probably mask yourself a thousand times better than I ever could, but I could help, I could layer my emotional weavings over you so that even the ones who feel for emotional disturbances wouldn’t catch a single ripple of your presence. And with how much information I keep receiving from emotions all across existence...sheesh, I’m telling you, I can pinpoint isolated parties of Primordial Architects who have already undergone modification!"

...!

She circled him slowly through the air, her hands gesturing as her words built momentum.

"Think about it! Just think about it for one moment! Nobody expects this of you right now. Nobody! Everyone in THE Wyld is bracing for the Civilizational Holy War, calculating who will fall and who will rise. Their attention is fixed on the spectacle. Their attention is not on the doors of their own home."

Her hair shifted into deep violets that suggested cunning beneath the mania.

"And THE Creature is already there running rampant! Things are chaotic in ways they haven’t been in eons. Primordial Architects are dying in corners of THE Wyld where their corpses won’t be found for a long time, and nobody can tell which disappearances are him and which are something else. You walking through that chaos would be one more ripple in a sea that’s already churning. Who would even notice?"

She drifted in front of him, her eyes holding too many colors to count.

"I already have the locations of a few isolated groups you could fuck up as your lab rats. Engineered ones, modified ones, the kind that would let you peel back their existential layers and see exactly what THE Gilded Ones did to them. You’d learn more in one visit than I could explain across a hundred conversations!"

Her smile sharpened into something almost shy beneath the manic glow.

"And...oh! It would be our first journey together..."

Noah considered it.

He stood there in the multicolored sea with twenty hours still remaining on the Civilizational Holy War countdown, his Pillar still rising within THE Infiniverse, his second body still overseeing the training of his people, his third body still standing on the other side of Sadakar’s door at Nakatsukuni.

He could spare another body for this. He could spare more than that if the work demanded it.

And he did need to stretch his muscles.

There was nothing grander than walking into the enemy’s field and studying them without their knowledge, no purer test of his current capabilities than moving through the home of beings who would happily collapse his existence if they sensed him there!

He had ascended through unconventional methods, and unconventional methods demanded unconventional applications.

His decision settled into him without ceremony.

He waved his hand once, ignoring Emotive entirely for the moment, and space fluctuated around him in response to the gesture. The fluctuation stretched, folded inward on itself, and from that fold a figure stepped through with the steady grace of someone who had been mid-motion when summoned.

Naldine Manthon emerged into the multicolored sea.

She was breathing heavily, the rhythm of her chest betraying that she had just been sparring with another of his bodies inside THE Infiniverse. Her radiant white hair held its new rivers of gold prominently, the strands still damp at the edges from exertion. Her singularity-dotted eyes adjusted to the new environment in a single blink, and her vihuela rested against her back, still humming faintly with residual authority.

Her gaze found Emotive almost immediately.

Noah watched the exchange with a quiet interest he didn’t bother to hide. Emotive’s hair, which had been cycling through warm and excited shades a moment before, suddenly shifted toward colors he hadn’t seen on her yet.

Deep greens veined with sour yellows. Her smile didn’t fall, but something tightened beneath it. Her eyes flickered as they took in Naldine’s power as she displayed...

Jealousy.

Those were the colors of jealousy, and Noah found them quietly amusing on a being who claimed all emotions as her domain.

"The three of us are taking a trip to THE Wyld," he said.

Naldine blinked once. Then again.

"Are you serious?"

She studied his expression for a moment, found whatever she needed to find, and exhaled through her nose with the resignation of someone who had long ago stopped questioning his choices.

"I mean...okay."

Her gaze drifted back to Emotive, her singularity-dotted eyes narrowing slightly as she took in the manic beauty floating beside them. Her brow furrowed in open displeasure, and her voice came out flat and unimpressed.

"Why are you picking up stray cats? What’s the use of this one?"

Emotive’s hair flared into bright reds.

"Stray cats? Stray cats?! Look at her, talking like she wasn’t crawling out of some dusty corner of existence playing her little instrument before he found her too! At least I came bearing gifts of information that could shape an entire war and more. What did you bring? A song?"

Naldine’s mouth curved into the smallest, sharpest smile Noah had seen on her in a while.

Noah raised his hand, and none of that shit continued.

He looked at Emotive without warmth.

"This one is just a tool," he said calmly. "And she knows it. If she performs well, she will continue to be used."

...!

Emotive’s eyes lit up at the words as if they were the highest praise she had ever received. Her hair settled into pure radiant gold, her smile stretched into something brilliant and unguarded, and she nodded with the eagerness of a creature who had finally been given a defined place in a hierarchy she could understand.

Naldine’s shook her head calmly.

Noah didn’t linger on either of them.

He raised his fist, drew it back, and brought it crashing upward through the air above his head.

BOOM!

Existence cracked.

The multicolored seas trembled as a fissure opened across the fabric of reality itself, splitting the air with the sound of something fundamental giving way. The crack widened, edges shimmering with the white gold radiance of a sea that lay beyond all definitions, and through that opening Prima Indifferentia became visible. The Crack of Observable Existence held steady, waiting, vast enough for them to pass through.

Noah stepped forward and went in.

Naldine followed without hesitation, her vihuela humming awake against her back.

And Emotive, with her hair blazing every color at once, drifted after them into the white gold sea beyond.

---

<Nakatsukuni>

The hidden domain between Observable and Unobservable held its own quiet weight.

Noah stood within Sadakar’s space at Nakatsukuni, his other body fully present, the structures of this sanctuary rising in soft geometries around him. Lanterns hung in air that didn’t quite obey the laws of either side it bordered. Somewhere within him, the weavings of paradox tugged with the steady insistence of a thread being pulled by a hand he hadn’t yet seen.

He spoke into the stillness without raising his voice.

"Can I take a portion of your space to have a conversation? I can feel my weavings of paradox tugging at me."

...!

The vast consciousness of Sadakar surrounded him before words formed, the Singular Cognizance’s presence pressing gently against everything in this hidden place. His voice came from no specific direction, only from everywhere the air touched.

"Think about what I said. Think about not looking at things like choosing sides, but maintaining neutrality through peace being the better side. That way, one lives longer."

The words held no command.

And then his vast consciousness withdrew, fading from the immediate space until Noah was left alone within a portion of Nakatsukuni that had become his to use.

Noah considered the words.

Sadakar was ancient in ways that even Singular Cognizances measured carefully against each other, and his philosophy had been forged across eras Noah hadn’t been alive to witness. But ancient didn’t mean correct. The longer one lived, sometimes, the more one mistook survival for wisdom, and the more one confused the absence of action for the presence of peace.

Neutrality didn’t really work.

Those who tried to play neutral were always eventually eradicated by whichever side won, because winners had no use for fence-sitters and survivors made inconvenient witnesses.

And the ones who weren’t eradicated had usually fooled themselves about what neutrality actually was. By choosing not to choose, they had already chosen. By withholding their weight from one side of the scale, they had given that weight to the other side without admitting it.

Sadakar’s longevity was real. His peace was an illusion built on the careful pretense that doing nothing was different from doing something.

Noah was not built that way.

In the distance of the borrowed space, a doorway swung open without ceremony.

His perception caught the brief presence of a Singular Cognizance on the other side of that opening, and then that Cognizance was being escorted elsewhere, taken to a different location within Nakatsukuni so that the conversation about to occur would happen between only two participants. The doorway settled. The space narrowed to him and one other.

Erwin came through.

THE Living Paradox stepped into the borrowed domain with the unhurried grace of a beggar who had always known where the next meal was coming from. His attire remained the grand beggar weave he favored, the colors muted and somehow regal in their muted state. His eyes held eons!

His expression held no surprise at all when his gaze met Noah’s, only recognition.

He nodded.

His smile broke across his features brilliantly as he floated to a position opposite Noah’s, the air between them thick with weavings that didn’t belong to either of them alone anymore.

"Congratulations are in order, I think."

His voice carried that same calm arrogance Noah remembered, layered now with what sounded like genuine appreciation.

"You took on Primordial Architects. You survived a Pulse of THE Silurian Light. You got yourself into a Civilizational Holy War declared by THE Deliverance himself. It’s quite something... Quite something to witness from the outside."

...!

Noah looked at him calmly.

"I’ve been trying to place you in a ranking."

His voice held the steady measure of someone reviewing inventory.

"I want to know exactly where you sit when it comes to entities like THE Creature or THE Primordial Paradox. Where the line of potential is drawn between you and them, and which side of that line you actually fall on. But you’ve been fluctuating in my assessment because very little about you is actually known. The data... keeps slipping through my analysis the moment I try to fix it in place."

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