Chapter 5227: Vile! II

Her voice remained even, which somehow made the words heavier than they would have been if she had let them become bitter.

"THE Luxuria spend eons at the beck and call of any Gilded One who wishes to indulge in the most obscene expressions of their nature, forced by their very engineering to endure and facilitate the whims of those who view them as less than dust. They are built to listen, built to serve, and built to break."

A pause.

"Even though it is a truth whispered only in the darkest corners of our existence, THE Luxuria have the second highest mortality rate in all of Gilded history, surpassed only by those who fall beneath THE Relictus. It is not their bodies that fail. It is their minds. After eons of being used and discarded, after eons of carrying the psychic filth of the high houses, their existences simply shatter. Some choose to unmake themselves, finding the silence of non-existence to be a mercy compared to the weight of their service. Others are shattered from without, their foundations cracking beneath a sudden burst of Ira’s wrath or the crushing weight of a Superbius Gilded One’s disdain."

She turned back toward him then, and her pure gold eyes carried what they had always carried but more plainly than he had previously seen it, the specific weight of a being who had chosen to live as Bounded for eons because the alternative was remaining in the arrangement she had just described.

"It is a cycle of abuse woven into the very architecture of our society, and it was the primary reason I chose to leave THE Braneworld. I could no longer breathe the air of a place that treats the shattering of a soul as a minor inconvenience."

She straightened fully.

"I have a dream for our people. A vision of an existence where one’s designation is not a life sentence of degradation. I will see that dream realized regardless of the price. For now, however, you must be the mask I need you to be. You must be the cold and distant Custos before the eyes of all others."

...!

Noah’s eyes flashed coldly.

The Gilded Ones continued to find new ways to make him detest them more and more, and he had started with a fairly significant amount of detestation to build upon. The image that formed in his mind was not abstract.

He was thinking of Dante, the specific Dante he had archived in THE Hadean Desmoterion, whose private residence had contained four Luxuria women with burns and crystalline fractures in their foundations that their Gilded engineering had produced not from combat but from one afternoon of someone’s bored amusement.

He was thinking of the complete engineering logic behind that afternoon: that those four women had been built to sustain it, built to endure it, built to return to the House that had produced them and present themselves again the next time the Scion required entertainment.

Built to break.

What kind of being sat down and engineered that?

What kind of civilization looked at the engineering methodology and said yes, this is the arrangement we want to sustain, this is the world we want to maintain, this is the legacy we want to carry forward across Seven Ages and defend against anything that threatens to change it?

"Okay," he said.

He looked at Adelheid, and she looked at him, and in the space between them the Primaris Bond hummed with its patient luminescence, the connection that was supposed to be professional and contained and administratively appropriate having already become something considerably more complicated than any of those words described.

At this time.

The door of the vessel opened before Noah fully turned toward it.

Sororis Prima Evangelina entered, her mandala-eyes making their rapid assessment of the vessel’s interior. She looked at Noah. She looked at Adelheid. She looked at Noah again.

She blinked.

Something had shifted in the space, and her Cognitio Cause sensitivity was registering the shift without being able to specify what it was exactly.

She shook her head.

"We have arrived at the Veiled Causal Site." Her eyes settled on Noah with the focused authority of a senior Sororis addressing a Custos. "Behave. Do not make light of our Ubergulden House. Come."

Noah gazed at her coldly and gestured toward Adelheid, both of them moving toward Evangelina with the synchronized composure of a Custos and his Ingenue.

They were going to a place where a portion of his existence would apparently need to cross into a domain filled with secrets regarding THE Primordial Source.

But while that portion of him followed Evangelina through the vessel’s corridors, the other portion of him that mattered at this particular moment was focused elsewhere.

The ten minutes had passed.

---

In THE Infiniverse, where golden sands dreamed beneath a sea of multicolored Infinity, THE Primus Apeiron rose.

The sea still held its myriad of beating hearts, the pulse of the Apeiron network synchronized in their slow continuous rhythm. Several of the hearts were gestating with dimmed intensity, the signatures of Noah’s people who had been collapsed in the Wandering Territories and were now rebuilding inside the Organ before their hour return window completed.

Noah’s Primus Apeiron form had rebuilt.

It was grander.

Not dramatically. But measurably, genuinely, the scales covering his body sitting slightly denser and more cohesive than they had before the collapse, the integration of the three loot singularities having settled into his Apeiron architecture and refined it in the specific way that loot integration refined, not adding new components but improving the quality of existing ones.

The dorsal spinal protrusions running along his back were larger, their surfaces carrying deeper channels for Observable Force, the new Sovereign Observable Organ’s passive intake already flowing through them in visible golden lines that had not been present before.

His tail was longer, the spear-tip singularity at its end burning with a concentration of Nearu Absolute Infinity that the prior form had not carried at that point.

His crown spun above his head with a brilliance that had increased in a way he could feel rather than merely observe, the multicolored flames carrying the compound weight of a being who had integrated two Prime Causes and unlocked a third power system in the interval since his collapse.

Around him, silent and invisible to any perception that was not his own, a barrier of Infinity sat.

THE Infinite Vector, operating passively.

He could feel it as a constant ambient presence, the way one feels the clothes against one’s skin without actively thinking about the feeling, a background sensation of something functioning correctly. Every ambient Infinity current flowing through THE Infiniverse moved around him or through him according to his foundations’ continuous quiet management, nothing arriving at his surface with a direction or magnitude or intent he had not permitted.

He wanted to see what it did with actual Gilded hostility directed at it.

He disappeared!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.