Chapter 5301: Enjoy The Little Things II

Alexander was different.

His encounter with Beowulf had left something unseen and unresolved, something he may not have fully recognized as unresolved.

The mentality that had driven him external, the need to prove he could handle himself without relying on another, had been carrying that unresolved wound into every battle since.

The Existential Acedia Ordnances had not simply injured his foundations. They had found the existing fracture in his Way and pressed against it with the efficiency of a force that attacked what was already compromised.

The Enneagram was gone from his chest. He had given it up.

That was the clearest sign. The willingness to relinquish the core instrument of his Civilization, to hand it to someone else and ask that someone else to take responsibility for the beings within it, was not the action of someone whose Way was intact.

It was the action of someone whose Way had developed cracks, and if those cracks were not addressed, Alexander’s Peace would remain forever a diminished version of what it could have been.

Noah didn’t like this.

He had always thought that people like him, and he had considered THE Peacemaker someone like him...as virtually invincible. THE Great Usurper, THE Primordial Paradox, THE Creature, hell, even Erwin and Little Bobby with his ridiculous luck.

He considered all of them beings capable of bouncing back from anything.

But...this was not always the case.

Nobody was entirely invincible. THE Gilded Ones...were making this abundantly clear.

"..."

He looked at the visage of Alexander who hid his desolation as listening to how THE Great Usurper had overcome something he couldn’t...seemed to further increase the cracks on his Way.

Something had to change. Something had to be done!

Noah allowed his body here to handle this as...

His awareness moved.

---

In THE Source Lands, his Galdr Source body existed in the dense dark of THE Strand of Broken Scales with the contentment of a being who had remembered that adversity was not the only thing worth experiencing.

Day had turned to night in the usual rhythm of the Illumination Flowers, the golden bloom-light having receded and the familiar deep darkness of the Strand pressing close around the ancient trees.

As for what he had been doing this entire time here...it was not hunting or exploration! Instead, it was...

Dual Cultivation.

The last few hours had been this, and he had no intention of pretending otherwise. He had, at some point, considered building an entire cultivation system around the practice because it was the mode of cultivation he genuinely enjoyed most.

But he had recognized in himself the tendency toward excess that such a system would accelerate, and a man had to have balance. He had impulses. He controlled them adequately.

What the practice had produced, however, was not merely enjoyment.

The Galdr Source had scaled upward significantly across the session, compounded by uttering Persevere every second throughout, the two processes running in parallel and feeding each other.

This, alongside the weight of THE Infinite Cause now officially equivalent in scale to THE First Cause behind an Observable Existence’s emergence, was the deeper reason he was holding his own against THE Creature and Calypso in THE Infiniverse.

Persevere, every single second, for the last few hours...was the reason he was managing to stand against THE Creature and Calypso in THE Infiniverse!

The Strand of Broken Scales was not separate from the Arms Race. It was contributing to it from a different angle.

He was also navigating a careful line regarding The Gilded Ones. His identity in THE Source Lands remained that of a Gilded One’s Custos. His most recent Lover was a Gilded One.

The entry of Gilded ones into THE Source Lands was a unique breach as he had to navigate when and whether to reveal this to THE Creature or Sir William soon.

He would gauge the benefits and risks of disclosure before releasing that information, and the timing would be his to choose rather than the events’ to impose.

He looked at Eon.

She sat in a meditative position among the ancient roots of one of the Strand’s massive trees, her entire existence burning with golden flames that were a different color and density than they had been when they arrived on the dark beach of this place.

Her Seidr Source was gone. What replaced it was Galdr, the second Demarcation, dense and viscous and pressing outward from her foundations with the warmth of someone who had made the crossing that most beings in THE Source Lands spent lots of time here attempting.

With his Osmontian Absolute Infinity running through her, with the depth of their bond and the hours of Dual Cultivation and the Persevere feeding through their connection into her foundations, she was emanating the immensity of a Devonian Paleozoic Scale Superbius Gilded One.

A step from THE Fourth Scale.

She was, at this moment, almost certainly stronger than her brother.

She opened her eyes.

The golden light within them illuminated the surrounding darkness, the night of THE Strand pressing close around them, ancient vegetation and old danger lying beyond the mile of perception they could each maintain.

"Are you ready to venture deeper?" he asked.

Before, they had sheltered in the caverns when night fell, because the night brought things that their prior capability had not been sufficient to face without unnecessary risk.

That calculation no longer applied. He would be the danger traveling in the night now. He wanted to see what lay deeper in THE Strand of Broken Scales, what the Gilded Ones had already found in there, and what lay beyond what they had found, because there was always something beyond what had been found and he had every intention of finding it.

Eon looked at him.

She stood, unhurried, the golden flames settling around her as she rose to her full height and looked at him. Then something moved behind her eyes, a calculation completing itself, and she said:

"We can begin after another hour or so."

A pause.

"I felt perhaps we could continue our session. If you weren’t overly tired, of course." Her eyes held deliberate mischief.

"You were a Bounded Lifeform before. If you require longer periods of rest, I could understand."

His existence buzzed.

The Source Lands exploration could wait a few more hours.

When a man had been challenged, he had to answer.

When he was the one being challenged?

Oh!

He made a silent prayer for Eon as boundless multicolored Infinity exploded across the region of the ancient Strand around them!

---

Existence... could throw at you countless adversities and push you down again and again, and this was its nature and it would not change.

You persevered. You kept moving. You found the next problem and addressed it. This was what a being did when they had decided that stopping was not an option.

But you also had to remember the other things.

The things that made you glad you kept moving. The things that gave you pleasure and anchored you to what you were beneath all the power and all the adversity and all the weight of the decisions existence kept demanding you make.

For some it was food, money, resources, position. For some it was the satisfaction of a battle that pushed back hard enough to mean something. For some it was the company of another existence at the hour when the ancient dark pressed close.

Existence was long. Existence was unfair. Existence was genuinely and consistently brutal in ways that could not be softened by any amount of power.

But there was no point in living through all of it in misery and missing the parts worth living for.

One had to remember to have fun. To enjoy the little things!

Otherwise, what was the point of any of it at all?

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