Chapter 5489: Unknown! II

The crossing, in the end, gave them no trouble at all!

Perhaps that should have been comforting. The dark between Dimensions had offered nothing but its frothing quiet as no wakes rose to meet them, no attention pressed back against their own as the living vessel flowed along its chosen road until the road simply ended. Ahead, through the radiant stanchions of blue, gold, and crimson...the outer boundary of their destination resolved out of the boundless dark!

The outer weavings of this Dimension were unfathomably heavy.

Age pressed off of them in profound waves as even at the boundary, even before entry, the threads out here ran thicker and older than anything his Sight had ever read before! How old did something have to be before its edges alone felt like this? He had stood before THE Queen Regnant. He had felt THE Sealed One fill an entire sky. Neither of those weights had carried this particular texture of sheer ancientness!

And just as Ryaenara had said, entering an open Dimension was no issue at all as the boundary took hold of the vessel gently, and they began to be pulled in.

Noah breathed out.

What here would have a connection to him, if anything did? His Eye had chosen this door out of millions, across time itself as an Anchor was a promise to a possibility. So was he closing a loop in time right now? Was some deed of his already waiting in this place, aged and patient, recorded in a history he had not lived yet?! Would he find answers here, or only more questions?

He didn’t know.

"Let’s go!"

Without an ounce of fear or doubt, he proceeded in.

HUUM!

The passage was unlike the crossing that came before it as entering felt like falling through countless event horizons stacked one behind another, each threshold folding space differently than the last as their sense of time and distance came apart entirely somewhere in the middle of it all. Up became a memory. Duration became a rumor! The glorious vessel held as Ruination’s weave hummed through every stanchion, and then, all at once...they arrived.

BOOM!

They arrived into liquid!

A viscous, glowing fluid pressed in around all of them as it filled the curved space they had emerged into from wall to wall. And it did not wait politely at their skin! The fluid forced its way into their bodies, into their very existences as it pushed past defenses that had turned aside the authorities of Mesozoic Scale beings as if those defenses were mere suggestions.

Power did not matter to it. It entered THE Creature the same way it entered the Dora Shath’yar, utterly indifferent to the difference between them!

HUUM!

|A foreign authority has forcefully entered your existence. I attempted to bar it and was overruled.|

Noah fought it on instinct as his Intent rose, his Foundations bracing to expel the intrusion.

And then, an instant later, he stopped.

BOOM!

Because his existence was cheering.

There was no better word for it! His Foundations, every single one of them, turned toward the invading substance the way roots turn toward water as he felt them begin to advance. THE Tide hummed. THE Hunger woke ravenous! Even the sleeping eight stirred in their grades as through all of him ran a fervor his body had not even asked his mind’s permission for.

|Correction to my prior report, and happily so. The foreign matter is extremely conducive to growth. It is being integrated across every component of your existence at once. +10,000 Osmontian Biomass has been gained. +20,000 Osmontian Biomass has been gained. +20,000 Osmontian Biomass has been gained...The count is still climbing.|

...!

Prompts of majesty and wonder!

His existence buzzed with shock and fervor both as his eyes flashed with tyranny. If this place wanted to pour wealth into him uninvited, then he would stop being a passive recipient about it! Noah opened THE Hunger That Refines fully and began to actively devour the substance around him, drawing it in through skin and breath and existence alike!

He wasn’t the only one.

THE Creature had already begun as his obsidian flames drank the fluid in slow greedy spirals. THE Infiniverse absorbed through every thread of her manifestation, and Emotive laughed somewhere in the golden thickness of it all, pulling the liquid in like a girl gulping air after a long dive! Even Ryaenara, wary as she was, had clearly decided that waste was the greater sin as every being aboard became akin to a black hole, the glowing fluid thinning around them, and thinning...until at last the curved space stood entirely empty of it!

Then the walls began to crack.

BZZT!

Thin fracture lines spidered across the edges of the space, glowing at their seams as the whole enclosure shuddered around them. Through the widening cracks came air, and the air was heavy! Dense past anything Observable Existences or THE Primordial Source offered, thick with terrifying concentrations of some unknown matter as it flooded in and pressed against them.

CRACK!

The cracks met. The walls gave!

And everything broke open at once, the curved shell falling away in great pale shards as they rose out of it into open air with the residue of the enclosure clinging to all of them, streaks of glistening film and clinging membrane...the unmistakable leavings of the inside of...an egg.

They had been inside an egg!

Noah wiped a slick of it from his jaw and looked around as the looking answered one question by opening ten more! They stood in a nest. A vast one, woven from materials even his Sight could not fully parse as its walls rose around them like hills, and beyond its rim, the air of the wider Dimension pressed down so heavily that his awareness could not spread past his immediate surroundings at all! He pushed against that pressure once, carefully. It did not push back so much as simply decline to move!

His existence buzzed with elation and oppression in the same breath. Oppression, because nothing here yielded even an inch to him. Elation, because the air itself was so pure, so pristine, that merely standing in it fed him! He could feel the slow steady tick of it already, Osmontian Biomass accruing from nothing but his very presense!

What kind of place fed you for existing in it while crushing your senses in the same breath? What had they hatched out of? And whose nest was this?

As they acclimated, an inflow of information arrived, freely and unasked.

|Master, information is being given. Given, to all entrants, as a matter of this Dimension’s law. I will relay it as it settles.|

|You have been born again with your entry. All of you. Passage into this Dimension occurs in no other way, and by hatching, you have been recognized as inhabitants. The Dimension now counts you among its own.|

|You have arrived in THE Krazhor-Nul. Its weavings sit before Vakochev’s Scales of Existence were ever born.|

|A caution, delivered with the welcome. This place is lethal as a matter of course. Anything that is not a True Lifeform will die here within minutes, unraveled by the same ambient density currently feeding you. The Dora Shath’yar and Amser Modred survive, for now, because they hatched within your Pantheon’s protection and stand inside its reach. I recommend they remain there.|

|The weavings of ancientness saturate everything here. And through all of it, prevalent past measuring, runs the aura of Those Who Remain.|

...!

Noah’s eyes were unfathomably bright!

Behind him, Ryaenara’s gaze had gone heavy, and then her composure simply failed her.

"Fuck... fuck! Osmont!"

She cursed him out as if he had personally murdered all of them.

Noah remained standing strong, egg residue and all. Because before anything else, before the nest and the name and even the aura of Those Who Remain...something in him had already begun to move!

|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered, Master, and Straif has finished settling just in time to answer it. You have given safe passage across Dimensions and Time itself, delivering a number of beings to an unfathomable place none of them could have reached alone. The Tide recognizes the carriage, the protection, and the arrival as one compound act of giving.|

|At C-Rank, Straif, the grade that sharpens and compels, the Tide’s returns now range from three thousand to twenty thousandfold, and it has gained the property of Sharpened Returns: boons no longer arrive merely as value, but honed toward what serves you most in the moment of payment.|

|Boons delivered. +75,000 Osmontian Biomass. Your rate of ambient absorption within this Dimension has been sharpened threefold, for you and for every being you carried. And one further return, shaped by where we now stand: a single thread of standing within THE Krazhor-Nul. You did not merely hatch as an inhabitant. As of this moment, the Dimension recognizes you as one born of its First Clutch, and I do not yet know what that title carries.|

...!

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