I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 688: Archean! III

The flood had settled, and Achilles did not trust how quiet everything was.

Below him, the seas of Tian had beco sothing that did not belong to any mory he had of them.

The gold was still there, folded under everything like a promise that refused to die, but it had been married to white. White-gold. Neither one nor the other.

He watched it for a long ti.

Pillars of liquid stood upright across the sea’s surface, tall as mountains. Archean currents coiled around their bases in lazy spirals, and every so often one of the pillars would pulse, softly, from root to tip, as if rembering how to breathe.

This was not Tian, not anymore!

It was the Tian that had Persevered.

Behind him, Rose and THE Watcher floated in the hush. Rose had been changed by the flood the way everyone who survived had been changed, her fire running deeper, her green burning closer to sothing molten, her Chaos Claim steadier than it had any right to be after what they had just walked through.

THE Watcher’s singularity had dimd from its sacrifices, but Archean light had threaded itself through the platinum now, and the golden lotus petals rotated with a cleaner rhythm than before.

They had all risen. His own rising simply did not fit in the sa room as theirs!

He turned his head, just enough to see Rose in the corner of his vision.

"Things will change," he said.

The words went out across the sea and did not co back.

"Trendously. Faster than anything in this Observable Existence has ever been asked to change."

Rose didn’t speak.

"Soti from now, we’ll look back at this mont..." He tilted his chin toward a horizon that was still settling. "And we’ll call it the start. The start of the most arduous ti Observable Existence has ever endured."

"Or it’s sothing else." His voice dropped a register, and the Archean rivers orbiting him moved with it. "I will do...everything I can to make it sothing else."

...!

Whatever was coming, whatever Mansa Zulu had set in motion, whatever sat behind Mansa Zulu and whatever sat behind that, he would bend it. He would negotiate with it, or outrun it, or outgrow it, or eat it, whichever of those worked!

For now, though, he would watch. He would be patient the way a predator was patient, the way a thing that knew it had ti was patient. He was not moving yet. He was not stepping into the Second Scale yet, even though the doorway stood open inside his chest. Every one of those moves could wait.

Because of the mark of Vilicus!

It was a leash, yes. But it was also a roof. Whatever ca hunting through this cracked sky, whatever reached for him or reached for what he loved, there was a calculus it would have to do first. It would have to decide whether it was willing to cross a Gilded One. Whether it was willing to spit in the face of Mansa Zulu, who had branded him personally!

So the mark was a chain and a shield at the sa ti, and Achilles was old enough in his vengeance to know that the best thing to do with a tool like that was to learn what hand had forged it. Learn what Mansa Zulu stood for. Learn what the Unobservable wanted from a failed Observable Existence it now claid had "always been ours to begin with."

Learn the shape of the experint he had been made the steward of, before whoever was running the experint ca back to check the results.

He would watch. He would learn. He would grow in silence, and...

BOOM...CRACK!

At such a ti...the sky broke.

It cracked like a mirror that had just rembered it was a mirror. One instant the heavens above the First Sea held their changed, settling light. The next instant a line ran through them, silver and thin and absolute, and from that line a thousand other lines spread in every direction, spiderwebbing outward with the slow inevitability of a decision already made sowhere else!

HUUM!

Achilles’s head snapped up. Rose was already rising. THE Watcher’s petals stopped rotating.

The shards of the broken skies did not fall!

That was what wrong about it. Mirror-sky broke, and the pieces did not co down. They tilted upward, peeling away from their fra, hinging open the way the lid of a box hinges open, and through the space where the sky had been there was...

Nothing.

There was an obsidian darkness so deep and so wide that his Architect’s Perception refused to read the bottom of it!

He frowned.

There were waves of power moving in that darkness!

And then, from the ragged edges of the broken sky, sothing began to build.

Obsidian-gold.

A span of it extended out from the breach, narrow at first, a single arc of material that was not material, and then it thickened, and then it locked, and then a second span joined it, and a third, and the thing assembling itself in front of him took shape with the patience of sothing that had been drawn a very long ti ago and was only now rembering its own blueprint.

A bridge.

It reached from the broken mirror of the Tian sky out into the obsidian dark, and its far end did not terminate anywhere Achilles could see. It simply continued, and continued, and at so point the bridge passed through a threshold his perception could not follow, and beyond that threshold there was presumably sothing the bridge was for. Sothing that would only beco visible to a being willing to walk across.

His heart beat heavily!

The mark on his forehead lit.

Information poured into him!

|A bridge between Observable Existences has been forged through the Unobservable.|

|Designation: THE Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns.|

|Function: The Obsidian Span is the sole sanctioned passage between Observable Existences through the Unobservable Sea. Entities who attempt to traverse the Unobservable by any ans outside the Span will be dissolved by its currents, regardless of Scale attained.|

|Even those who have attained THE Second Scale of Existence will crumble within the Unobservable Sea if they stray from the Span. Infinity within the Unobservable is not the Infinity of the Observable. Anchors forged under Observable law will not hold.|

|Passage Protocol: The Span accepts only those permitted by THE Great Mansa Zulu or those bearing His mark.|

|Vilicus Notice: As THE Vilicus of this Observable Existence, you are granted standing passage upon the Span at any ti of your choosing. Other travelers passing in either direction will be logged for your awareness.|

|The first convoy approaches.|

Achilles’s eye shone!

Far out along the Obsidian Span, where the bridge passed into the part of the Unobservable his Perception couldn’t crack, sothing was moving. He couldn’t see it. He could feel it the way he had felt the currents. Large. asured. Walking with the unhurried confidence of things that had been invited.

They were coming.

The Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns humd in the broken sky, and sothing on the far side of the Unobservable took its first step toward their Observable Existence!