The seas of Infinity dispersed around him, and the skies of a grand floating island opened into his perception.
The light filtered through sothing that wasn’t atmosphere, golden currents of Observable Force braiding through the open sky in slow rivers that curved around the island’s edges without ever touching them. Below, the island stretched wide and terraced, its pale stone surface veined with gold that pulsed in patient rhythms, its towers rising at the corners with their blinking arrays of polished lenses.
Information poured into him from every direction.
The weavings of Infinity carried the signatures of every being present, the configurations of every structure, the residue of every experint that had been conducted on this island.
Observable Force layered its own data over the top. It was abundant, the kind of abundance that would have drowned a lesser perception in static, and he let all of it flow freely across his mind!
It passed in less than an instant.
Even in its density, even in the sheer volu of what was being given to him, he received it and read it and filed it in a span shorter than an instant.
|Domain Entry: Unnad Research Archipelago, THE Wyld.|
|Entity Count: Seven Primordial Architects confird present on the primary island. Six distant islands hold additional entities. Full classification pending.|
The information settled into place, and his eyes shone brightly as he looked ahead.
Many eyes looked back.
The silence that fell was awkward! Nobody moved and nobody spoke. The apparatus continued its quiet hum. The golden table at the center continued to receive its rivers of Infinity. The corpse on that table continued its chanical breathing.
The island spread out beneath him in full view now.
Corpses lay across multiple tables, each one a Primordial Architect in so stage of dissection or modification. Protruding fungi grew from their exposed organs. Pale tendrils wound through their rib cages. So of the bodies twitched faintly with residual life. Others were clearly past the point of any return. Each table was its own quiet experint, each subject a record of so attempt that had either succeeded along a narrow axis or failed in an instructive manner.
At the center, a single table commanded the rest.
The corpse lying on it radiated sothing the others didn’t. Terrifying power rolled off its fungus-laced body in slow waves. Potent Infinity pulsed through the rivers being fed into it, the flow rates higher than anything feeding the other tables.
The Primordial Architects of this research party had clustered near it.
Noah focused on the ones carrying the most power.
|Entity Detected: Octavius Kraethos, Designer of THE Primordial Mycelia.|
|Status: Surprised but composed.|
|Current Scale: THE Proterozoic Scale - Calymmian Tier(Seems fake, power does not match).|
|Threat Level: Significant? Unknown|
|Entity Detected: Valeria Morne, Research Peer.|
|Status: Alert and guarded.|
|Current Scale: THE Proterozoic Scale - Calymmian Tier.|
|Threat Level: Less significant.|
His gaze settled on Octavius.
So this was the one who had created the Primordial Mycelia. The scholar who had forged the fungus of Unity that Erwin had taken!
The entity whose research had rippled outward through so many downstream consequences that even Emotive’s claiming of Chaos traced back to his table!
What a wonder of causality.
All of that had been conceived on a floating island like this one, probably on this exact island, under the steady patient hands of the being now staring back at him.
Looking at Octavius, and at a few of the others clustered near him, brought a unique sensation into his perception.
Seas of Infinity moved within their bodies.
Seas! The concentration held by each of these engineered Primordial Architects exceeded anything he had encountered in any Primordial Architect before, and the seas were stable in a way that made no imdiate sense. They should have been drowning. They should have been losing themselves to THE Gamaidian, the madness that Infinity inflicted on beings who couldn’t withstand its pressure.
Instead, the seas held themselves in orderly shorelines inside each of them, kept that way by engineering that had been written into their existential foundations.
The so called amplification of Ego.
Was this what Emotive had been describing? Emotions inflated to such intensity that they could stand against the natural superiority of Infinity, push back against its madness, create a stable foundation on which the sea could rest without spilling over?
The curiosity that blood inside him was sharp!
He wanted to gauge their power. He wanted to open their bodies and see exactly what made them tick. The engineering was right there in front of him, walking and speaking and preparing to resist him, and all he had to do was get his hands around one of them to begin the study!
All of this passed through him in a span that asured below a nanosecond.
Below him, the Primordial Architects had already gathered closer to their leader.
Octavius looked at him and at Naldine with eyes that couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. A deep smile blood across his face, slow and scholarly and unsettling in its warmth. His pale gold eyes held focused intensity.
"This... is absolutely incredible."
His voice carried the cadence of a master who had just received an unexpected gift.
"A lot might have truly underestimated you, Infinity-bearer. I saw you when you were broadcasting your thrashing of Beowulf, and the recording was instructive, genuinely instructive, but seeing you in person is sothing else entirely. It’s a treat. Honestly, a treat!"
He took a small step forward, his hands clasped lightly behind his back.
"Listen. I have many internal laboratories ready for use, quite nearby, well prepared and well equipped. If you’d be willing to cooperate with the process, I can lay you down on a table and open you up just to study your Infinity a little bit. Nothing too invasive. I just don’t want things to get ssy and loud and have any others co by. The integrity of the research depends on quiet, you understand."
...!
Noah opened his mouth to tell Octavius that he didn’t have to worry about any interruptions.
Emotive’s voice beat him to it.
"Haha!"
Her voice echoed out across the floating island with all the singsong mania she had been holding back in the forest.
"Soon-to-be-corpse, you don’t have to worry about that! I! Have! Sealed! Everything!"
...!
Yes.
The mont they had arrived, both Emotive and Naldine had exerted power in their own unique ways, each of them operating on their own initiative without needing him to direct them. He had felt the twin workings settle into place alongside his arrival. He hadn’t needed to make a single move of his own to lock this region down.
|Emotional Blockade has been established. Authority: THE Living Emotive.|
|All information capable of traveling on weavings of emotion and chaos has been severed within the surrounding region of approximately one gigaparsec. Complete existential silence has been declared. An Ediacaran Tier entity would require several minutes to overco this blockade.|
|THE Hadean Barrier of Infinity has been enacted. Authority: Naldine Manthon.|
|All weavings of information expressed through Infinity have been prevented from entering or exiting the surrounding region of approximately ten gigaparsecs. No signal, plea, or distress weaving will reach any outside party.|
The notifications settled into the space between his thoughts.
He looked at the unique Primordial Architects glowing with their seas of Infinity, their engineered stability holding their fras against pressures that should have collapsed them. Even he couldn’t say for certain whether these would be decent enemies or whether a few of them would actually give him trouble.
The seas inside them were real. The engineering was grand. These were not the ordinary Primordial Architects he had dismissed as kindling for his people’s training!
But this entire region was locked down now.
Nothing would be getting in. Nothing would be getting out. Whatever happened here would remain here, and the only witnesses who would leave would be the ones he permitted to leave.
His voice carried calmly across the island.
"You know a lot about ."
His eyes held Octavius’s pale gold ones without wavering.
"But I don’t know too much about you. The circumstances are asymtric, and I’d like to correct that. So here’s how we’ll do it. You have two options, and I’ll let you choose between them."
He let the pause settle, tyrannical in its patience.
"Option one. You put yourself up on that table. You lie down beside the subject you’ve been working on, and you let take a look at you. I open you up carefully. I study the engineering that THE Gilded Ones wrote into your existence. I learn what I ca here to learn. At the end, depending on how things go, I may or may not let what’s left of you keep breathing."
His gaze drifted briefly toward the fungus-laced corpse at the center of the gathering.
"Option two. You tussle with first. You and your peers here put up whatever resistance you think you can muster, and we see how far that gets you. And when the tussling is done, I put your corpse on that table to join the one already there. Then I still study you. I still learn what I ca to learn. The only difference is that in option two, you don’t get a chance to guide my hands away from anything important, because your hands won’t be moving at all by then."
The island fell quiet around his words.
"Which one...would you like?"
...!
The mont the question landed, Octavius’s smile stretched extrely wide.
And then he began to laugh!
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