The Fifth Scale being who had been speaking with Da Seraphine the whole way, the tall figure nad Andro, gestured toward the gaping entrance.
"This is THE Maw," he said, "It was our richest mine. We pulled the greatest share of our Eridarch Ore from THE Maw for longer than most of the workers here have existed. It produced more strength for Her Majesty’s forces than any other shaft in Arkethys."
His Existential Radiation, the color of deep water, dimd slightly as he spoke.
"And then it began to change. The deeper one goes now, the more unstable existence becos. The Pulse you can feel is faint here at the mouth. It worsens with depth. Past a certain point inward, both Infinity and the Primordial Source co apart entirely, unraveled into that foreign nature, and only Fifth Scale beings can hold their own identities together against it. Below that, we do not know, because we stopped sending anyone below it. We had to stop mining THE Maw. Our richest vein, and we abandoned it, because every attempt to work it now ends with the workers ceasing to be themselves."
...!
Da Seraphine frowned and looked around the drifting region, her gaze moving across the crystal and the dark.
"The Infinite Lifeforms," she said. "Their movents. Have they had anything to do with this? An instability that conveniently weakens the Source side of a domain..."
"We thought the sa," Andro said. "We watched closely. But they have been quiet, for the most part. Quieter than usual, if anything. And none of them have crossed into our borders. Whatever this is, it rose up out of our own ground."
Da Seraphine stood with that for a mont, thinking, her composed features giving little away. Then she turned to Noah.
"You feel it as well as I do," she said. "Are you comfortable going in to take a look?"
Noah rolled his neck and stretched, easy and unbothered, Seo-yeon swaying gently on his shoulder.
"Let’s go," he said.
They entered THE Maw, joined only by Andro, the other Source Lifeforms remaining behind at the mouth, and the dark closed over them as they descended.
|Environnt: Interior of THE Maw. Ambient hostility increasing with depth. Environntal pressures and Pulse intensity rising. Raging existential winds present, carrying the foreign converted nature; capable of cutting into the existence of any being whose Akashic Civilizational Intent is of insufficient rarity to ward it. Continue with caution.|
Inside, the mine was a vast hollow throat of obsidian blue crystal, the carved walls still bearing the marks of long mining, scaffolding of pale tal hanging abandoned in the deeper reaches.
And the winds ca almost at once, raging existential gusts that carried the converted foreign nature on them, sweeping up through the shaft, the kind of wind that would have flayed the existence off any being whose Intent was too weak to turn it aside. It tried to cut into all of them!
WUU! WUU! WUU!
Noah withstood it without effort and kept the Aura wrapped firm around Seo-yeon, the two of them passing through the flaying wind untouched. The other consideration was the Swords as they were strong enough to withstand all this, and Andro held his own with the unbothered steadiness of a Fifth Scale being on familiar ground!
They delved deeper.
The Pulse strengthened with every length of descent, the beating of it growing heavier, the foreign nature pressing harder against every existence in the shaft. And then, as they passed through a turning in the great crystal throat, his own existence pulled at him.
Not toward danger. Towards... want! Towards Loot! His senses were tingling!
His foundations, steeped now in Infinity and THE Primordial Source, recognized sothing ahead and leaned toward it. He shifted the group’s direction, turning them away from the path Andro had been following and toward the pull, and in doing so he steered them into a vibrant storm that would have clouded one’s vision!
Beyond the storm, set into the crystal wall, a cluster of Eridarch Ore shone.
It was the banded crystalline tal he had been told about and had not yet seen, dark and layered and luminous, each band holding its thread of Infinity beside its thread of Primordial Source, the two authorities suspended together in defiance of every law that should have annihilated them. It glowed in the dark of THE Maw with a light that was almost gentle, which felt like a lie given everything he knew it was worth and everything it had cost.
Andro looked at the cluster, and then at Noah, with new attention.
"Soone with a nose like yours should have been brought here a great deal sooner," he said. He drifted closer to the Ore, careful not to touch it.
"Eridarch Ore can be drawn out using either Infinity or the Primordial Source. You channel the authority into the lattice, match it to the thread of its own kind, and coax the band free. It takes vast reserves to do it, because the Ore does not give itself up easily. The half of it that responds to you is terrifying enough on its own. But the other half, the opposite authority, resists. And if you mine it wrong, if you let the two threads co out of balance, the Infinity and the Primordial Source within the Ore clash...and they explode." His voice flattened.
"An explosion from a single improperly mined cluster can wipe out an Einherjar Source. Or a weak Fourth Scale equivalent. Clean off the board, identity and all."
He gestured at the shaft around them, at the abandoned scaffolding and the raging wind.
"And recently, with the Pulse worsening, the balance has beco impossible to hold. Every attempt to mine, no matter how careful, ends in collapse. In death. That is the other reason we stopped working THE Maw. It was that the Ore itself stopped letting us take it without killing us for the trouble."
...!
Noah looked at the cluster of Eridarch Ore, at the gentle deadly glow of it in the dark, and made a decision.
"Wait here," he told Seo-yeon, and lifted her gently from his shoulder, setting her in place behind him. "I want to look at sothing."
He floated ahead, toward the shining cluster, alone.
And Da Seraphine floated up beside him as he went, not crowding him, but close, her sozoic Scale presence settling at his flank with the quiet readiness of a being prepared to put herself between him and whatever happened next, should the Ore or the Pulse or the Maw itself decide to be problematic!
Noah reached the cluster of Eridarch Ore and did not channel Infinity into it, and he did not channel THE Primordial Source into it, because both of those were the thods that got beings killed.
He used THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian instead.
The Aura was the one expression he had that held everything at once, Infinity and Primordial Source and the nine Pri Causes and the Observable and Unobservable Force, all of it integrated and amplified through the wild anomalous nature of THE Source Barbarian.
So rather than matching one thread of the Ore and fighting the other, he reached out with the whole of it, the obsidian gold settling over the shining cluster, and t both threads at once. The Infinity in the lattice found Infinity in his Aura. THE Primordial Source in the lattice found Primordial Source in his Aura.
Neither thread was left to resist while the other was coaxed, because he was offering both of them a ho in the sa motion, and the Ore, which had killed careful Source Lifeforms for refusing to co out in balance, ca out in perfect balance because balance was the only thing Noah wanted!
HUUM!
The band of Eridarch Ore lifted free of the crystal wall, intact, unexploded, drifting into the obsidian gold of his Aura without so much as a flicker of the clash that had been wiping out Source Lifeforms across the recent months!
|Resource secured: Eridarch Ore.|
|Properties: A crystalline tal in which pure stable Infinity and Primordial Source are bound together in a single lattice. Among the most effective progression materials for Third, Fourth, and Fifth Scale beings in existence. Refining with Eridarch Ore allows a lifeform to smoothly form their Akashic Civilizational Intent and step into the Fourth Scale, and has shown the capacity to elevate an Intent toward a higher rarity, as well as to ease the path toward the Fifth Scale.|
|Your Aura of THE Source Barbarian is reacting to the Ore. THE Aura currently functions as a unified expression of all your capabilities but does not hold a formal Akashic Civilizational Intent designation, as you exist outside Vakochev’s Scales. The bound nature of Eridarch Ore is compatible with the Aura’s structure. Refining a sufficient quantity of Eridarch Ore into THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian may grant the Aura an official identity as an Akashic Civilizational Intent, formalizing what it already does into a recognized record imposed upon existence.|
...!
Noah turned that over with genuine interest.
His Aura already behaved like an Intent. It had pressed on Fourth Scale beings and felt heavier than a third-rarity Intent when he unleashed it, and yet it carried no formal designation, because he was off the Scales entirely and the frawork had no slot to put him in!
The Ore offered to give the Aura a na in the language existence actually spoke, to turn the thing he had built into a record that reality would formally acknowledge, the way it acknowledged the Intents of every Fourth and Fifth Scale being.
He put the band of Eridarch Ore away in his existence, and sent his directions inward to Ruination.
Analyze it. All of it. Determine whether sothing like this could be replicated, grown, produced deliberately in THE Infiniverse.
|Understood. Beginning full analysis.|
He was about to turn back to Da Seraphine, to say sothing, when the Maw changed around them!
HUUM!
Deep below, far past the depths Andro had said the Source Lifeforms no longer went, sothing triggered.
The Pulse, which had been beating in its slow heavy rhythm the whole way down, lost the rhythm. It went chaotic, the steady beat breaking into sothing erratic and rising, and the foreign converted nature that rode on it surged up through the shaft with new violence!
The raging existential winds tore harder. The instability climbed, and every being in the depths felt it at once, the whole of THE Maw shuddering as whatever sat at its bottom stirred!
Noah focused on the instability, and the light of his Infinite Cause began to bloom around him.
He reached out with it, the way he had reached into Chernobyl, checking the integrity of the domain at the foundational level, examining THE First Cause of Arkethys and the Pri Causes built into it. He expected to find what he had found in Chernobyl!
Deterioration. Failing Causes guttering toward collapse, a domain coming apart at its foundation, the familiar shape of an Observable Existence beginning to die.
He found nothing of the kind!
Oh!
He found, to his genuine astonishnt, that the Pri Causes of Arkethys were vibrant. Not deteriorating. Not guttering. Not failing in any direction he could read. They blazed with strength, every one of them, more vigorous than the Causes of a domain in this state had any right to be!
|Analysis of THE First Cause of Arkethys: The Pri Causes of this Observable Existence are not deteriorating. They are, by every standard asure, stronger than ever. However, their identity and standing have been altered by an unfathomable force. They exhibit qualities never before observed in their respective natures. The Pri Causes themselves have been influenced by an unstable weaving that is transforming what each one stands for, converting their fundantal aning into sothing else.|
|The instability of Arkethys does not originate from failing Causes. It originates from Causes that are being changed. The domain is not dying. The domain is becoming sothing older, other than what it was, at the level of its foundational truths, and the lifeforms and authorities within it are being dragged along into that sa foreign nature.|
...!
Noah frowned, THE Infinite Cause light churning around him!
The foundational truths of the entire Observable Existence were being altered, converted, transford into sothing they had not been, and everything else, the Pulse, the unraveling of Infinity and Primordial Source, the erasure of identities, was downstream of that!
Sothing had reached into the bedrock truths that Arkethys was built on and begun rewriting them!
The winds raged harder, the chaotic Pulse climbing, the foreign nature pressing in from every surface of THE Maw, and Da Seraphine’s composed features tightened as she felt the depths stir toward sothing none of them could yet see.
"Pull back!" she said.
...!
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