Noah understood exactly where he stood, and he let the cold certainty of it fill his voice.
"You think you’re inside my body, growing into my foundation. You’re not. You’re rely inside my heart." He took a step toward the corpse’s face.
"My heart...beats with Infinity, yes. But it beats even more with Quintessence, the irreducible essence of every single thing that exists. My identity is bound to my Infinity, and bound even tighter to my Quintessence. And what is held inside my Organ of Existence is mine, by the whole nature of what it is. It is for to take."
He held the thing’s stolen gaze without blinking.
"So you, Sealed One, are the grandest al that ever buried itself in a mine. Your power is now held inside an organ whose entire purpose is to make what it holds mine to use. And with every beat of my heart, it will draw on you. A little. And a little more. With every single beat, forever, until you are nothing but a dried-up cleaved hand with no power left in it at all."
HUUM!
THE Sealed One stared at him.
And then it laughed, and the laugh was worse than the arrogance, because there was nothing in it but genuine delight! Genuine! Delight!
"Try it," it said, rising slowly back to its full height on the corpse’s nose. "Try it, little thing. The more unique you are, the better. The more problems you make for , the better. Do you have any idea how long I have been bored? Do you understand the tedium of waking in one small mind after another, each of them folding the instant I touch it, none of them worth the effort of the taking?" Its eyes shone.
"I am intrigued. Truly intrigued. I did not think this recent Age had a single thing left in it capable of intriguing , and here you are. So go on. Drain , beat by beat. Let us find out which of us runs dry first, the patient thing...or the clever one."
Noah closed his eyes after he heard such words.
Multicolored Quintessence Infiniforce burned to life around him, the essence-light of every irreducible thing, and it swirled, condensing, deepening, until it resolved into Osmontian Absolute Infinity, his identity made into pure authority.
From him it spread out across the entire domain, across the corpse and the drifting fragnts of Observable Existence and the dead and vibrant Causes, and it ford chains!
Endless chains of Osmontian Absolute Infinity, link upon link upon link, weaving through the whole vast space, wrapping the corpse, binding the shattered worlds, threading through the swirling currents themselves, a prison built inside the prison of his heart, the chains turning endlessly through the domain with no beginning and no end and no edge anywhere for the thing inside to set itself against!
THE Sealed One watched the chains spread across its dead kingdom, and laughed harder.
"Good," it said, and the word was genuine and terrible. "Good! GOOD!"
BOOM!
Noah opened his eyes, looked one last ti at the thing wearing his aged face, and brought his palm to his own chest in a single defiant strike, sealing the domain, sealing the chains, sealing the laughing ancient thing into the heart that would spend it beat by beat for as long as it took.
And he vanished from that place!
---
Noah opened his eyes and ca back to THE Maw, and his body was trembling.
He stood in the dark of the mine, where four rivers of light had been drunk down not long ago, and for the first ti in longer than he cared to count, his existence was not entirely his own to command. His expression was heavy. His legs wanted to fold.
He reached out and grabbed the surrounding existence itself for support, fingers closing on the substrate of the place the way a falling man grabs a railing, and he caught himself a breath before his knees t the ground.
He did not let them et the ground. That, at least, he refused!
The prompts ca while he held himself up.
|Status: You have montarily contained THE Sealed One within your existence. The action draws on the entirety of your Osmontian Absolute Infinity to maintain. A slight lapse in concentration, a single mont where your identity wavers, and THE Sealed One may break the constraint and resu what it began.|
|You have co under the influence of sothing unfathomably old, presumably active before THE Scales of Existence were ever laid. The full nature of it cannot be assessed. What can be assessed are its impositions.|
|THE Directives of THE Sealed One have been imposed upon your existence:|
|First Directive: You cannot speak of THE Sealed One, nor share any information concerning it, by any ans, to anyone. The knowledge is sealed behind the seal. You may acknowledge that sothing is wrong. You may not say what.|
|Second Directive: You must devour and feed your existence a set Unit of Existential Biomass to maintain yourself and to feed the hunger of THE Sealed One. This hunger is not static. It will grow. What satisfies it today will not satisfy it tomorrow, and the requirent will climb as the contained existence stirs against its chains.|
|Third Directive, imposed by THE Sealed One upon itself and upon you both: If more components of its scattered existence are not found and taken into your existence over ti, an Irreversible Source Detonation will occur. The detonation will unravel its identity and yours, completely, across the whole of existence. It has bound its survival to your progress in gathering it.|
...!
Noah read it with heavy eyes, and did not look away from the weight of it.
THE Sealed One was a monstrous thing, and he was not going to make the mistake of underestimating it by even a hair.
A monster from before THE Scales. A monster he still knew almost nothing about, that he was now forbidden from even describing, that had bound its hunger and its detonation to his own existence so that saving himself ant feeding it and feeding it ant strengthening the thing he was trying to starve.
It was, he could admit, a horrendous trap.
And yet.
His existence steadied as he held himself up, and underneath the weight of the calamity, he began to feel the other things. The things a different being might have been too busy panicking to notice, and that Noah, who had built his entire existence out of turning catastrophe into fuel, noticed at once.
He raised his hand. It trembled slightly. And his hand alone felt unfathomably sharp, the way a blade feels sharp before you have done anything with it, a latent edge sitting in his palm that had not been there before.
|Assessnt of secondary effects. The following are consequences of the contained presence that may be classified as positive:|
|THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian has been influenced by THE Intent of THE Sealed One. It has begun transforming into an unranked and unrecognized Akashic Civilizational Intent. All of your knowledge, your records, your foundations, and every component of your power are beginning to draw together into a true Intent of your own. It may not retain this form or this na once fully realized; it is becoming sothing the frawork has no slot for. Resources such as Eridarch Ore will aid and accelerate this transformation. It is now theorized that the mining of Eridarch Ore across the ages gradually loosened whatever sealed THE Sealed One, which is what permitted the events of today to occur.|
|Your Infinity and THE Primordial Source have developed a natural inclination to resonate and combine. They now behave like boundlessly interacting strings and waves within your existence, and each ti they collide they produce unknown sparks. These sparks calibrate and elevate your Source.|
...!
The prompts kept coming, layer after layer of them, and Noah felt the ongoing changes moving through his existence even as the information described them, the two processes running together, the calamity and the cataloguing of the calamity arriving at once.
|Your existence and the existence of THE Sealed One are locked in a contest of supremacy. The contest is being waged at the foundational level, identity against conversion, your nature against its nature. You currently hold the upper hand. The reasons are specific. Your Osmontian Absolute Infinity, with its identity forged unbreakable into its foundation and its endless boundless nature, paired with your infallible Quintessence, the irreducible essence of what you are, is the sole reason you have not already been converted. You held the upper hand because you are more yourself than anything it has ever crawled into.|
|Boundless information and knowledge are being drawn from the contained Sealed One, slowly, beat by beat. Its presence within your existence, even contained, even chained, has catalyzed the ergence of THE Prival Form of Old. As your existence draws on the contained power, you will gain the capacity to transform and wield the power of THE Sealed One itself.|
...!
Noah’s entire body buzzed, and the surrounding existence of THE Maw shuddered around him in answer, the dark mine trembling at the proximity of whatever he was becoming.
He looked down at himself. He moved his suit aside, the obsidian Armant parting at his chest, and looked at what had appeared there.
His muscular chest carried a tattoo now. A massive, intricate, circular runic design, worked across the skin over his heart, filled with his Osmontian Absolute Infinity and a great deal more besides, threads of Quintessence and Primordial Source and the nine Pri Causes all woven through it.
And it was not still. The runic circle was alive, swirling constantly, its lines turning and grinding against one another in a slow ceaseless rotation, and Noah understood without being told what he was looking at. This was the seal. The Calabi-Yau folding he had thrown around his own heart, the prison of endless chains he had built around the laughing ancient thing, rendered onto his flesh as a living mark, grinding without pause, turning forever, pulling the power of a monster from before THE Scales out of his heart and into himself a fraction at a ti.
A wound and an engine, both at once. A thing that would kill him if it stopped and feed him as long as it turned.
|Final assessnt. All of the above is preliminary. The unknowns vastly outnumber the knowns, and information will continue to be extracted from the contained presence over ti, at a rate set by your heart. THE Sealed One is a trendous adversity. It is the kind of adversity that does not have a middle outco. It will either break you completely, unraveling your identity across the whole of existence in an Irreversible Source Detonation, or it will transform you into sothing existence has not seen since before THE Scales were laid. There is no version of this where you walk away unchanged. There is only the breaking, or the becoming.|
...!
Noah stood in the dark of THE Maw, one hand still braced against existence for support, the living seal grinding endlessly over his heart, a monster chained inside him and feeding him as it strained against the chains.
He let his suit fall closed over the swirling mark.
He had wanted adversity. He did not think it would take on such a terrifying form!
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