Chapter 5144: Go Wild! I

Noah turned toward Ubergulden Adelheid.

"How many hours can you buy with those who seek to know your Custos?"

Ubergulden Adelheid raised her brows slightly.

"A few hours."

She said it plainly.

"I have been deflecting. The Magna Sorora are patient when patience serves their methodology, but they are patient in the manner of a tide. The water waits because it knows the shore is already beneath it. I can stretch the deflection a few more hours. Beyond that, silence becomes confession, and confession becomes grounds for many more things."

Noah nodded.

He thought about his Civilizational Holy War ticking down in the background of his consciousness, the twenty-hour countdown still running, and then he refocused on the being in front of him.

"Do you trust me to take on the role of a Custodes? That I can be powerful enough, akin to a Gilded One?"

The question was a heavy one.

He asked it without softening it.

Ubergulden Adelheid looked at him for a long moment.

"Before, I would have said a Bounded Lifeform cannot do much."

Her voice held the honesty.

"The gap is too vast. The engineering is too foundational. A Bounded Lifeform playing at Gilded standing would be a fish attempting to fly by flapping harder, and the attempt would end the same way every time. That is what I would have said before."

Her gold eyes settled on his.

"But I was reminded of THE Creature. A being who should not have been able to do what he has done, and yet has done it, and is still doing it, climbing toward something that our entire people have collectively failed to reach. And then there is the sheer reality that you were able to bind me as a Custos. That binding requires a Gilded One. It requires a ceremony with THE Magna Sorora. It requires engineering and ritual and oversight that you had none of. And yet the bond settled into me the same way any ceremonial bond would have settled, because your Infinity does not respect the protocols that should have prevented it."

She tilted her head slightly.

"There is something about you with your Infinity. I cannot name it precisely. But if you begin to amplify your Ego as well, if you lean into the identity cultivation that the Gilded use to stabilize their foundations, you may reach a configuration that cannot be easily distinguished from what a Gilded One actually is. I am not certain of this. But I am less certain that it is impossible than I was before we began interacting."

Noah looked at her closely.

Her answer was decent enough.

Okay. Okay!

He rose up from the wave of Quintessence Infiniforce and stretched his body. The multicolored seas around them rippled in response to his motion, currents adjusting to the shift in his posture the way loyal servants adjusted to the movements of their master. He rolled his shoulders once, cracked his neck, and looked down at Ubergulden Adelheid from his standing position.

"I have a little Civilizational Holy War to deal with first."

"If I were to get a bit wild in our Observable Existence during that process, should I expect attention from Gilded Ones down there? Would my actions draw eyes from above?"

Ubergulden Adelheid blinked at the question.

"Nearly all Gilded Ones don’t give a damn what happens in Observable Existence."

...!

"Only what happens in THE Braneworld Observable Existence matters to them. Your Observable is beneath their attention in the most literal sense of the word."

She considered for a moment, then offered him an analogy.

"Imagine you know there is an aquarium somewhere in your residence. A small glass box filled with tiny fish. You are aware the aquarium exists. You fed the fish once, a long time ago, when you first set the aquarium up. On rare occasions you might walk past it and glance inside to see what the fish are doing. But you do not think about the aquarium when you wake. You do not factor the fish into your decisions about your day. If one fish eats another fish, or if the water changes color like THE Loom, THE Belly of Existence, THE Fallout or your Pluvial Epoch of Existential Infinity, or if a particularly ambitious fish manages to jump slightly higher than the others, you do not notice. Because the aquarium is not where your life happens. It is a decoration in a room you rarely visit."

Her gold eyes held his without apology for the comparison.

"That is how most Gilded Ones view your Observable Existence. A small glass box. Tiny fish. Occasionally interesting if you happen to glance inside, but never urgent."

She continued.

"Most Gilded Ones who interact with your Observable at all do so for specific purposes. Some practice the Engineering of Egos on Bounded beings down there every now and then, using Primordial Architects as test subjects for configurations they want to refine before applying them to Gilded-tier beings. Others are the cruel, dissatisfied Gilded Ones who come down to torture the weak because cruelty against something smaller makes them feel grander about their own standing. They do...unsavory things in your Observable. But these visits are rare. Sporadic. Unmotivated by anything resembling strategic attention."

She shook her head.

"Otherwise, I would have been caught long ago. Even sealed, even suppressed to appear Bounded, I lived among your people for eons. If Gilded Ones were truly paying attention to the aquarium, my presence would have been detected within the first century of my arrival. The fact that I survived undetected for as long as I did tells you everything you need to know about how closely they watch."

Her voice shifted into something more practical.

"So do whatever you need to do. Go wild. As loudly as you can. Burn rivers of blood across THE Wyld if that serves your purposes. Collapse Primordial Architects by the dozens. None of it will draw Gilded eyes downward, because Gilded eyes are not pointed downward right now."

She paused.

"But in about three or four hours, we will need to begin preparing."

Her tone tightened with the urgency of someone whose clock was genuinely running.

"Painting you gold is not a single action. It is a sequence. You will need to be prepared physically and existentially. You will need to be transferred to THE Braneworld Observable Existence through a crossing that I will facilitate. I need to prepare things on my end as well."

She drew a slow breath before the next part.

"And I will be reaching out to a friend in THE Magna Sorora for help."

...!

Noah’s eyes sharpened at the word friend.

"A friend inside THE Magna Sorora. The organization that would privately execute you if they discovered what happened."

"Yes."

Ubergulden Adelheid’s voice didn’t waver.

"She may choose to scorch you from existence the moment she learns what has occurred. That is a real possibility. She is a Sister of THE Magna Sorora. Her loyalties are to the Sisterhood first and to personal bonds second. That is how the Sorora are engineered."

Her gold eyes held his.

"But if our friendship was real, and I believe it was, she will listen to me before she acts. She will evaluate the situation with the thoroughness her rank demands, and she will recognize that a solution serves the Sorora better than an execution in this case. Her inclusion in our plan would be foolproof. If she agrees to help, she can construct credentials from inside the system that the Magna Sorora cannot see through, because she understands the system from within."

She settled back on her wave.

"Those are the terms. Three to four hours for you to handle your affairs. Then we begin."

...!

Three to four hours to wrap up a Civilizational Holy War that was due in twenty hours.

Noah turned the timeline over in his mind. Three to four hours before Ubergulden Adelheid needed him painted gold and crossing into the Braneworld.

This...should be manageable.

He had already transformed the vast majority of his strongest into Nascent Hadeans. He had Beowulf and THE Living Elemental serving as training dummies. He had Midas now, a bloated golden Abomination at the Ediacaran Tier whose power dwarfed anything the designated opponents could field.

He had bodies running multiple operations simultaneously. He had Naldine monitoring THE Wyld. He had Emotive feeding him intelligence on every participant in the Holy War.

Three to four hours to get loud, get wild, and handle what needed handling in the Observable before he stepped into a terribly dangerous place!

He looked at Ubergulden Adelheid one more time.

"I’ll be back."

With a flicker of brilliance, he disappeared!

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