Chapter 5569: Four Numbers! II

Across the shaking flats, Anaximander looked over at him through the heavy winds. There was no fear in the scholar’s face. There was something quieter and heavier, sitting beside the fresh sadness already there.

"What is happening to you?" he asked somberly.

Noah raised his hands and looked at them.

CREAK!

Space distorted around his fingers as he lifted them, thin lines of strain webbing out through the air and sealing themselves shut again, the domain flinching away from ten ordinary fingers!

"I am expressing myself," Noah said. "Fully. Who I am, all of it, all at once."

He turned his hands over slowly, watching the air bend. "I don’t have control over it yet."

He lowered his hands.

"But the solution should be easy."

He breathed out and closed his eyes again.

As much as some part of him wanted to, he could not go back to his old system. The Scales were familiar. The grades, the ranks, the ladders, the tallies, every rung of it was familiar. He had even kept all of it, saved inside THE Infiniverse, because in the end he could not entirely let it go.

But he had begun to be unfathomably true. He had generated something of his own, out of nothing but himself, and a being who had done that could not keep measuring himself with borrowed rulers.

He would have to look at himself differently now.

So at this moment, standing in the bowl of bent sand with the winds still circling him, Noah turned his attention inward and focused on the singularity.

His light.

He did not command it. Commanding was for external things, and this was not external. He communicated with it instead, the way a man communicates with his own heartbeat when he finally sits still long enough to listen, and the singularity answered by simply being understood.

Its hum ran through him, ancient and grand and his.

Every moment of listening taught him something, because every moment of listening was self-knowledge. This was Provenance Essence!

This was what he generated. It was not a store of power to be spent. It was an ongoing statement of what he was, and the pressure wrecking the domain was only that statement spoken too loudly, without shape.

Shape could be learned. He was already learning it. His mind filled with possibilities, one after another, each opening onto ten more.

And then...

Noah smiled.

And at this time, he called out.

"Oh, Ruination."

HUUM!

Light gathered beside him and became a figure!

Her illusory form took shape in strands of crimson and blue, the familiar silhouette he had carried on through wars beyond counting, and she...was crying.

She appeared already wiping at her face with both hands, over and over, quick and precise the way she did everything, as if she wanted the tears to stop and could not make them stop, and they kept coming anyway, bright drops sliding down through her translucent light!

...!

Because Noah had cast out many things.

She had felt every one of them arrive. The Source. The Causes. Infinity. The Heart. The entire contents of his existence, delivered into THE Infiniverse, one treasure after another set down and pushed away, and from the far side of a silent channel it had felt like watching someone give away everything he was as even she...felt disconnected! When he had been so close!

Noah’s heart pained when he saw her like this.

He crossed the sand to her, and the domain shuddered under every step, and he did not care, and he took her into his arms.

"I’m sorry," he said quietly. "I had to put many things aside."

She shook against him without a sound.

"But you are never something that came from others." His hand rested on the back of her head. "Most of what you are came from our journey together. And it will always continue. Okay?"

"..."

Ruination looked up at him.

Then she stepped back, wiped her eyes one last time, and waved her hands. Between them, light condensed into a circlet of deep blue, slender and clean, turning slowly in the air.

THE Circlet of the Quintessential Ruin, offered back to him.

Noah smiled and took it, and set it on his head.

Ruination watched him do it, and her hands came together in front of her, and her voice came out small.

"Always together?"

"Always together," Noah said.

He let the words sit for a moment. Then he continued.

"Now. I want you to be the one to display the prompts of my new existence. Though this time, from here on out, I will be generating the knowledge." He tapped his own chest once.

"It comes from me now. You can make it simpler for us to look at and analyze. Okay?"

Ruination nodded.

Her figure dissolved into a glimmer of crimson blue light that flowed upward and into the circlet, and it settled loosely above his head, riding there the way a crown rides on a king who has stopped needing one and wears it anyway.

The last of the change moved through him then.

The adornments on his body, robes and wrappings that had carried him across Dimensions, were riddled through with the black filth his transformation had expelled, and now they burned away entirely, ash scattering on the wind. In their place, pristine white pants took form, plain and heavy, burning with a sense of ancientness that no forge in existence had put there!

Above the waist he was laid bare, and his muscular upper body stood clean under the obelisk light, every line of it pristine, a physique with nothing borrowed in it anywhere.

Dark hair. Obsidian singularities for pupils. A crown of blue light!

Noah closed his eyes.

And he heard Ruination’s voice once more.

|An unfathomable change has occurred to your existence.|

|What is being identified as Provenance Essence has bloomed within you in the form of a singularity. Your existence has communicated with itself to better allow you to grasp your power, and it has generated a System of Power and Measurement unique to you, applicable to your power alone.|

|When you gaze upon others, their weavings will also appear and be translated into this same System of Measurement.|

|Your existence has been broken down into the following:|

|VERITAS: how true you are to yourself.|

|PROVENANCE: how much of you is your own generation.|

|POTENTIA: what you could still become.|

|PONDUS: the weight you can carry without breaking.|

Noah looked at these prompts with a smile.

This was what his existence wanted to simplify things down to. Four measures. Not grades handed down from trees older than his species, not Scales built in answer to another being’s framework. Four questions a man could ask himself, made into numbers!

He went a step further.

"Show me my current Status Panel."

WAA!

|STATUS PANEL: NOAH OSMONT|

|VERITAS: 10|

|PROVENANCE: 1(???)|

|POTENTIA: INFINITE|

|PONDUS: 5|

|THE OSMONTIAN TONGUE: I AM · OSMONT · QUINTESSENTIAL · HUMAN · PROTAGONIST|

|THE NINE FOUNDATIONS: S-RANK EBAD|

|THE Unkneeling Crown · THE Tide That Owes Nothing · THE Mirror That Keeps · THE Hunger That Refines · THE Unmoved Verdict · THE Pure Trajectory · THE All-Drawing Stillness · THE Remembered Truth · THE Sovereign Existence|

|All Foundations stemmed from your own making. They have been naturally elevated through your transformation.|

...!

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