Chapter 735: Pure! I |
The bulls charged, and Achilles decided he wanted to test something before anything else!
He had established his Cause and formed his Anchor and felt his immensity rise past what a Third Scale entity carried, but feeling a thing and confirming it were two different matters, and the creatures bearing down on him offered a convenient opportunity to confirm.
His perception caught their details as they came.
|Fledgling Source Lifeform.|
|Power assessment: slightly above Silurian Paleozoic Scale.|
|Anchored to the obsidian stone. Cannot leave its surface.|
So they sat above the second tier of THE Third Scale. Respectable, by most reckonings. Enough to grind down most beings foolish enough to enter this trial without the foundations to survive it.
He let the nearest one reach him as it roared!
OOOH!
He did not budge!
Not a step back. Not a shift in his footing. The bull’s full charge met his fist and his fist won the argument entirely, the creature’s massive head snapping to a halt against his knuckles while the rest of its body kept trying to move forward into a position it could no longer reach.
...!
"Haha...HAHA!"
A laugh tore out of him, half disbelief and half pure satisfaction.
This was his power. Not borrowed, not consumed from something else and worn temporarily. His!
He grabbed the bull by its horns, planted himself, and roared like something that had stopped pretending to be civilized.
"Assimilate!"
BOOM!
Brilliant multicolored light gushed out of him for the first time in full view, the light of THE Assimilation Cause finally showing what it actually was. It poured from his form and wrapped around the bull in thick coiling ropes that latched onto every part of the creature at once, and then it pulled, drawing the Fledgling Source Lifeform inward toward his existence with a hunger that did not negotiate.
The bull came apart into light and the light went into him.
He felt the sliver of Pure Primordial Essence the creature had carried settle somewhere deep, a small thing on its own but a thing his foundations recognized as valuable in ways that went past its size.
The others did not wait.
They came from every branch of the maze at once, dozens of them charging across the obsidian pathways with their crimson eyes fixed on knocking him off the stone. He let them come!
He moved toward the distant exit at his own pace and refused to be moved by anything that struck him along the way, planting himself like a pillar somebody had forgotten to make liftable.
A bull hit him from the side. He took the blow, grabbed it, assimilated it.
Two more hit him from behind. He did not turn around. Tentacles of multicolored light erupted from his back without him needing to look, wrapped both of them, and drew them in while he kept walking forward!
ROOAR!
That was when the light of THE Assimilation Cause truly began to unveil itself.
It was not a single reaching thing anymore. Millions of tentacles erupted from his existence in every direction at once, each one finding a target across the maze, each one latching and pulling and feeding the Cause that fed him.
The Fledgling Source Lifeforms charged into a being that consumed them faster than they could reach him, their slivers of Primordial Essence accumulating within him one after another until the accumulation stopped feeling like individual additions and started feeling like a current.
He walked the whole length of the maze like that!
Unmoved. Unbothered. A pillar that happened to be walking, swallowing everything that threw itself at him and growing denser with each one!
The roars thinned out. The charges came less often. The crimson eyes grew fewer as the maze emptied of the things that had filled it, and the obsidian pathways stretched ahead of him with progressively less standing between him and where he was going.
By the end, the light of THE Assimilation Cause hung around him like he had always been wearing it.
He stood before the exit of this place as he wss... in a region of endless obsidian seas.
The waters stretched in every direction without horizon, dark and still and reflecting nothing, and he ignored all of it. The seas, the absence of any other landmark, whatever this space was meant to be on the far side of the maze he had crossed, none of it held his attention. What held his attention was what he felt happening inside his existence.
The slivers of Pure Primordial Essence he had taken from the Fledgling Source Lifeforms were integrating.
He felt them gather first, the small fragments he had pulled from dozens of consumed creatures drawing toward each other within his foundations and combining into something larger than the sum of the pieces. Then he felt that combined essence begin threading into him, settling into THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation and the Cause surrounding it with the quality of something foundational finding the place it belonged.
He understood what it was as it integrated.
This was the purest authority Source Lifeforms began with. Before the wings and the blades and the letters of THE Primordial Tongue, before any of the grand expressions he had witnessed from Sir William or the Guardian of the Stone, there was this.
Pure Primordial Essence. The starting material of beings that operated beneath all Nine Prime Causes, drawn from the well that had produced the potential the Causes themselves divided out of.
And now he was integrating it. Assimilating it!
|Assimilation Active: Pure Primordial Essence.|
|This is the foundational authority from which Source Lifeforms originate. It operates beneath the level of Prime Causes, connected to the weavings of THE Primordial Source itself.|
|Your Assimilation Cause has gained tremendous foundational backing. THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation is now connected, at a nascent level, to the weavings of THE Primordial Source.|
|Effect: Your Prime Cause now rests on a foundation shared by Source Lifeforms rather than ordinary existences. The ceiling of what your Assimilation Cause can express has risen accordingly.|
|Effect: If sufficient Pure Primordial Essence is Assimilated, you may declare additional Prime Causes for your existence, expanding beyond THE Assimilation Cause alone.|
|Effect: THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation has begun producing trace Pure Primordial Essence on its own, the same way it produces Observable Force. Production is currently very, very minimal and will scale with continued integration.|
|Effect: Your existence has gained partial resistance to authorities derived from THE Primordial Source. Source-level techniques that would previously have excluded you entirely now register as something you can perceive and, in time, approach.|
...!
That last line was the one that mattered most.
The barrier he had felt during the transit here, the absolute boundary between himself and the obsidian currents Sir William wielded, the thing that had told him in no uncertain terms that THE Primordial Source was a wall rather than a door.
The wall had developed a seam!
Oh!
A seam!
Not an opening yet. Not anything he could push through today. But a seam, the first indication that the boundary which had seemed absolute was in fact a matter of degree, and that with enough Pure Primordial Essence accumulated the way he had accumulated everything else across his existence, the door he had assumed was a wall might become a door after all.
He stood in the endless obsidian seas and felt his Primordial Realm settle into its expanded foundation, denser and grander and resting now on something that beings of Sir William’s category had started from.
Additional Prime Causes. A path toward THE Primordial Source itself!