Chapter 5401: THE Genesis Tesseract I
Thalassarch Nereon.
A monstrous thing whose actions had led to the deaths of more lifeforms than any being could honestly count. One could not even begin to estimate the trillions of realms and domains that lived within a single Observable Existence, let alone the lives inside each of them.
And inside an Observable Existence made mostly of water, the number went somewhere past innumerable. The seas held more life than the land ever could, layer beneath layer beneath layer of it, choirs in the currents and cities in the trenches and peoples in the dark who had never once seen a surface. An ocean-Observable-Existence was not a domain with life in it. It was life, all the way down, packed into every drop!
This being had killed all of it. Every last drop of it. Trying to protect it!
It was an unfortunate and utterly horrific scenario to find oneself standing in.
So even as the monstrous thing voiced itself toward him and radiated terrible waves of power across the gigaparsecs, Noah’s identity came to the forefront, the way it always did now, because his identity was his power and his power answered first with who he was. And first and foremost, before anything else, he was Quintessential, and he was tyrannical. That was the irreducible truth of him, and it shaped how he spoke and how he stood and how he met even a grief-warped titan-beast at THE Fifth Scale.
He showed no fear. He came out, if anything, a little domineering.
"What I did," Noah said, his voice carrying across the transforming sea, "was take an Observable Existence that you ruined and decimated countless years ago, and resuscitate it into something that can live again. It undoes nothing too much, really. It will not bring back the countless lives that perished all that time ago. But it gives new life a chance to bloom here, where before there was only your drowning and your grief." He held the leviathan’s vast gaze.
"I feel for you. I do. I understand why you did what you did, better than you might think. But the results you got were still catastrophic, intent or no intent. That part doesn’t really care how holy your reasons were. Alas. Such is existence...such is existence..."
BOOM!
...!
His words were heavy, and they landed, and in the next moment Thalassarch Nereon bellowed.
And in the bellow, Noah felt something that genuinely surprised him. Because after all these years, drowning in the slow death of his own Observable Existence, carrying the weight of an extinction he had caused, the being had not stayed still. The guilt itself had done something to him! He had elevated his Intent. From the second rarity he had carried as a living Emperor, all the way up, through the third, to the fourth. An Olympian Intent, grown not from triumph but from a grief so total it had reshaped the foundation of what he was.
WAA!
And Noah, reaching into that Intent as the bellow rolled out, felt what it was made of.
It was made of voices. Endless grief and guilt and a chorus of thoughts that seemed to tell themselves through the Intent, over and over, without pause, without mercy. It was your fault. You massacred your own people. You massacred your entire family. You collapsed an entire Observable Existence with your own hands, reaching for a power you told yourself was for them. The voices filled the Intent, layered into its very structure, dark and malevolent and turned entirely inward, a hatred of oneself so deep that Noah could not find the bottom of it. The being had spent the long death building an Olympian Intent out of nothing but self-loathing, refining his own grief into a fourth-rarity record of accusation, judge and jury and condemned all folded into one drowning sovereign!
The moment Noah felt that, he let his defenses down.
Because he understood, reading the shape of the Intent, that this being did not even have the capacity to attack him. There was no aggression in it. There was no want left in it at all except the want to be punished. The bellowing was not a threat. It was a wound, made audible. The aura targeting Noah’s existence was not hunting him; it was simply what a being this grief-soaked radiated, pressing outward because there was nowhere inward left for it to go!
The bellows went on, and as they did, Noah realized the being was finding some form of goodness in this moment. Some recompense. The leviathan was looking past Noah, at the healed Observable Existence rising and transforming all around them, the cerulean paradise blooming where his drowned graveyard had been, and there was something in the vast warped face that had not been there in countless years. Not peace. Nothing so clean as peace. But the sight of life given a chance to return to the place he had killed was reaching something in him that the guilt had not entirely smothered.
HUUM!
Noah’s mother shook her head, a quiet sadness moving across her face as she watched the creature grieve. Seo-yeon and Henry held conflicted expressions, the child and the young man caught between the horror of what the being had done and the unbearable weight of what it was now suffering for it. A monster, and a victim of itself, both at once, and no easy way to feel about either.
But Noah truly could not spare too much of his attention for the unfathomably powerful thing across the gigaparsecs.
Because he had a treasure to collect.
He waved his hand and called out to THE Genesis Tesseract, and its mere approach made the surrounding existence begin to melt, the terrifying potency of its potential and immensity warping the space around it as it came, realms threatening to run like wax from the sheer pressure of a First Cause’s worth of beginning held in a single folded shape. The only reason everything did not melt down entirely was that Noah’s Intent had converged to cover the treasure on every side, sheathing the impossible thing in his identity so that it could move through the Observable Existence without unmaking it.
BOOM!
