Chapter 239: Vastness! I
There is a unique comfort in a small world.
A man who has only ever seen his own valley believes the valley is the measure of things. The mountains that ring it are the edge of what exists, and the sky above it is the whole of the sky, and he moves through his days with the quiet confidence of someone who has seen everything there is to see.
His viewpoint is complete because his viewpoint is all he has, and a thing that is all you have always feels like enough.
But expand what a man can see, and you take that comfort from him.
Show him that his valley is one of ten thousand valleys. Show him that the mountains ringing it are foothills to ranges he cannot name, that the sky above it continues past anything he imagined, that the world he thought he understood was a single grain in something too vast to hold in the mind. He does not become larger by seeing more. He becomes smaller. The more he perceives, the more he learns how infinitesimal he was the entire time, sitting in his valley and mistaking it for the world.
Damian was learning this now, and his valley had been the entire Lands of Stone.
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His perception spread outward from the Cradle of First Flames, and the geography of the world unrolled beneath it.
He sensed the Threshold Lands first, the barren stone and dry earth where he had spent his hidden summers, and past them the territories of the empires he knew.
He sensed the Sacred Mountains rising in their ranges, and across their slopes and peaks he felt the beasts that roamed them, powerful creatures at the Nine Circles moving through their territories with the unhurried confidence of things that nothing in their immediate world could threaten.
His perception passed over the Covenant of the First Stone, where the white walls still stood and the Hallowed Voice’s forces were no doubt still settling the aftermath of the war that had ended before it began. It passed over the Dominion of Crimson Stone, where the mausoleum he had built at the center of the citadel held his father’s bones.
It kept spreading.
He came to perceive the distant River of the World, the black rushing immensity that he had crossed earlier that same day, and beyond it the Lands of Demons, the scorching crimson plains and the glass-edged mountains and the capital where the Demon Emperor now lived as an ordinary creature stripped of everything he had been.
His perception went past even that.
And there, beyond the Lands of Demons, he found something he had not known existed. A vast stretch of endless blue sea, spanning so far that his expanding perception took time to cross it, its surface torn by chaotic storms and atmospheres that churned with a violence that had nothing to do with anything living. It was a sea that no tribe of the Lands of Stone had ever spoken of, because no tribe of the Lands of Stone had ever known it was there.
He crossed it in his perception.
On the far side, the world changed again. Frost and cold took over, a glacial environment extending for thousands of miles, white and blue and silent. And in that frozen expanse, his perception found something that made him still.
Civilization.
Structures of ice, carved and shaped and raised into towers and halls, an entire empire built into the glacial waste and secluded unto itself, a people his Lands of Stone had never heard of living lives his Lands of Stone could not imagine. They had been there the whole time. Across the sea, past the demons, beyond everything anyone he knew had ever mapped, an empire of ice had been existing on its own for who knew how long.
His perception kept spreading, faster now.
Words bloomed before him.
|As the range of your Primordial Perception increases, your Scale of Existence exerts its authority across the regions you can now perceive.|
|Due to this, the feedback of all lifeforms now imposed under your Scale of Existence is increasing. Your Source is gaining exponentially more breadth and immensity.|
Damian sensed all of it.
In the Cradle, his physical body floated above the luminous lake, and his eyes shone with a terrifying obsidian light, and the breadth pouring into his Source from the newly perceived lands fed something in him that wanted more of it.
"More," he said, low at first, and then it tore out of him. "MORE!"
BOOM!
His voice boomed across the Cradle of First Flames and very likely woke every soul who had been trying to sleep that night, and his perception shot upward and expanded for tens of thousands of miles more.
It rose past the heights where ordinary Warriors could sense, past the clouds, into the elevations that belonged to the beings above the world. And there he perceived hundreds of floating landmasses, drifting through the distant skies, and on those landmasses, the Ancestral Celestials moved.
He observed them going about their lives.
They moved with pride and brilliance, each of them carrying themselves as though they owned the Ancestral Lands they stood upon, and in a sense they did. He saw Xuanwu among them, the massive winged turtle reduced by half, surrounded now by similarly powerful Ancestral Celestials who pressed close around it with grave expressions, asking it what had happened, the way beings asked questions when they believed they were facing a terrifying enemy. He watched them confer with the seriousness of a faction preparing for something it feared.
Past them, his perception found more floating landmasses holding other existences entirely.
These belonged to other Ancestral Celestials, other factions, other ideas of what an empire in the sky should be. The lands above the clouds were not unified. They had their own divisions, their own High Mountains and Skies of White, their own rivalries running between beings who had each exceeded the Nine Circles. It was a whole society up there, layered above the world below, going about its existence with the same politics and pride that every society carried.
To Damian, it did not matter.
With THE Primordial Source, he had stepped over every lifeform in the surrounding miles, and the miles were only growing. Even with the small fraction of access he had accumulated, even as a tiny leaf connected to that vast sea, none of the beings his perception was sweeping across could stand against what he carried!
He had proven it on Zhuque. He had proven it on Xuanwu. The hierarchy they had spent centuries climbing simply did not apply to the thing he had touched.
His perception continued to expand, and it rose past the floating landmasses, and there it found something new.
Space.
"Ah."
He perceived the vacuum for the first time. The vast emptiness that held no air, that extended above the floating lands and kept extending, dark and silent and endless. He sensed the immensity of it, the scale of a thing that made even the floating landmasses of the Ancestral Celestials look like dust suspended in a hall, and his body in the Cradle trembled as the perception settled into him.
The endless obsidian expanse of that space felt like the sea he had been trying to reach.
It felt like he had only just begun to look at THE Primordial Source. Like everything he had touched so far, the Murderous Saint and the Ancestral Celestials and the Scale spread across thousands of miles, had been the shallows, and here at last was the depth, the true vastness, the thing he was connected to by a single thin thread.
His obsidian eyes looked up.
His hand rose, and stretched toward the distant dark, and he felt something he could not explain. His whole existence was vibrating, every cell in his transformed body telling him the same thing, that it wanted to touch that vacuum, that it wanted to reach the vastness it had only just glimpsed, that the thread connecting him to THE Primordial Source was pulling him toward the place the Source truly lived.
He did not stop to think about whether he could survive it.
He did not stop to consider what it would mean, whether a body could exist in that emptiness, whether even a Primeval Viridis Lifeform bathed in Pure Primordial Essence could endure the vacuum his perception had only now learned to see.
Obsidian Primordial Source wrapped around him.
He looked at that distant dark, the space he could now perceive, and his body disappeared from the Cradle of First Flames with rapidity!
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