Chapter 5530: Existence!

<THE True Human Emperor>

The last thread of the Curse tore free of Hvitrmarr’s existence, and in the exact instant it left...Noah stretched that instant into infinity.

Everything froze.

The expelled obsidian hung motionless in its pillar far above. The endless blue paused mid-flood through nine reborn Organs! The falling snow beyond the White Steed’s frame stopped in the sky like scattered stars, and within the vaulted stillness of a frozen moment, THE True Human Emperor simply floated there, and sensed his existence.

He did not count. He did not calculate! For once, he only felt.

And in that frozen moment, two presences moved.

They were the only things in all the stillness permitted to move, for they were fused into the very self doing the stretching, and Ruination and THE Infiniverse came to him simultaneously, without a single word, and hugged him.

Ruination’s illusory form wrapped around him from one side, her strings folding over his shoulders like a mantle! THE Infiniverse pressed in from the other, her arms tight around the new body she had guarded the seeds of, her face buried against him, and neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing to say that their grip was not already saying! He had died. They had watched, from inside his splitting halves, shielded by his ending, and no protocol and no composure in either of them had survived the memory of that silence!

Noah smiled softly.

He raised his new hands, and patted both of their heads.

"I am sorry." His voice was quiet in the frozen vault. "I will try everything humanly possible...to not have something like that happen again."

He did not promise it would never happen. They would have known the lie! He promised the trying, which was the only thing a Human could honestly promise, and the two of them heard the honesty inside it and hugged him tighter while nodding against him, crown and existence holding their Emperor in a moment stretched wide enough to hold all three!

And Noah smiled, and turned his senses inward, into the body that held them.

His new body!

Regrown from the Root with so much Primeval weaving that it hardly remembered what it had replaced, every bone and channel and sea woven from Primeval Osmontian Cells, and everything felt so unfathomably light! His will moved through himself without a single seam of resistance, thought arriving as action, intention arriving as fact!

And his Causes...

His Causes felt unfathomably grander!

All nine of them turned through his existence with a depth they had never carried, and he could feel WHY, for they were no longer only his! Each one was mixed now, married through nine reborn Organs to nine First Causes seated by the hands of Those Who Remain, and through those marriages, something was flowing back!

His Prime Cause of Existence carried a new note of sworn permanence from its union with Fealty! Adversity hummed with Valor’s charge-drawn breath! Tyranny had learned something from Mercy’s gentled claws, and Apocalypse from Temperance’s discipline, and all nine of them were visibly, actively undergoing a change, an evolution in slow glorious progress, growing grander with every moment they mingled with the First weavings of a Steed!

And when he looked at the whole of his existence together, he was shocked, as the prompts began.

|For enduring tremendous adversity, for dying within it and returning through it, and for completing what you began at the cost of everything: +25,000,000 Osmontian Biomass has been gained.|

...!

Twenty-five MILLION!

|All facets of your existence have been automatically upgraded to Rank B Ngetal. Osmontian Source Infinity aside, your Volume, your Output, your Trueness, and your Foundations now stand at the rank of reach and pervasion as their floor.|

|And above the floor, Master: your Second Foundation, THE Tide That Owes Nothing, your Intent, THE Ananke Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian, and your Osmontian Source Infinity have elevated to Rank A Idho. Near-permanence. Authority over endings. The rank your fused peak could only pretend toward, now standing as your base.|

|Your True Appendages have also been reborn alongside your body, and further elevated. THE Estuary Eye: Rank A Idho. THE Pinion Vigil: Rank A Idho. THE Hepatarch of the Undying Root: Rank A Idho, exhausted but grander for its work. THE Primeval Osmontian Marrow: Rank A Idho. THE Amaranthine Heart, THE Circlet, THE Quintessential Pantheon of THE Infiniverse: Rank A Idho. All of them stand at the rank of Yew, Master. Every instrument you carry is now an authority over endings.|

|For reference, as you will ask: elevation to Rank S Ebad is priced at 100,000,000 Osmontian Biomass per facet. The trembling shield-tree does not come cheaply. Reserves currently stand above 25,500,000.|

...!

Prompts of majesty and wonder pulsed!

Noah floated in the stretched stillness with his crown and his Observable Existence in his arms, and took all of it in, and for a long moment of the infinite moment, he simply...reflected.

He had died. He had stood in a sea of his own dead and been asked the question that every ruler owes and almost none ever answer, and he had answered it honestly. He had felt fear, and it had not broken him. He had felt doubt, and climbed through it!

The Root that saved him was spent. The door behind him was closed, and death, for the first time in his existence, was again a thing with consequences.

And somehow, that made all of it heavier, and all of it brighter at once! To climb without a net was simply...to be Human again. He had asked, once, on a golden island, whether immortality violated being human.

Existence, apparently, had heard the question.

And it was amidst this reflection that the prompts returned, and their tone had changed.

|Master. THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered at Rank A Idho for the first time.|

|The Tide has weighed what you have done. You have undertaken a tremendous act of giving: you have cleansed the Curse of a Steed whose lineage stems from Those Who Remain, at the price of your own death. You gave existence itself back to a dying Steed of the First Clutch of makers, and the Tide does not permit such giving to flow one way.|

|An Unfathomable wonder of unknown origins will be paid through this act of giving.|

...!

The moment the prompts finished...

CRACK!

Noah’s stretched moment of infinity shattered.

Time slammed back into motion around him, snow falling, blue flooding, the pillar climbing, and in the same heartbeat he felt something squeeze into existence directly above his palms, fold itself out of nothing with a small, dense, impossibly quiet weight, and drop into his hands.

It was...a simple white egg.

"..."

Noah stared at it.

There were no flashy lights! There were no terrifying bursts of power, no detonating skies, no light-years of split heavens announcing a boon’s arrival! The grandest Foundation he possessed, at the rank of authority over endings, triggered by an act of giving priced at his own death, had produced...a smooth, palm-sized, perfectly white egg, sitting in his hands.

|You have gained ?????.|

"..."

Even Ruination’s prompt had nothing else to offer! Five question marks, from the existence that had catalogued Curses of Those Who Remain and Character Sheets of Steeds, and the egg simply sat there, white and warm and silent, explaining absolutely nothing!

Noah’s eyes became heavy as he looked at it.

An unfathomable wonder of unknown origins. Unknown even to the Regard, unknown even to her! He turned it once in his fingers, felt nothing but smooth warmth and a faint, patient density, like something very large practicing being very small...and he put it away, deep into his stores, beside the Primeval limb and the Marrowbane Fruit and every other loaded thing he owned.

Because they were still within the body of Hvitrmarr.

And in front of them, the vaulted white-flame dark was gathering itself into a shape.

Light condensed! White flame drew inward from the reborn vaults, folding and slimming and settling, and a humanoid manifestation of Hvitrmarr formed before them!

She stood tall and straight-backed, robed in layered white that fell like fresh snowfall given tailoring, and her terrifying, regal beauty struck the vault silent. Hair of white flame poured down her back, still faintly burning without fuel or end! Twin slender curves of translucent ivory swept back from her temples, the ghost-echo of her horns, and her face was ageless and cold and heartbreakingly fine, the face of a queen carved by makers who had never once intended for it to know suffering! And her eyes, gold, ring within ring within ring, rested upon Noah and upon THE Infiniverse.

She was trying to show them nothing.

And Noah saw everything she was hiding! The happiness, three thousand years overdue, trembling at the very edges of that composed cold face. The hope, no longer punished, no longer priced, burning quietly in the rings of her eyes for the first time without agony answering it. The relief, vast as her true body, held back behind regal stillness because a queen of the First lineage did not weep in front of guests, and every nanosecond of her not-weeping was visibly, gloriously costing her!

She looked at them both for a long moment.

Then Hvitrmarr, First of her lineage in three thousand years to stand uncursed, gave them a light bow.

"I owe you...existence."

....!

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