Published at 23rd of April 2026 11:30 am

Chapter 5148: False Idols! III

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The balconies that had held so many a moment ago now held fewer.

The surviving Calymmians froze in place, their flames guttering with confusion and dread. The Ediacaran Primordial Architects near the top, who had been about to descend with their superior contributions, halted where they stood. The mountain’s assembled population collectively absorbed what had just happened, and the absorption was not pretty.

Philemon Aristos stared down from his high balcony.

Both of his heads held expressions that had crossed from rage into something narrower, something that knew what dread felt like from close range. His plasmic golden flames had flickered down several orders of intensity while he watched his Calymmian forces burst across the lower levels of his own mountain. His two mouths opened together, and the voice that came out of them had lost some of the harmonic authority it had carried before.

"What power is this?"

His voice rolled down the slopes, unsteady for the first time.

"What taboo thing have you turned to? What have you done to yourself to be capable of that?"

His left head’s mouth worked.

"Do you know what you are doing now? Do you understand what you are pressing against? This is tantamount to spitting at the feet of THE Gilded Ones. We are their feet!We are what stands between them and the lower tiers of existence. We are the arrangement they placed here to receive the kinds of insults you are now offering. You are not defying Primordial Architects. You are defying the order that THE Gilded Ones themselves engineered across THE First Cause! This will not be tolerated. This cannot be tolerated! The moment word of this reaches-"

...!

The surrounding atmosphere began to waver and melt.

The pale stone at the base of the mountain softened under a heat that had not been there a moment ago. The air rippled with distortion. The temples higher up began to sweat at their edges, their carved proportions blurring slightly as the ambient temperature of THE Wyld itself started to respond to what was happening at the foot of THE Gilded White Mountain.

THE Creature’s flames rose higher in temperature.

The multicolored gold deepened into something closer to the bloody undercolor that had always lived beneath them. His posture remained floating and calm, but the flames now reached above his head in standing columns, their heat pressing outward across the slopes in waves that made the surviving Primordial Architects shield their own flames against his.

He spoke.

"I am going to cut off those feet."

His voice was almost conversational.

"I am going to cut them off, and I am going to teach all of you how to think for yourselves. You have been the feet of a False Golden Idol for far too long, and you have confused servitude with community, and you have confused engineering with belonging, and someone has to finally separate those confusions for you. That someone is going to be me. Today is the day you learn what your minds feel like when they are not being operated by external instructions."

The flames rose further.

"And any power I have, I obtained because I persevered. Through loss. Through grief. Through a foundation I shattered with my own hands and rebuilt across eons of climbing. I did not inherit this. I did not receive this. I did not accept any offers from any Idols. I climbed, and I bled. I continued when continuing was the only option that remained to me, and I continued when even that option ran out and I had to construct new ones from nothing. Every capacity I now wield is a capacity I earned through perseverance."

His eyes lifted to the highest balcony.

"So...Persevere."

BOOM!

Brutality ensued.

---

With every passing nanosecond, Noah was stronger than the previous nanosecond.

It was a unique sensation. His body continued generating endless Quintessence Infiniforce that filled his existence at a rate which had become self-sustaining and no longer required his active attention.

Observable Force poured into him endlessly from Ubergulden Adelheid through the bond that now functioned more as a wormhole than a channel, and her continuous contribution saturated him to a degree that most beings would have collapsed under. And above him, a faint THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity grew grander with every moment, the construction continuing as he actualized additional Civilizations into its mid-tiers, the Pillar becoming a catalog of Civilizational possibilities that stretched higher with every breath he took.

And yet Absolute Infinity seemed a bit distant still.

The threshold was closer than it had been an hour ago, closer than it had been a day ago, but it was not yet at hand. The final crossing from Uncountable Infinity into Absolute Infinity required something more than accumulated additions. It required an integration, a settling, a moment when the accumulated Civilizations and the saturated force and the engineered foundations all cohered into a single unified expression grand enough to cross the boundary.

That moment was not here yet. He felt it the way a climber felt the shape of a summit still above him. Clearly fuckin visible, but not yet touched.

But since he was forging THE First Infinite Scale and he got to decide what went into it, he now wanted to incorporate the amplification of Egos.

He could affirm to himself with certainty that his emotions had nothing to do with why he had not gone mad with Infinity.

As a weak F Rank Hunter back in his old world, or even his self when he had first put together the fragments of Ruination to affirm his Infinity, had not possessed emotions significant enough to compare with the Gilded Ones who amplified their Egos to existential thresholds.

His immunity from Infinity...did he really need some grand reason why? Maybe it just was what it was!

That was something to investigate more deeply someday. He thought back to Egos.

Uniquely, Ubergulden Adelheid belonged to THE Superbius Gilded Ones. They amplified their Egos to exceed what Pride itself stood for.

Superbius.

The word carried more than its surface translation. In the old tongues, superbia had been one name for Pride, the first and often considered greatest of the seven deadly sins, the Ego that preceded all falls and lay beneath every other Ego in subtle ways.

But superbius, the adjective form carried forward, implied something stronger. The haughty one. The sovereign one.

The Pride that was not merely inflated self-regard but a foundational conviction of one’s own supremacy, a Pride engineered so deeply that it became the substrate of identity rather than a feeling about identity. The Superbius Gilded Ones were Pride given form. Pride refined into architecture. Pride made into a people.

The other Egos likely followed their own names from the old categorization.

Avaritia for Greed, the hoarding appetite that Octavius Kraethos had been engineered along.

Luxuria for Lust, the Ego that sought satisfaction through consumption of others, whether sexual or emotional or existential.

Invidia for Envy, the Ego that cultivated itself through measurement against what others possessed, refining itself through the hunger for what was held elsewhere. Gula for Gluttony, the Ego of unbounded appetite that differed from Greed in that it sought to consume rather than to hoard. Ira for Wrath, the Ego of sustained fury refined into combat foundation.

Acedia for Sloth, which in its amplified form was not laziness but a strange inertia, a refusal to be moved by external pressures that became its own kind of implacable power.

Seven Egos drawn from the seven deadly sins, engineered by THE Gilded Ones into seven configurations for holding the flood of Infinity without triggering THE Gamaidjan.

Of course, there should also have been Egos relating to the virtues.

The counterweights. Where the sins amplified hungers, the virtues would amplify restraints and positive drives.

Humilitas for Humility, the inverse of Superbius, the Ego of refined self-diminishment that paradoxically became its own kind of foundation.

Caritas for Charity, the Ego of outward giving, the cultivated love of others that could potentially became a channel through which Infinity could pour without collapsing into self.

Castitas for Chastity, not as prudishness but as refined purity of focus, the dedication that refused distraction. Patientia for Patience, the Ego of unhurried endurance that could hold a flood indefinitely by simply not being moved by it. Temperantia for Temperance,

the Ego of measured restraint, of choosing less when more was available.

Industria for Diligence, the Ego of sustained effort refined into a combat foundation. Humanitas for Kindness, the Ego of outward care that cultivated itself through the well-being of others.

Seven sins, seven virtues, fourteen possible foundations across the binary of engineered appetites and engineered restraints.

He wondered, quietly, whether THE Gilded Ones had actually pursued the virtue side of the engineering, or whether their methodology had tilted so heavily toward the sin configurations that the virtues had remained theoretical. He suspected the latter.

THE Gilded Ones who had built the system were, by definition, the Superbius, the embodiment of Pride, and Pride did not naturally lean toward engineering its own counterweights into existence. He would ask Ubergulden Adelheid about this later. For now, the theoretical framework was enough!

Noah thought about all of this in the span of an instant he had stretched out toward infinity.

Emotive’s report about THE Gilded White Mountain and THE Creature had landed just moments ago in the external timeline, but his Hadean Mind of Infinite Calculation had pulled that instant into an extended subjective duration in which he could think for hours or days if the thinking served a purpose.

Externally, Naldine and Emotive would appear frozen, held in the posture of their last motions. Internally, he had all the time he needed.

Before he moved and went wild across THE Wyld, he wanted to see if there would be a significant enough boost of power with the amplification of Egos for his people. Right now, he was theorizing how to continue his engineering of his people without stopping. He would always be making changes. He would always be refining, upgrading, adjusting. So he began to think about himself and his people in a different sense.

A thought crossed his mind that was both grand and tyrannical.

The Quintessence Infiniforce swirling within him. The Observable Force he had accumulated. The Hadean Pillar and its Civilizations. His Infinity!

All of these could be considered his hardware. Components of his existence that handled the fundamental operations of his cultivation, the substrate on which everything else ran. Hardware was what held the power. Hardware was what determined the raw capacity.

And the engineering modifications he wanted to make. The transformations. The alterations to his people’s foundations. The integration of amplified Egos into their existing Nascent Hadean configurations. Those could be considered software.

Software!

From his understanding, software had been the layer that defined what hardware did. The hardware held the capacity. The software defined the applications. And software could be updated independently of the hardware, patched across networks, distributed to those who accepted the updates and received the new capabilities without having to replace the underlying machinery.

A well-designed software distribution system meant that every device on the network received the improvements nearly simultaneously, and the improvements compounded across the whole network rather than remaining siloed in individual hands.

If he could establish something similar for his people...

If he could design new modifications he wanted to make, wrap them into discrete weavings, and release a singular burst of power that made those weavings available to all those who held his Quintessence Infiniforce within them. Available for them to accept the moment he distributed them. Capable of being integrated into their existing foundations without requiring him to personally transform each of them, one by one, across the laborious sequential process he had been using until now!

The entire scale of his engineering operations would shift.

He could make modifications to himself first, test them in a controlled environment within his own existence, verify they worked as intended, and then push them outward. His people would receive the modification nearly instantly. The Civilizational Holy War participants, the broader circle of his followers, everyone with his Quintessence Infiniforce active within them, all upgraded in a single coordinated deployment. The power gains would compound across his entire network rather than trickling through individual transformations!

This was the methodology he needed as his eyes shone brightly!

"Let it be actualized."

His voice carried the calm authority of a being giving a direct command to his own existence.

"Let...some form of a Sandbox emerge. Let the distribution system establish itself. Let the engineering framework become native to my operations from this point forward."

...!

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