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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5207: Simply Unworthy!
Chapter 5207: Simply Unworthy!
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<THE Creature, On Tongues and the Weight of Letters>There are two Tongues across the arrangement of existence that I have come to understand, though understand is perhaps too generous a word for what I hold regarding the second one.
THE First Tongue can be considered the language of Infinity. Its letters and words of power are carved into the substrate of Observable Existence with the permanence of things that were placed there during THE First Cause and have been accumulating interpreters ever since.
Many beings across the long span of cultivation have touched its letters. Many have learned to speak its words with sufficient precision to produce the structured expressions.
THE First Tongue is, in this sense, a shared inheritance. Difficult to master. Possible to approach. Available, in some fragment or another, to anyone who climbs far enough to reach it. Its Phonemes, Logos, and Philologies are there.
THE Primordial Tongue is the language of THE Primordial Source. Its letters predate the arrangement that produced THE First Tongue. Its words do not describe existence from within existence but from beneath it, from whatever foundation the arrangement of existence rests upon that existence itself cannot fully observe.
Across all of our Observable Existence, and across THE Braneworld Observable Existence above it, and across every configuration of being that has emerged since THE First Cause divided its potential, I am the only being who has managed to utter its letters.
This is either because I have achieved something genuinely grand, or because I have survived something genuinely terrible, and I am not yet certain those are different things.
Here is the question I keep returning to.
Is THE Primordial Tongue grander than THE First Tongue because so few have access to it? Is scarcity the correct measure of value? A thing that only one being can use is either invaluable or useless depending entirely on whether that one being can translate the using into something that matters. A lock with a single key in the universe is either the most important lock or the most irrelevant one. The key does not determine the answer. The door does.
And yet.
Infinity is accessible to many. Its letters are distributed across the cultivation frameworks of countless beings, each one approaching the Tongue from their own angle, each one adding their comprehension to the collective understanding of what the Tongue can produce.
The breadth of that access has produced ages of accumulated methodology.
All of that, from the breadth of access to Infinity.
From THE Primordial Tongue, accessed by one, I have produced the capability to rewrite my existence back from ruin through sheer defiance, and evolve into something more. It is...minimalist.
So which is grander?
I think the question is wrong. I think I have been framing it as a competition between two things that do not compete because they do not occupy the same category. Infinity is the ocean. THE Primordial Source is whatever the ocean is resting on. Asking which is grander is asking whether water or ground is more important, and the answer shifts depending on whether you are drowning or falling.
What I know is this.
When I first spoke the word Exelissomai a long time ago and felt my existence begin to shift, it was not because THE Primordial Tongue is grander than THE First Tongue or lesser than it.
It was because the word was true. It was a true thing spoken by the one existence that had earned the right to speak it, and true things spoken with the full weight of the existence behind them have a way of making the surrounding arrangement move aside.
Perhaps that is the real measure.
Not which Tongue is grander. But which words, spoken by which beings, in which moments, carry enough truth behind them to make existence listen.
-THE Creature, written in the margins of his own becoming
—
The transformation concluded.
What stood in the blood-stained crater of THE Undefined Gaps was no longer the figure that Ragnar had been systematically dismantling, and it was not quite the titanic Relictus engaging the thousands of Gilded Ones far above either.
It was something that occupied its own category between those two reference points!
THE Creature’s new form rose to a height that dwarfed his previous frame by an order of magnitude, his body now carrying the proportions of a being whose relationship to the space around him had shifted from occupancy to ownership.
His silhouette was humanoid in the broad architectural sense, two arms, two legs, an upright orientation, but the specifics refused the category at every detail.
His body was scaled in overlapping obsidian plates that caught no light but produced their own, a deep inner luminescence that pulsed in slow rhythms from beneath each plate like heat rising from stone that had been sitting in fire for too long.
His neck was long and carried the forward angle of something predatory, his jaw slightly extended, his face holding the specific beauty that his humanoid form had carried but pushed into something sharper and more elemental, the cheekbones higher and harder, the brow heavier, the eyes burning with obsidian light that carried THE Primordial Source’s authority as their ambient state rather than their activated one.
His arms were long, his hands ending in claws of compressed obsidian.
Massive wings of scaled obsidian membrane folded against his back, their span suggesting that when opened they would rewrite the geometry of the surrounding space simply through the act of unfolding.
Nine obsidian tails extended from behind him, each one moving with its own independent awareness, their surfaces scaled and their tips carrying small concentrations of THE Primordial Source’s obsidian flame that burned without consuming, patient and permanent.
Above his head, nine obsidian crowns floated in slow spinning orbits, each crown slightly different in its configuration.
He looked at Prima Custos Ragnar.
The Gilded One’s smile had gone.
THE Creature’s voice emerged from his new form with a depth and resonance that traveled upward through the void of THE Undefined Gaps without diminishing, reaching the formations of thousands of Gilded Ones battling far above and arriving at full volume despite the distance.
"You walk upon scales you do not own."
"For eons, your kind has reached for THE Primordial Source, yet it remains as distant as the stars from the belly of a well. Do you ever ask why it stays beyond you?" His obsidian eyes moved across Ragnar and then upward, taking in the assembled thousands above.
"You steer the Causes of Observable Existence to suit your vanity, believing your gold is authority and your engineering is destiny. But THE Source does not care for your pedigree or your stolen perfections."
One of the nine tails moved slowly through the air behind him.
"Perhaps you are simply unworthy. Perhaps, after all your reachings and your thefts, there are things in this existence that refuse to be broken. You have tainted everything you touch, molding reality into a cage for whatever falls within your reach. But THE Source is the unyielding stone. You cannot taint it. You cannot engineer it. You cannot administer it or breed it into compliance through seven ages of methodology."
His nine crowns spun above him in their silent independent orbits.
"It will remain pure long after your names have turned to dust."
BOOM!
He took a single step.
The step covered the distance between the crater and Ragnar’s position in the void, the spatial compression of a being for whom the gap between two points had become a suggestion rather than a constraint. His claw came down with the full weight of his transformed existence behind it, the obsidian flames burning along the arc of the strike with the concentrated patience of THE Primordial Source expressing itself through physical contact!
Ragnar threw his punch to meet it.
The collision did not produce the result the last eighty-one collisions had produced.
BOOM!
Ragnar descended.
His massive frame drove downward through the obsidian floor of THE Undefined Gaps with a force that carved through several strata of the solidified void before the crater his body formed reached its final depth, the impact shaking the surrounding architecture in ways that several of the Gilded Ones far above registered.
Dust and obsidian particulate settled around the crater’s edges.
Ragnar looked up from its depths.
His face cycled through several expressions in rapid succession, the shock arriving first and giving way almost immediately to something that landed somewhere between disbelief and the specific unhinged delight of a being who had been genuinely, sincerely surprised for the first time in an unspecified but clearly considerable duration.
He began to laugh.
It came out booming and genuine, the laughter of someone who had asked Existence for something interesting and had just had the request answered beyond expectation.
"Fuck!"
He pushed himself upright in the crater, the crimson rings on his forearms spinning back up to full velocity as the wild light returned to his eyes.
"Buddy boy." Another laugh, shorter, sharper. "Haha, man."
He rose from the crater with the ease of a being whose brief residence in it had done nothing to alter his fundamental operational capacity, his massive frame settling back into its combat posture with the comfortable familiarity of someone returning to work they enjoy.
"Alright."
His smile came back.
It was wider than before.
"Let us seek death and glory!"
BOOM!
