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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5504: Sisyphus! II
Chapter 5504: Sisyphus! II
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The golden island drifted on through the storm, and for a while, Noah simply sat with his elevated Intent and his finalizing Pantheon and his thoughts.Then he spoke to no one and to all of them.
"There is an old myth I always think about. The myth of Sisyphus." His gaze rested on the raging horizon.
"A king who offended the powers above him, and was sentenced to roll an immense boulder up a mountain. And every time he neared the peak, the boulder would roll back down, and he would descend, and begin again. Forever. That was the entire punishment. Not fire, not blades. Just effort, rendered meaningless, repeated without end."
Emotive had gone still beside him. THE Infiniverse listened without moving.
"The lesson, as it was taught, was about futility. The cruelty of labor that arrives nowhere! And when I heard it while I was young, I pitied him. Endless hardship, endless struggle, a mountain that never stays climbed. What existence could be worse?" Noah’s mouth curved faintly.
"But when I think about hardship now. About adversity, and effort. I find I only want more and more of it. Show me the boulder! Show me the mountain! I have rolled my stone up through Scales and eras and domains, and every time it rolled back down, I picked it up heavier and climbed faster, and somewhere along the way, the climbing stopped being the punishment and became the point. I think, if I met Sisyphus now, I would not pity him. I would ask him what he learned on the ten thousandth climb that he missed on the first."
...!
He paused.
"And at the same time...I feel like thinking this way puts my family, and everyone I love, in more and more danger."
...!
"I want adversity to grow. I have built my entire existence to convert hardship into height! But this adversity is sometimes extremely terrifying, and it does not always aim at me. What will I do when, one day, an adversity comes that causes an irreversible death of those close to me? I chase after hardship so relentlessly." His voice stayed level which made it heavier.
"Am I so selfish, to do this? To drag everything I love along the road to every storm I can find, because the storms make me grander?"
He thought this out loud, openly, and THE Infiniverse and Emotive were somber as they listened, neither offering comfort. A distance away, Seo-yeon still sat with her eyes closed, sensing, her small frame wrapped in mirrored light, unaware that her Aba was speaking about her and many others.
Noah looked at her for a long moment.
"This is another one of my human qualities," he said quietly. "Selfishness. Every human expresses it. The wanting that does not stop to fully count its costs! I want to continue climbing higher and higher, and I am doing so knowing the dangers, knowing the peril, knowing exactly who stands behind me on the mountain. This is human. And it is one of the negative aspects of being human, so I will not pretend it is a virtue." His eyes sharpened!
"I will simply be ready for the consequences when they come. I know what my existence is. I am playing with my life and the lives of many. So, to do my very best to ensure I do not fall..."
He rose from the throne.
"I shall enact the last Letter of THE Osmontian Tongue."
HUUM!
The last Letter!
Well, he could always change his mind later, it was his Tongue after all. But he wanted this to be the last Letter! For he had studied the First Tongue, the Infinite Tongue, THE Primordial Tongue across his climb, and all of them shared the same bloat, many Letters, especislly THE First Tongue, where most simply ended up being there, catalogued and unutilized, grammar for the sake of grammar!
His Tongue would not rot that way. Five Letters, consolidated hard around his core identity, and from that foundation...he would begin enacting Words. And then sentances.
It was definitely very sad not to reach that magical number 9, but he wouldn’t dwell on it.
A language did not grow grand by adding more alphabet. It grew grand by speaking!
"For now, my last Letter of THE Osmontian Tongue shall be..." Noah’s voice rolled out across the golden sands as his existence gathered itself. "PROTAGONIST. I AM...THE PROTAGONIST!"
HUUM!
He had this Civilization already, seated inside his Osmontian Pillar within his Scales of Existence! And as abstract as the identity was, it was pivotal, for what was a Protagonist?
Across every story humanity had ever told, barring the protagonists of extremely darker tales, the Protagonist and their people were safe! They werre not spared hardship, never spared hardship, but carried through it. The Protagonist faced the impossible battle and made the breakthrough at the final moment. The Protagonist’s family survived the siege. The story bent, subtly and constantly, toward their continuation.
It was the oldest architecture in Human storytelling, and Noah uttered this Letter wanting it to truly become part of his identity, so that his selfishness in seeking adversity...would not come one day to bite everything he loved.
The Letter carved itself into his backbone as existence checked the claim, weighing a being who had clawed up from a dying world through apocalypses and found the word fit!
|The Fifth Letter of THE Osmontian Tongue has been transcribed. PROTAGONIST. I will catalogue its boons.|
|First: THE Aura of THE Protagonist. Whenever you face adversity, this aura gathers around you, and it passively produces Osmontian Biomass proportional to the adversity being faced. A skirmish will trickle. A battle against something that should kill you will pour! It is a mechanization of the oldest pattern in Human stories, the protagonist who somehow makes their breakthrough in the middle of the battle that guaranteed their death. From this moment, the more impossible your circumstances, the faster your wealth grows...|
|Second: THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard. The Protagonist survives because the Protagonist reads the story. Upon any lifeform your gaze settles on, you may now perceive their Character Sheet: their designation, their driving motivations, their current disposition toward you, whether malice, neutrality, or favor, their level of danger to you rendered in plain terms, and the pertinent threads of their circumstance, debts, fears, and desires. Beings vastly exceeding your existence will return partial sheets, veiled in ?????, and beings actively concealing themselves may distort their entries. But against all others, you now walk into every room already holding the script.|
...!
Prompts of magisterial wonder bloomed.
Noah gazed at the terrifying capabilities detailed before him as the fifth Letter settled its weight through his existence, and he nodded slowly, and whispered calmly to himself.
"I AM THE PROTAGONIST."
He said it silently, privately, because he wanted to convince himself! Because he knew there could be terrifying adversity on the horizon, adversity he himself had invited by fishing an unknown door out of the dark, and he wanted every tool possible to get past such adversity that he himself wanted...without ruining what he wanted to protect!
For he was THE True Human Emperor. He could be selfish. He could be loving! He could be brave, fearless, Quintessential, and so much more. But most of all, he needed himself and those around him to be safe, for one major human condition was death. And death...came for all humans.
Would he be any different?
In his grand existence, if he endlessly asked himself his purpose, and continued to enact his Scales, and climbed the ladder of existence rung after rung after rung, it was truly hard for him to die.
But could he ever call himself immortal? Or would that violate what it meant to be human, as even for him...there would be an end one day? Was that Osmontian? Was that part of his identity?
He kept these thoughts to himself and nobody else, and in the privacy of his own vast existence, he wondered...how existence would be without Noah Osmont in it.
"..."
He was met with heavy silence within himself.
Noah breathed out, and focused. He stopped thinking about what the end could be, for he was living in the now! And his now was infinitely grand, filled with aspirstions and goals, with so many things he wanted to explore and understand! For now, he wouldn’t think about his end. If there was ever an end.
It was such a human thing... that he may have not realized it.
