Published at 6th of September 2026 6:20 am

Chapter 5700: Engineer! III

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His Provenance Realm had changed again, as it always did when he did.

Above the blue-gold hills, where there had once been a single unmoving star, there now hung a field of them. Radiant sun-singularities, one for every Provenance Essence he carried, burning steady in a sky that had no weather and asked for none. Anyone counting them would have arrived at the same number he did.

Eighty-nine!

Of course, that number had been eighty-six not so long ago. Standing in front of an architect and surviving the standing had apparently been worth three.

|VERITAS: 89|

|PROVENANCE: 89|

|POTENTIA: INFINITE|

|PONDUS: 88|

Ninety was close now!

Noah sat on the bank of the river of light where it ran fastest, in the shape his Provenance had settled into. Bare feet in the star-pooled shallows. Pure dark hair. Skin without a single mark on it, which was somewhat funny given the amount of it that had been removed recently.

His eyes were obsidian singularities in one second and endlessly blue in another, and they were currently pointed at his own right hand.

There was a ring on it that was not there.

Illusory, faint, gold, visible to nobody else in existence and barely visible to him. The residue of something a genius had left behind!

In truth, since another of his bodies was currently occupied with the considerable pleasures of being human in the Vasiliou Elseworld, he would have this body begin thr work.

So he sent his Provenance Essence into the ring.

He was ready to get started.

|Alright.|

The voice boomed out over the Realm, coming from the ring and from the air and from a little behind his own ears at once.

|It seems you are ready to get started, which means this will actually be an experiment for the both of us. I am not here. I am not even a little bit here. This is something unique of mine doing the talking.|

|I am like a record. Except considerably better than a record, because a genius designed it, and I can do a great many things a record cannot.|

|You can ask questions. Do so rarely. Questions interrupt my flow, and answering them will draw on your energy and your authority in ways you will feel. So any question you have for me will cost you. Price it before you open your mouth, and if that offends you, take it up with the man who is dead.|

|Most of what I carry stays locked until I have given you the basics and the introductions. So.|

|Welcome to Existential Engineering 101.|

The illusory ring pulsed.

Golden light spilled out of it and unfolded into the air above the river, and it wrote itself, in an ancient tongue that Noah found he could read without the smallest effort, as though the words had been waiting for eras for eyes that would bother.

EXISTENTIAL ENGINEERING: BASICS

...!

Noah looked at it with shining eyes.

And the voice continued.

|Now. When it comes to engineering, and all the crazy things around dimensional authority and existential narrative and truly terrifying levels of Dimensionality, I did what any reasonable person would do. I simplified all of it into an art.|

|I broke it down into the basic building blocks of existence, and I made those my engineering. Every design I ever made came from using the components of existence itself as ingredients for the immensity I built.|

|And there are many, many ingredients. I will have to teach you how to isolate parts of existence, timelines, parallel weavings, all of it, into clean separated ingredients you can actually construct with. That goes in our course on time and temporal mechanics, which you are not remotely ready for.|

|So let us start at the beginning. There is engineering, and there is alchemy. Sometimes they go hand in hand.|

Diagrams began to appear.

They unfolded out of the golden light one after another, hanging over the running river, drawn in that same old script with lines connecting the parts of them.

A vessel with something suspended inside it. A lattice with nine points. A shape Noah could not name at all, which annoyed him considerably.

|When a lower lifeform considers alchemy, it imagines boiling water and crushed herbs. When it considers engineering, it imagines metal struck against an anvil.|

|Compared to the truth, those are the playthings of children who have not yet worked out that they are living inside a locked room.|

|In fact, at their core, neither art is about the manipulation of physical matter at all. Both are the manipulation of absolute laws.|

|So ask yourself. What is an Aspect of Existence? Is it a thing you express, or is it a fundamental building block? If an Immense One can harvest the unspent Causes of a bloodline to mortar their pristine thrones, does that not make a Cause a brick?|

The lattice diagram brightened, and a single point on it detached and hung by itself, and the light around it wrote the word for brick.

Noah’s eyes did not leave it.

|Naturally, to use these bricks, one must understand conceptual extraction.|

|Alchemy is the act of boiling down a timeline that was violently aborted, skimming the grief off the top, and distilling the raw potential into a liquid truth. You take an abstract concept, the weight of a dying Primeval, the suppressed ambition of a harvested lineage, and you force it into a consumable state.|

|Thus, you are not brewing potions. You are drinking isolated existence.|

The vessel diagram filled slowly with something that had no color the Realm could render.

|By comparison, engineering is the framework that cages the extracted truth. Once you have distilled an aspect of existence, where do you put it? You weld it. You take the extracted Cause, or the extracted Provenance, and you carve pathways of narrative into it until it holds a shape and does work.|

|Since Aspects of Existence are merely ingredients, anything can be built.|

|A lesser smith builds a sword. A sovereign engineer builds a new timeline.|

|Become proficient enough at engineering existence itself, and you can construct mechanisms grand enough to mimic the Immense Ones. Engines that generate their own localized Scales. Their own rulings. Structures that bypass the architects entirely, since the architects only own the board so long as nobody else learns to make boards.|

|Perhaps you will even find, one day, that the foundational blueprints of Existence itself are recorded inside a grand conceptual structure somewhere.|

The light hung on that sentence a moment longer than it had hung on any other, and then moved on without explaining itself.

|In truth, existence is not sacred. It is simply waiting to be melted down.|

|But we are getting ahead of ourselves.|

|One of the more basic places to start is with an ingredient that happens to be the most stable one I ever found in nature, and I found that out through a great deal of trial and a considerable amount of tribulation.|

|That ingredient is a Cause.|

The nine-point lattice turned slowly above the river.

|Being able to harvest and isolate Causes as an ingredient is going to be basic work for you. And one of the better ways to harvest them is not from Observable Existences or Dimensions that are built out of those Causes, because the moment you take them away, the structure goes unstable and you will have made a mess for no reason.|

|Lifeforms are better. Unique ones. The kind capable of generating their own Causes are some of the best subjects you will ever find for this, and you will not necessarily be stripping the Cause away from them. You isolate the essence of the Cause, which they regenerate over time on their own.|

|We will start with Causes, and we will expand from there. Because when it comes to authorities, all of them distill. Provenance included. Everything can be reduced to its own unique ingredient, given enough patience and a sufficiently unpleasant amount of failure.|

|So let us start with something simple that requires Causes as an ingredient|

|Let us have you design your own Elsedimension.|

BOOM!

Simple?

That was something SIMPLE?

Noah sat very still on the bank of his own river, in his own Realm, with his eyes blazing!

|Now.|

|An Elsedimension is actually fairly simple. It has only a few main ingredients, and we will take them one at a time.|

|Let us start with the most basic. Distilled Cause Essence.|

|You need to extract and crystallize the essence of at least nine Causes into Distilled Cause Essence. Depending on your Provenance, this will be either easy or extremely difficult, and I genuinely cannot tell you which, because nobody has ever tried this with whatever it is you are.|

|Find something to extract it from. An Observable Existence will do. A Lifeform will do better.|

|And if you are using an Observable Existence, please empty it of all life first, so that you do not go around causing unnecessary genocides.|

...!

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