Published at 6th of September 2026 6:20 am

Chapter 5701: Engineer! IV

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He started with something he had made himself, which seemed only fair.

Noah reached into THE Infiniverse and pulled out a young Observable Existence, one of the thousands that had bloomed out of the Genesis Tesseracts and had been growing quietly ever since. It came into the Realm and hung over the river of light, turning slowly, no larger than a fruit at this scale and containing an interior he could have walked for an age without finishing.

Of course, there were no lifeforms in it. Not one!

He looked at it for a moment anyway.

Then he dreamed.

That was the only word for what THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer actually did here. His eyes lowered halfway and did not close, and the light around him went soft at the edges. The river kept running. The eighty-nine suns kept burning. And Noah sat on the bank of his own Realm and dreamed the young Observable Existence apart.

In the dream, its Causes were visible.

Nine of them, which was simply what an Observable Existence grows on its own if you leave it alone, wound through the structure of the thing like the veins in a leaf held up to a light. He did not cut them. He did not pull. In the dream he simply understood that the essence of each Cause was a separate thing from the Cause itself, the way the taste of a fruit is separate from the fruit, and having understood it, it was already true.

The first essence came away.

It rose out of the turning Existence as a thread of pale color that had no name, and it hung in the air over the river.

Then the second. Then the third and fourth together, since he had the shape of it now.

By the seventh he was no longer being careful, and by the ninth the threads had begun to find each other on their own, winding together over the water. They combined!

What was left was a liquid.

It swirled in the air, unhurried, holding nine colors that all belonged to it, and it moved slower than liquid should. Noah rose from the bank and drew a bottle out of nothing, glass and stoppered, and let the thing pour itself in.

|DISTILLED CAUSE ESSENCE|

|The isolated conceptual essence of nine naturally-arisen Causes, rendered into a stable liquid state.|

|Classification: base ingredient, foundational tier. Stability: the highest observed in nature.|

|Retains the function of a Cause without retaining the Cause. Existence does not recognize the loss.|

And above the river, the Observable Existence he had drawn it from finished changing.

It had been turning with a slow inner light. That light was gone now. It kept its shape, all of it, every domain and cosmos and world inside it exactly where it had been, and none of it was going anywhere ever again. A thing that could hold, but could no longer become.

|TERMINAL OBSERVABLE EXISTENCE|

|Structure intact. Causal generation ceased. No further growth will occur.|

In truth, Noah felt bad about that more than he had expected to!

Fortunately, it was fixable. He could resuscitate it himself with enough attention. Better still, he did not have to.

He waved a hand, and the dead thing lifted and went, crossing out of the Realm toward a distant domain where a certain manifestation was currently overseeing thousands of infant Existences. THE Infiniverse would resuscitate it!

Although as the terminal Existence dwindled out of sight, Noah found his thoughts wandering.

Causes as ingredients. Nine from an Observable Existence.

Compare that to what Atlas had actually recommended, which was Lifeforms, and specifically the ones capable of generating their own. Take the essence, leave the Cause, walk away. They regrow it. Nobody dies. Nobody even limps.

That was harvesting.

And Noah knew exactly where the richest fields were, which was the part he did not like.

The Laestrygonians would soon be reborn inside THE Infiniverse and birthing Causes natively, a whole restored people producing the most stable ingredient in existence simply by living. Hvitrmarr, with nine First Causes seated in her organs, transformed and hers now. The Steeds, bred as burden-bearers for exactly this reason by beings who had looked at living things and seen carrying capacity.

Was this the reason for THE SLEEPLESS FIEND’s fixation with causes and lifeforms that inherently held them?

Noah shook his head and refocused.

Then he spoke into the ring for the first time.

"I have successfully extracted Causes into Distilled Cause Essence."

The moment the words left him, he felt his Provenance being drawn on. A decimal of a percent, sapped away slow and steady, small enough to be nothing and precise enough that he knew exactly what he had spent.

The ring buzzed on his finger.

|That was rather quick.|

|You did not cause a genocide, did you? Do not go down that route. Everyone who goes down that route tells themselves it was efficient, and every one of them was wrong.|

|But if you did it that fast, it means your Provenance is very suitable for this.|

|Because some would start whining at this point. Sir, how exactly do I extract the Causes into Distilled Cause Essence? That would have been a dumb question.|

|You did not ask. Which means you most likely told your Provenance, here are the Causes, extract their essence for me. And your Provenance did it.|

|So sometimes the right Provenance does it all. Remember that when you are tempted to be proud of yourself.|

Noah’s mouth twitched.

|Alright. The other ingredients of an Elsedimension.|

|First, your own Provenance. It serves as the basis and the core, and it is what actually makes the thing YOURS rather than a room you happen to be standing in.|

|Second, an extremely high concentration of hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron. Europium. Strontium. Neodymium.|

Noah blinked.

|And you might ask yourself, what the fuck do these elemental particles have to do with anything.|

|Well. When I began engineering existence itself, I looked at the makeup of stellar bodies, and I told myself that the ingredients had to be things that were easily accessible, so that whoever came after me would have boundless possibility rather than a shopping list they could never fill.|

|Do not make things overly complex. Complexity is what people reach for when they have not understood a thing well enough to make it simple.|

|Wonder has to bloom out of the most common things. The most ordinary things, made grand.|

Noah’s eyes shone at that!

He tugged upward with two fingers.

Another Observable Existence floated down out of THE Infiniverse and settled over the river.

Inside it were countless domains, and inside those, cosmos beyond counting, universes and their worlds and stars beyond that, and every one of those stars was made largely out of exactly what Atlas had listed.

The commonest things there were.

He waved a hand, and they came out.

Stellar rivers poured from the young Existence into the air above his Realm, eight of them, braided and enormous, hydrogen and helium running silver-white at the front, lithium and beryllium and boron threading through them, europium and strontium and neodymium arriving last in colors that had no business being that beautiful!

They came out at concentrations that would have collapsed a star and left the Existence itself entirely unharmed, since he was not taking its structure, only its abundance.

The rivers turned slowly over the bank, waiting.

Noah sent his Provenance into the ring.

|Good. Now listen, because the assembly matters more than the ingredients.|

|You will begin with the Elseengine. That is the core, and everything else is built outward from it, and if you get the core wrong you will not find out until the whole thing comes apart around you.|

|Take your Provenance and the Distilled Cause Essence, and fuse them. Not layered. Not adjacent. The Essence provides function that existence recognizes as legitimate, and your Provenance provides the authority that answers to nobody. Together they will hold a law up without borrowing a single thing from anyone. That is an Elseengine.|

|Then weave the elements around it. All eight, in the order I gave them, because the order is the order for reasons you will understand in about a hundred years maybe.|

|And here is the part that matters most, so hear it properly.|

|You will include nothing else.|

|No Argent Loom. No Infinity. No Primordial Source. No Narrative. Not a thread of any framework’s Dimensionality, not one borrowed weaving, no matter how convenient it would be and it will be extremely convenient.|

|Because whatever authority you build INTO a place has standing INSIDE that place forever. Include the Loom, and the Loom may enter. Include Infinity, and everything that has ever mastered Infinity has a door. By excluding them at the foundation, you are not hiding from those authorities. You are making somewhere they were never invited, and existence honors that with a stubbornness you would not believe.|

|What you get is a domain bent uniquely to your Provenance, running your rules, sitting outside the scope of the weavings that every powerful lifeform in existence has spent their entire lives climbing.|

|An Elsedimension is like a second body of your own.|

|And nobody has greater autonomy over your body than you.|

Noah stood up.

He took the bottle in his left hand and unstoppered it, and he brought his Provenance up out of the depth of himself, and he put them together over the river of light.

The Distilled Cause Essence did not pour. It reached. Nine colors that had grown inside a young Existence found the blue-gold weight of something that had generated itself out of nothing, and there was a moment where nothing at all happened!

Then they fused!

HUUM!

The Elseengine came into being over the water, small and turning and impossibly heavy, throwing a light that did not resemble any authority in existence because it was not borrowing from any of them. Noah felt it take hold. He felt it hold a law up on its own, needing nothing, asking nothing, owed to nobody.

He brought the rivers in.

Hydrogen first, and it wrapped the engine and thinned into a shell.

Helium after it, settling into the gaps. Lithium, beryllium, boron in sequence, and with each one the shell stopped being a shell and started being a place, gaining depth!

Europium came in and the light inside changed character entirely. Strontium threaded the edges. Neodymium last, and when it landed, the whole construction went quiet.

Then it BLOOMED.

An Elsedimension unfolded over the river of light in Noah’s Realm, and it shone, and it shone like a budding flower! Not brighter than his eighty-nine suns. Differently. It cast a light that owed no one anything.

Noah spread his hands, and it grew.

He expanded it outward, and outward again, letting it take the size it wanted rather than the size he had planned, and when it had settled he pressed it gently down into the Realm itself, and the two of them fused. Blue-gold hills on one side. Somewhere on the other side that answered only to him.

|An Elsedimension has been constructed.|

|Elseengine: stable. Foundation: Provenance and Distilled Cause Essence, fused. Composition: eight stellar elements, ordered.|

|Included authorities: none. THE Argent Loom holds no standing here. THE Provenance of Existence holds no standing here. No framework of Dimensionality has been granted entry.|

|First act of Existential Engineering completed without instruction failure. The work was understood, not copied.|

|VERITAS: 90|

|PROVENANCE: 90|

|POTENTIA: INFINITE|

|PONDUS: 89|

...!

Ninety!

|Did it work?|

The ring buzzed.

|If it did, your existence should be feeling the pleasure of advancement right about now. That feeling is real and it is not vanity. Engineering alone can make you understand the secrets of Existence and elevate your Dimensionality, because you cannot build a thing without learning what it is made of, and everything is made of the same handful of things.|

|Making an Elsedimension is the first step.|

|Our goal is to make you your own Gu Elsedimension Ring, since you gave the last one away.|

|Haha. I still cannot believe you gave it away. If you had any idea how hard that thing was to make and how prized it is.|

|But hey, forget about it. We will take things a step at a time. Do not worry.|

|For now, you have the capability to make an Elsedimension. So the next step is naturally Gu.|

|And for that, you need to make a trip to a place lost through existence and time. Somewhere most Immense Ones do not even know is there as others of their kind keep it a secret.|

|THE CHRYSALIS OF THE FIRST SUNDERING.|

|Knowing about it is one thing.|

|Getting there. Now that is the fun part.|

...!

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