Published at 20th of September 2026 7:19 am

Chapter 5754: ECG!

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

Far from THE Infiniverse.

Noah’s Dream body hung above the Primordial ice forest, and he looked at all of it with shining eyes.

Below him the frost-trees spread for Gigaparsecs, their rimed boughs heavy with frozen domains, dormant Observable Existences and Elsedimensions hanging still and cold as buds that would never bloom themselvs.

The snow fell through his masked existence and did not stop. And he thought and thought and thought!

Why?

Why had a coldness that seemed woven into the very structure of existence caused Lucy to emerge from the corpse of an Immense One? Lucy, who carried a definition of Infinity so complete she had scattered Dimensions from her hands like feed, Lucy who was tied somehow to IT, to the pen behind every wall.

Why had her likeness risen out of a death and planted a forest of frozen Domains across the ruin? And the prophecy, the one the dying Stranger had left in a desert hundreds of years ago, the shattered scales and the balance that was winter and the three at the turning.

How did all of it fit together? The cold. The pen. The first thing wearing a frozen face. The Runestones!

He could feel that there was a shape to it, a single grand pattern beneath the cold and the forest and the chant. He simply could not yet see it!

And as he turned it over in the falling snow...

HUUM!

A certain crystal within his existence began to buzz.

Noah’s shining eye flickered. It was the one left behind by Vakochev, the crystal elevated when he had aided Masamuk in freeing a fragment of Vakochev. It buzzed now!

And in the midst of the falling snow, around Noah’s brilliant and barely-perceivable eye, an illusory existence began to form.

It came together slowly out of the drifting white, a thing that no ordinary gaze could have caught, a flaming outline of a humanoid figure whose features would not resolve, whose edges burned and shifted and refused to be held. It was faint, and it was vast, and it was unmistakable.

Noah’s existence shone with resplendence as he looked upon the unfathomable figure of Vakochev!

The Remnant, or an echo of it, stood in the snow above the frozen forest and gazed out across the endless white, and for a moment it said nothing. Then it spoke.

"I did not know something like this could arise from the collapse of another Immense One," Vakochev said, his flaming gaze on the frost-trees. "I did not predict it. I did not even consider it possible. But such are the weavings of existence. Always unfathomably unpredictable, no matter how high one climbs."

The snow fell between them.

"In my rage, I did many things I would not normally do. I moved without accounting for the surroundings. I stood there and spoke of the injustice of life, of decillions killed and weighed as nothing, and I did not spare a thought for the small existences here my own war would grind to paste beneath it."

A dry, tired note entered his voice. "It was a bit hypocritical of me. Anyway. There is a favor owed, for what you did not long ago, when you gave a fragment of me back to the light. I have come to settle it, and so I will offer you a-"

"If I forego the favor," Noah said, cutting him off, "and instead ask you to simply tell me what is happening in existence right now, could you do that?"

The being who had just massacred an Immense One went quiet!

For a long moment Vakochev only stood in the snow, his flaming visage turned toward the frozen forest, considering the question that a lesser being would have thought was the wisest thing to ask. Then, slowly, he shook his head.

"It would be a disservice for me to do that," he said. "Because even someone of my power and standing cannot say with certainty what is happening in existence right now. Whatever I told you today could be wrong in a matter of days. Or years. I know only this much: every single lifeform is out for itself. I am out for my own weavings and my own interests. The Immense Ones are out for theirs. That is all that is certain."

His gaze did not leave the snow.

"A great many of us, when we reach a certain height of Dimensionality, come to believe that we understand existence. That existence is at our beck and call. We believe it so completely that the belief has blinded us. Because we can alter reality with a thought, conjure flames and constructs, distort time and lineages, manipulate the fundamental structure of what is, we decide we must be above it."

His voice went quiet and hard. "We are sorely mistaken. We do not know what we do not know. We do not even have a grasp of the shape of our own ignorance. All we have, in the end, are impossibilities."

BOOM!

Noah’s existence buzzed at the words.

His already-active reverie caught and blazed, and profound brilliance rolled out of him as boundless epiphanies bloomed one after another in the deep of his existence!

Impossibilities. Unknowns. The edge of understanding, the place where the mind gives out and names the dark past it. Infinity! It was the same truth the Runestone had shown him, the same truth Lucy had lived, spoken now by a titan in the snow, that no being ever grasps the impossible, it only ever names its own not-knowing and calls the name a mastery.

And here was one of the mightiest existences ever to live, telling him that all his immensity had bought him was a longer list of things he could not comprehend!

As Noah’s existence radiated immensity and reverie, Vakochev waved his flaming hand.

The dark crystal that had rested within Noah’s existence floated out into the snow, hung between them for a moment, and shattered. And from the breaking bloomed something Noah could not see. He strained his infinite gaze upon it and caught nothing, no shape, no color, no edge, only an absense with weight, and yet the snow whipping around the two of them buzzed, and Noah felt a sensation he had no words for, a pressure and a presence and a wrongness his existence could sense but not hold.

Vakochev cupped the invisible thing in his flaming hands.

"In lifeforms that hold no authority," he said, "there is something called human chorionic gonadotropin. The hormone a growing embryo makes from its earliest days. Its whole task is one thing. It signals the body to sustain the pregnancy. It tells the mother’s system to keep the environment stable, to hold, so that the new life keeps growing without the mother ever consciously doing a thing. It is the molecule that says, quietly and endlessly, keep growing this. Do not stop. It works below awareness. It is the signal of becoming."

The invisible thing pulsed in his hands, and the snow buzzed with it.

"In my hands is what I believe, after a great many experiments, to be the critical factor in the emergence of an Immense One and many other things. The Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin. ECG, for short. It is the hormone of Immensity’s own gestation. It is the signal an existence produces that tells reality itself to keep growing that existence into something greater, without conscious effort, the way that other hormone tells a body to grow a child without the mother lifting a finger...among other things even I haven’t fully grasped."

Noah listened intently!

"It is not a physical substance but an authority-substance," Vakochev went on, "produced in vanishingly small amounts within the existence of an Immense One. Where a hormone circulates in blood, this circulates in an existence’s weavings. And it is imperceptible to any being of lower Dimensionality, genuinely beneath their capacity to sense, the way an ant cannot perceive a mana. It is one of the reasons a lesser existence can stand before an Immense One and feel only pressure and wrongness rather than understand what it is looking at. Part of what it cannot perceive is this, quietly saturating the mightier being’s whole existence."

His flaming gaze turned to Noah.

"Even Immense Ones do not fully understand the thing in their own existences. It is nearly impossible to study, harder still to isolate. But this is a single unit of it, isolated externally, which I do not think anyone before me has done."

He weighed the invisible thing in his hands. "It has roughly one turning of a day before it disperses back into existence and is gone. If you can understand or grasp anything of it in that time, you may make advances no one has made before!"

He was silent a moment.

"I am staunch about giving things away for free. It goes against Adversity, and Adversity is the core of my existence. So understand what this is. It is not a gift. It is an adversity, holding its own difficulty, that you may or may not benefit from, depending entirely on your own capability. There is no promise in it. There is only a chance, and a hard one. Good luck. And..."

The flaming visage turned back to the snow, and his gaze changed.

It went soft, and sorrowful, and old, a look Noah would not have expected on a being who had just torn an Immense One apart with his bare hands, and Vakochev watched the white snow fall over the frozen forest for a long moment before he spoke again, almost gentle.

"Hold those you love close. You never know when they will be gone." The snow fell through his burning outline. "In existence, there are no guarantees."

HUUM!

With those words, he took the invisible thing from his own hands and moved it toward Noah, and Noah’s masked existence unfurled to receive it, and in the taking, the flaming figure of Vakochev was gone, dissolved back into the falling snow as though he had never stood there at all.

Noah was alone above the frozen forest.

The snow fell around his brilliant unseen eye, and his Dream body held onto something it could not see, something with a terrible weight, and the instant it settled into him his existence STRAINED. It was as though the mere holding of the thing was trying to tear him apart, as though a single isolated unit of the hormone of Immensity, one drop of the substance that grew titans, was too vast and too dense for even his existence to cradle without breaking!

He roared inside himself.

There was so much he had wanted to do here. Speak with THE Creature, who had withdrawn into the cold. Reach for the weavings of THE Sealed One, or study Adrastia, the Vessel that had refused. He had planned all of it. None of it mattered now. He had one day and a thing in his hands that was trying to unmake him, and there was room in his existence for nothing else!

He had to survive what he had just been given!

So Noah pulled his infinite dream inward, out of the falling snow and the frozen forest and the sight of anything at all, drawing himself down into the space between things where nothing could reach him and nothing could bother him, a space that was his and his alone.

And there, holding an impossibility that was trying to break him, THE True Human Emperor vanished completely from all perception!

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