Published at 1st of October 2026 6:53 am

Chapter 5795: Sparks and Fear!

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

<THE True Human Emperor>

THE First Gu of Time was gone.

The purple sky of the Chrysalis had gone back to being only a sky.

The time-disks spun on through the clouds as though nothing had hapened. The violet smoke drifted. Far off, something enormous and slow turned over in the murk and went back to sleep. And Noah stayed exactly where he was, floating in the middle of it all, because he had just been given a new piece of himself and he wanted to understand it before he took it anywhere else.

THE Osmontian Inscription of THE Dreaming Hour.

He had forged it out of nothing but his own Root, his own Provenance, and the time he had lived through. No Gu at its heart. No borrowed material. It was his in a way nothing he had ever carried had been his, and yet he needed to fully understand what it actually did. The prompts had told him, of course. But prompts were only words. He wanted to feel it.

So he started with THE Lived Hour!

He closed his eyes and turned his attention inward, and waited for a single second to pass.

It passed!

And inside him, far more than a second went by. He felt it happen. His Provenance turned over and settled, turned over and settled, again and again, as though it had been left to work at itself through a long quiet day with nothing to disturb it. His foundations did the same. An entire day’s worth of refinement, worked through in the space of one breath, and then the next second came, and it happened again.

That was all it did. It simply kept happening, every second, without being asked!

Noah opened his eyes and looked at his hands.

He had half expected his attributes to start climbing. That was what progress had always looked like, for most of his rise. More. Bigger numbers, bigger reserves, a bigger shadow thrown across existence. But that was not what THE Lived Hour was doing to him at all.

It was pressing him down!

Every second, every hidden day of refinement packed inside that second, pressed his Provenance a little closer together. Tighter. Denser. The same amount of him, fitted into a smaller and smaller space, as a blacksmith hammers the same iron over and over until the metal that comes out the other side weighs the same and is nothing like what went in.

He looked deeper, down past his foundations, past the Root, down to the very smallest pieces of what he was made of.

His quarks!

Not long ago, in a very different stage of his existence, he had remade every quark of his body one by one into something that carried his own aims. They were still there, all of them, countless as sand. But now, looking at them, he found each one packed. Crammed full!

Dense with his Provenance, blue and gold, pressed into every one of them past anything he would have believed a single quark could hold. And threaded all through that Provenance, cold and clean, was something else.

The Long Night!

The cold was in him. It had been in him since the frozen underworld. But he had always felt it as something he carried. Something he survived. Now, looking down at his own quarks, he saw that the cold had been compressed in alongside his Provenance, layer on layer, until the two had become one substance. Warm and cold. Dream and winter. Neither fighting the other.

As he watched, snow began to surge around him!

The Long Night’s snow reached deeper into this murky corner of the Chrysalis, and it came drifting down through the purple clouds toward him, and sank in! Rivers of it, drawn out of the sky, flowing into his crystalline body and down into the packed quarks, and every flake that sank in was pressed down with everything else, and every flake left him cleaner.

As the snow poured in and the Lived Hour pressed and pressed, he felt more and mofe sublime. One by one, any rough specks were ground out and pushed away, until his whole existence, from the surface of his crystalline skin down to the smallest packed quark, was unblemished!

Then he looked at his Root.

THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin turned at the center of him as it always did, the endless mobius spinning in his chest. But it turned heavier now. Slower, with more behind it. And when he looked at it closely, with everything he had, he could see its two natures more clearly than he had ever seen them.

He had known now that his Root was Dual. Conceptual and Physical at once.

On one side of it, the Conceptual side, he could feel the Dreamer. The part of him that dreamed a thing and watched existence adjust to agree. That was the Collector’s kind of power, the Empyros kind, the power of a being who could write something true and make existence live inside the sentence.

One day, if he lived long enough, that part of his Root would make him an Empyros Immense Lifeform, able to rewrite whatever he looked at.

And on the other side, the Physical side, he could feel the weight of his Dreams and infinity and everything else. The packed quarks. The cold compressed into his body until his body had become harder than any material in existence. That was Lucy’s kind of power. THE Infiniverse’s kind. The Fiend kind, a being simply heavier than the rules!

One day, that part of his Root would make him a Fiend Immense Lifeform, so dense and so real that no sentence anyone wrote could hold him.

Both at once!

He had watched the Collector write a perfect sentence on a mountain and break against it. He had watched THE Infiniverse fill a paradox with so much existence it had nowhere left to hide. One of them had been the writer. The other had been the page.

He was going to be both!

Noah smiled quietly, alone in the purple sky. What a ridiculous thing to be. A writer who was also the page, a dreamer who was also the weight. Was there anything in existence that could argue with that?

He did not know.

Then he looked up, and stopped smiling!

He had been floating in this same place for a long while now, testing and feeling and turning his power over, without moving at all. No attack, no dream sent outward, no reaching for anything around him. Only himself, sitting still, letting the Lived Hour work.

And everything around him had begun to dream!

The time-disks nearest him had slowed. Their violet edges had gone soft and blurred, like a thing half remembered. The purple clouds had drifted into strange shapes, towers and faces and wide calm seas that had never been clouds before, shapes that came from nowhere any cloud could have learned them. The violet smoke of old time curled into slow spirals, turning over and over like a sleeper shifting in a warm bed. Even the Dimensions far off in the murk twinkled in a new rhythm, slow and even, like breath.

And drifting close by, not ten paces from him, was a Gu!

A small one. Common, pale and new, the sort he would once have reached out and taken without a second thought. It floated in the purple air with its thin wings drawn in, perfectly still, and it was not afraid of him. It was asleep! Curled up in the dream that was spreading out of him through this whole region of the Chrysalis, and whatever it was dreaming about, it looked content.

Noah looked at it for a long moment.

He did not reach for it!

The whole murky domain around him, the clouds and the time and the smoke and the stars and the small sleeping Gu, had been dreaming quietly while he sat in the middle of it. Simply because he was there. Simply because of what he was.

His Dreamer’s sight opened, and showed him!

|NOAH OSMONT: THE TRUE HUMAN EMPEROR/ THE HUMAN DREAMER|

|VERITAS: 668. PROVENANCE: 761. POTENTIA: INFINITE. PONDUS: 659. OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 674.|

|DENSITY: REFINED. Each point of every attribute now holds far more than it once did. The numbers have not kept pace with what they measure.|

|ROOT: THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin. DUAL CONCEPTUAL AND PHYSICAL EXISTENTIAL ROOT OF IMMENSITY. Future path: EMPYROS and FIEND, at once.|

|PROVENANCES: THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer (Quality of Time). THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign.|

|INFINITY: DIALETHEIC.|

|NINE FOUNDATIONS: INEFFABLE.|

|INSCRIPTIONS: THE Osmontian Inscription of THE Dreaming Hour. THE Existential Foundational Narrative Inscription.|

|STATE: Unblemished. Quarks compressed with Infinity, Provenance, and THE Long Night.|

|PASSIVE EFFECT: Existence near you begins to dream.|

...!

The numbers had barely moved, and he was stronger than he had ever been. Well, barely may have been the wrong word as he HAD been at 500 attribute a day ago.

Noah looked at the panel for a long while, and then at the sleeping Gu, and then out across the whole dreaming domain.

"With all of this," he said quietly, to no one, "it should be possible."

The clouds drifted in their strange new shapes. The Gu slept on.

"To dream, and to live freely." He let out a slow breath. "Nothing in existence can be guaranteed. The First Gu was right about that. The Caretaker was right about that."

He looked down at his own unblemished hands. "But I can guarantee my own Dream. That much, at least, I can do."

He closed his eyes.

—

Far away across existence, in the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, another part of him opened its eyes on the Glacial Mountain.

The snow was still falling on the golden monastery. Verys still stood a few paces off, patient in his fur-lined cloak. But the light had changed, and Noah could feel, in the particular stillness of the mountain and the faint new hum running through the Conduits beneath it, that an entire day had truly passed now. Somewhere in the Legacy, things were about to begin.

And in the Existential Root Domain, a third part of him sat in the blue-gold clouds, watching two women.

THE Infiniverse and Ruination had not said much since he sent them home. They had stood beside him before THE First Gu of Time and been able to do nothing, not one thing, and it sat on both of them heavily.

THE Infiniverse had already begun growing new domains to replace the ones that had crumbled, faster than before, harder than before. Ruination sat very still with her eyes scrolling, reading back over everything her Root now kept. It looked very much like they were both about to throw themselves into their own progression grander than they ever had before!

Good!

But one thing at a time.

Existence was vast, and they were young. For all three of them, things were only just beginning to unfold.

And Noah found that what he felt, looking ahead at the Legacy’s gathering, was curiosity. What kind of beings would he meet? What dreams did they carry, what power, what strange and singular ways of looking at existence?

He wanted to know. Not so he could take any of it. So he could learn from it, and dream grander for having seen it.

That was how it had always gone for him, when he thought about it honestly.

THE Creature. Anaximander, who needed no authority at all to be exactly what he was. Ul’moreth. Eon. Atlas and his brilliant, restless engineering. Poona. Moriarty and his spectacles. The Caretaker. And now THE First Gu of Time, who had shown him what everything felt like from the inside, right to its end.

Every one of them had looked at existence differently, and every one of them had given him a spark he could never have struck on his own. Who he was now, he was because of all of them.

That was why he could not simply hide. He could not seal himself away in his Existential Root Domain and grow in the dark, safe and alone, where nothing grand could find him. A being who hid could not dream anything but the inside of its own hiding place!

He had to go out. He had to experience existence, all of it, the frightening parts and the wondrous ones, to be able to dream truly grand dreams.

That was how, across every epoch, he would truly be supreme.

Not by being afraid!

Share