Published at 23rd of October 2026 9:43 am

Chapter 5889: Testing II

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Noah watched the glass as the great shape of colored light turned toward Achilles, and the prompts kept coming.

|Day 4, Hour 4: THE First Gu of Emotions sends its power at Achilles Adrastia.|

|It sends no feeling this time. It sends pure power, raw and heavy, enough to crush him outright.|

|Achilles Adrastia tries to assimilate this too.|

|He uses the weavings of Emotions he has already taken to soften the blow.|

|It helps, very little.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions sits halfway to Unfathomable Immensity. It is among the weaker First Gu, and it is still far beyond anything in this army.|

In the glass, Achilles bent under it like a reed in a flood. His body cracked along its seams, light spilled out of him, and the two people sharing his body seemed to pull against each other as the weight pressed down. He roared, a raw sound full of pain and refusal, and kept his feet.

Behind him, Rose was in danger!

The storm had found her. Its colors were closing around her one by one, and she stood in the middle of them with her green hair whiping in the wind of feelings. Then she walked forward, out of the colors and straight through the weight, and stepped up beside Achilles. She took his hand.

She looked at him once, calm and sure, as if they would simply go together.

Noah’s breath caught in the glass!

|Through your bonds, you sense what is unfolding.|

|You send a body.|

|You bring Emotive.|

The pane flared blue-gold, and a body of Noah’s arrived at the edge of the storm with Emotive beside him, her eyes full of every color at once. She looked up at the vast jellyfish of light, at its threads trailing across the sky, and smiled the gracious, dangerous smile.

"Oh, darling," she murmured. "You are...so very loud."

|Emotive does not fight THE First Gu of Emotions head on. She cannot win that way.|

|She weaves herself into its threads instead.|

|Her Seven Virtues anchor those it has seized.|

|Patientia rides the thread of rage and slows it. The Established One stops tearing at its neighbor.|

|Caritas rides the thread of grief and gives it someone to hold. Moriarty stops weeping long enough to look up.|

|Diligentia rides the thread of longing and gives it work to do. THE Thinker stops walking home.|

|Temperantia rides the thread of joy and sets it a limit. The laughing Progeny who remain stop coming apart.|

|Her Seven Sins tangle the Gu itself.|

|Gula floods its threads with more feeling than they can carry, until they choke.|

|Avaritia claims its threads as hers, one by one.|

|Invidia sets its threads pulling against each other.|

|She gives her Everythings away to keep the army standing. They grow back, and she gives them again.|

In the glass, the storm changed! Its colors, which had moved as one, began to snag and knot and turn against themselves. Emotive stood inside the knot with her hands lifted, threads of fourteen colors running from her fingers into the great shape of light, and every thread she touched turned a little less obedient to its master.

|Emotive has bought time.|

|Achilles Adrastia uses it.|

|He begins assimilating everything nearby.|

What happened next was terrifying!

The silk around Achilles thinned and vanished into him. The colors of the storm bent toward him and drained into his body like water down a drain. The loose threads of feeling the Gu had cast across the army came loose from their victims and coiled into him instead. The torn pieces of space near his feet grew pale as he took those too, and the whole region around him began to look a little empty, a little hollow, as if he were slowly eating the room he stood in.

Noah’s body crossed the storm in a single step and stood beside him!

"Listen," Noah said quietly, through the faint connection between them. "What you take, you already make it yours. Find what is still you underneath all of it, and pull everything toward that. This is Shinjitsu as you should be very attuned to it..."

|You share the knowledge of Shinjitsu with Achilles Adrastia.|

|It cannot be granted. It can only be shown.|

|Achilles Adrastia is more in tune with Shinjitsu than any lifeform you have seen.|

|His Assimilation is the very thing Shinjitsu asks for: taking what was borrowed and making it truly his own.|

In the glass, Achilles’s eyes went wide! For one breath, the two people sharing his body seemed to stop fighting and listen to the same thing.

Then the great shape of light screamed!

It made no sound. Its whole body flared every color at once, and the prompts turned grim.

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses its own Provenance threatened.|

|Two unknown things are taking its Emotions away.|

|In a fit of rage, it reaches inside itself and pulls out a glowing object.|

|It is a Shard of IT.|

|It pours its Emotions into the Shard.|

...!

|The surrounding Gigaparsecs fall under a full Unfathomable Immensity.|

|Everything in them is shredded apart.|

|The silk, the storm, the army, the space itself.|

|Nothing nearby survives the catastrophe, except those connected to your Dream.|

|They survive, barely.|

|Ling, Poona, Moriarty, and THE Thinker survive, broken.|

|Your body here survives, broken.|

|Emotive entrenches herself deeper into THE First Gu of Emotions to survive, inside its own threads.|

|Achilles Adrastia survives.|

|Rose’s existence has collapsed completely.|

The glass went white, and when it cleared, there was almost nothing left.

A vast torn emptyness stretched across the pane where the storm had been. In the middle of it hung Achilles, and Noah could hardly recognize him. His nerves had spread out of his body into everything around him, threaded through the shredded silk and the raw, loose feelings still drifting in the dark, so that he felt all of it at once, every scrap of broken space and every wild emotion raging through the ruin.

His hand was still closed around nothing, where Rose’s hand had been.

He roared, and it was a sound of pain beyond measure!

|Achilles Adrastia’s existence is assimilating the ruin around him.|

|His lifeform is mutating.|

|A Unique Advancement is blooming. ?????|

Across his broken existence, faint glimmers began to bloom, every color of every feeling he had swallowed, rising over him like a fragile new skin.

It was Shinjitsu, and it was all of the colors at once!

The multicolored Shinjitsu settled over Achilles, and the prompts changed tone.

|Achilles Adrastia’s Assimilation and his new Shinjitsu have joined.|

|What he assimilates, he now makes truly his own, at once.|

|He no longer needs to take existence piece by piece.|

|He can take it in vast expanses, instantly.|

In the glass, Noah watched the ruin around Achilles vanish!

It went all at once. The shredded silk, the broken space, the drifting scraps of feeling, light years of torn existence in every direction, gone in a single breath and swallowed into him. Where it had been, there was only a clean, quiet dark.

Achilles lifted his head and looked across the distance at the great shape of colored light.

His face was full of rage and sorrow at once.

|Achilles Adrastia begins to assimilate THE First Gu of Emotions.|

His existence opened!

It spread out from him like a mouth opening across the sky, vast multicolored jaws as wide as a region of the Chrysalis, every color of every feeling he had swallowed glowing along their edges. They closed on everything between him and the Gu, and everything between them simply went into him. Light years of silk vanished. A drifting Dimension of colored storm vanished. The jaws kept coming.

THE First Gu of Emotions flinched!

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses danger.|

|It runs.|

Noah stared at the glass. A being sitting halfway to Unfathomable Immensity, one of the First Gu, was fleeing from a lifeform it should have crushed with a single thought. Somehow Achilles had stepped past every wall of power between them, and he had made it run!

The great jellyfish of light tore away across the Chrysalis, its threads streaming behind it, and the jaws snapped shut on the space where it had been a moment before.

Then Achilles’ existence shook!

For a heartbeat he was a man, standing in the dark with his hands at his sides. In the next heartbeat he was something else, a vast Gu of shifting colors, many-legged and bright, hunched where the man had stood. Then he was a man again, and then the Gu, flickering between the two as if his existence was still deciding which one to be.

Both of them were crying.

Multicolored tears ran down his face and fell into the dark, each one a feeling he had swallowed, and none of them could bring her back. Rose was gone. He had taken in whole expanses of existence, he had made a First Gu run, and not one bit of it could return the hand he was still reaching for.

Noah looked at him for a long moment.

Then he followed the Gu!

|Your body, still broken, follows THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|Emotive is still inside it, woven through its threads.|

|She keeps feeding on its Emotions.|

|Achilles Adrastia tore away half of its Immensity. Its defenses are far weaker than before.|

|Day 4, Hour 9: THE First Gu of Emotions runs across the Chrysalis. Emotive eats thread after thread from the inside.|

|Day 5, Hour 2: It is weakening. The colors of its body are fading one by one.|

|Day 5, Hour 6: The Shard of IT inside it is dimming as its Emotions drain away.|

|Day 5, Hour 8: Emotive is close to taking the whole of its existence, and the Shard of IT with it.|

In the glass, the chase stretched across gigaparsecs of drifting silk. The great Gu fled with its colours failing, red and gold and blue fading out of it one after another until it was more grey than anything, and inside it, a small bright knot of fourteen colors kept growing. Noah followed close behind, near enough to feel Emotive through their bond. She was laughing softly, tired and triumphent.

One more thread, then another, then the Shard!

Then...

Then the whole pane changed!

|Day 5, Hour 8: Multiple Ancient Gu of Provenance arrive.|

|They lock onto you, behind Emotive.|

|They recognize your signature: the thing that brought the Calamity’s weavings back.|

|How they found you here is unknown. ?????|

|They attack together.|

They came out of the silk on every side at once! Noah recognized what they were at once, the hunters Lygara had warned of: a great beetle of molten gold with stained-glass wings, a centipede of silver Time trailing clocks from its hundred legs, a pale moth of Death whose wings blotted out half the sky, a mantis of green Life with its forelimbs raised. More came behind them, radiant and ancient and many.

|The gold beetle traces Emotive’s origin back to your Dream, and cuts it.|

|The centipede of Time unwinds her moments, one by one.|

|The moth of Death closes its wings over her.|

|Her Everythings grow back. She gives them again.|

|They grow back slower.|

|They grow back slower still.|

|Her Everythings can no longer regenerate.|

Inside the fading Gu, the bright knot of fourteen colors came apart thread by thread. Noah felt every thread go through their bond. At the very end, as the moth’s wings closed, he heard her voice one last time.

"Was I magnificent, darling? Was I...helpful?"

|Emotive has been ripped apart.|

|Her Dream returns to THE Infiniverse, to be reborn.|

Grief would have to wait!

|The Ancient Gu of Provenance turn on you.|

|Collapse 1. Your Dream remembers you, and you return.|

|Collapse 2. You return.|

|Collapse 3. You return, slower.|

|Collapse 4. They trace each return back to its origin and cut it again.|

|Collapse 5. Collapse 6. Collapse 7.|

|The probabilities around you are breaking apart.|

In the glass, he died and came back and died again, over and over, each time a little more slowly. The windows around the scene cracked. Then the windows beside those cracked, and the cracks raced outward through the whole blue-gold hall, pane after pane splitting into lines of white light.

Far away, in one last clear window, the grey and broken shape of THE First Gu of Emotions slipped away into the silk, half of itself gone, the dim Shard of IT still clutched inside it.

|The many collapses have destabilized THE Infinite Quantum Dream.|

|Quantum Dream 2 has ended.|

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