Published at 23rd of October 2026 9:43 am

Chapter 5890: A Glorious Undertaking!

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The glass halls healed slowly around Noah, crack by crack, and he stood in the middle of them and thought.

Two dreams, two deaths. He had lost every Dimension in his Dream to a single light, and he had lost Emotive to a ring of hunters one breath away from winning. Both times he had learned something.

He laid the pieces out in his mind.

The first piece was a place. He knew exactly where THE First Gu of Emotions floated now, at the heart of its storm of feelings in the Chrysalis, and he knew that a Shard of IT sat somewhere inside it.

The second piece was fear. That vast creature, halfway to Unfathomable, had run. It had run from Achilles once he had grasped Shinjitsu, and it had weakened with Emotive inside its threads. Those two had touched it where raw power had failed. This was a unique situation that was likely never to repeat outside these two factors!

Emotions and Assimilation!

The third piece was time. The hunters of Provenance had come much later on. So this time there would be no army and no noise, and he would finish long before their entry.

The fourth piece was Rose. She had died because she was standing there.

Noah looked at the pieces for a long moment, and then he smiled.

Defeating a First Gu was far beyond him, and he had no need to. He only needed it to let go of one thing.

He stepped into a new window of possibilities!

|Quantum Dream 3 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 0.2%.|

|Hour 1: You take Emotive and travel toward the region of THE First Gu of Emotions, through empty places only.|

|Hour 2: You arrive at its edge. Ling, Poona, and THE Thinker are still two days away.|

|No army follows you. No Narratives notice you pass.|

The glass shifted to show the storm of feelings again, churnning red and blue and gold at the heart of the Chrysalis, and the great shape of colored light floating at its center. This time the edge was quiet. There was only one body of Noah’s, standing in the drifitng silk far outside the storm, and Emotive beside him with her hands clasped and her eyes bright with interest.

"Oh, I do love it when you plan," she murmured.

|Hour 2: Your Dream begins to spread through the empty silk around the region, silently.|

|You leave the storm itself untouched.|

|Hour 6: Your Dream cautiously reaches halfway around it.|

|Hour 19: Your Dream surrounds the region on every side.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions notices nothing.|

In the glass, Noah watched his Dream close around the storm like a hand closing very gently around a candle flame. Every bit of empty silk and space on every side of it became his, through and through, while the storm itself stayed exactly as it was, wild and unaware that everything beyond its edges had quietly changed owners.

|Hour 20: Emotive slips into the outermost threads of THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|She takes one thread at a time, so slowly that each one still feels like its own.|

|Your Dream flows in alongside her, quiet as breath as you really lean in to the cautious route.|

|Hour 23: A quarter of Emotive is woven into its existence.|

|Hour 26: A third of her is woven in.|

|It has noticed nothing.|

Emotive went in. Her fourteen colors threaded themselves along the edges of the Gu’s own threads until they looked like part of the same weave, and every feeling that passed through those threads now passed through her first. She tasted each one, kept a little, and let the rest pass on as if nothing had changed.

Noah’s Dream went with her, thin as a whisper, holding the space around every thread she touched.

Then he reached for Achilles!

|Hour 27: You pull on your connection with Achilles Adrastia.|

|You bring him here alone.|

|Rose stays where she is, far away and safe.|

Achilles arrived at the edge of the silk with a jolt, his eyes flicking wildly from Noah to the storm. Noah raised one hand before he could speak.

"Look," Noah said, and showed him.

He gave Achilles a memory from another road. It was the storm, the army breaking, the pure crushing power of the Gu bearing down, and Rose walking through the colors to take his hand. Then it was the white flash of the Shard, and the emptiness after, and his own hand closed around nothing.

Achilles staggered! His whole existence shuddered!

"What you saw happened on another possibility of existence. On this one, it has not happened yet." He turned his head toward the storm. "That is the thing that killed her there...in another flow of time."

It was a cruel thing to show a man. Noah showed it anyway, because a man who has seen it will fight a First Gu, and a man who has only heard about it will hesitate.

Then he gave him the rest.

"There is something called...Shinjitsu"

He met Achilles’ eyes as he began to infuse him with knowledge and the plan!

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

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

|Achilles Adrastia grasps it faster this time.|

|Faint multicolored glimmers rise over his existence.|

Noah smiled thinly.

|Hour 28: Achilles Adrastia begins to assimilate THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|His existence opens into vast multicolored jaws.|

|At the same moment, Emotive reaches halfway into its existence.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses the threats at once.|

|It panics.|

|It reaches inside itself and pulls out the Shard of IT.|

In the glass, the great jellyfish of light flared every color at once, and from deep inside its body it drew out a small, glowing object, bright as a fallen star.

|It pours its Emotions into the Shard.|

|Half of the Emotions it pours now pass through Emotive first.|

|Patientia slows them. Temperantia sets them a limit. Acedia lets them grow heavy and dull.|

|The Emotions reach the Shard thin and cold and late.|

|The Shard does not ignite.|

|The space around the Shard has always been your Dream.|

The Shard pulsed once, weakly, and went still!

The Gu stared at it! Its colors flickered in confusion, then in alarm, then in plain shock, because Achilles’ jaws were closing in from one side and something inside its own body was eating it from the other, and the one weapon it had trusted had just failed in its own hand.

|THE First Gu of Emotions cannot be defeated by you.|

|It does not need to be.|

|It runs.|

|In its panic and its existence having its two halves murky and chaotic, it leaves the Shard behind.|

The great shape of colored light tore away across the Chrysalis, its threads streaming behind it, and the small bright stone hung alone in the air where it had been.

Noah’s Dream was already holding the space around it!

He reached out, and closed his hand around it!

|You now hold a second Shard of IT.|

It was warm and heavy in his palm, humming faintly, and for a moment the glass halls around him seemed to lean toward it.

|Emotive remains inside THE First Gu of Emotions, woven halfway into its existence.|

|It carries her away with it as it runs, and has not yet fully noticed what she is.|

|Achilles Adrastia is unstable.|

|His existence flickers between man and Gu as he assimilated something far, far above himself. He is trying to hold it together.|

Beside him in the glass, Achilles hung in the torn silk with his arms wrapped around himself, his existence flashing man, Gu, man, Gu, the multicolored glimmers of his Shinjitsu fighting to stay in one shape. He was breathing hard and staring at nothing, and his lips were moving. Noah could read the word on them easily. It was a name.

It was...Rose.

|Hour 40: The Ancient Gu of Provenance have not appeared.|

|Beyond the Shard, the probabilities grow too murky to see.|

|Quantum Dream 3 has ended.|

The glass went quiet.

Noah opened his eyes in the blue-gold halls, and they were shining with brilliant light!

He had all of it: the place, the timing, the order, and the cost. One dream had shown him the price of greed, the second had shown him the price of noise, and the third had shown him a road where nobody he cared about died and a First Gu ran away and left a Shard of IT in his hand.

Now it only had to happen!

He moved at once! The halls of glass fell away around him like mist, and Noah moved in existence for real, his Dream stirring across the Gaps and the Legacies and the Nova Dream Sector, reaching first for Emotive on the white throne, and then, along a faint and stubborn thread, for a young man named Achilles Adrastia.

Somewhere in the Chrysalis, a great shape of colored light went on floating over its storm, with no idea that it had already been robbed once.

—

<THE First Gu of Emotions>

Every lifeform that has ever lived has felt something.

That was the first truth THE First Gu of Emotions had learned, long ago, when existence was still young enough to be surprised by itself. Before there were names, there was a small creature somewhere in the dark that flinched, and the flinch was fear, and fear was the first feeling. The Gu had been born from that flinch. It had grown on every feeling since.

It floated now at the heart of its storm in the Chrysalis, vast and soft and many-colored, and it tasted.

Feelings drifted through its region like weather. Grief came in slow and heavy from the far edges, where small things mourned other small things. Joy came in bright bursts and burned away. Rage arrived hot and hungry and left nothing behind it. The Gu let all of them flow through its trailing threads, light years of them, and kept a little of each.

It thought of feelings as tides. Every lifeform believed its feelings were its own, born inside it and owned by it, but the Gu knew better. Feelings came from outside, rolled in, filled a creature up, and rolled on. Creatures were only shores. The Gu was the sea.

Deep inside it, where nothing else could reach, a small bright stone sat warm against its oldest threads. It had kept that stone for a very long time. It preferred to leave the stone alone, and it preferred even more to leave alone the thought of what it could do.

On the first day, the far silk grew quiet.

The Gu noticed the quiet as one notices a sound stopping somewhere in a large domain. The edges of its region had always hummed with the small feelings of drifting things, and now, slowly, over many hours, that hum softened. Beyond the storm, the silk grew calm and still on every side, as if the whole outer dark had taken a long breath and decided to keep holding it.

Quiet things bored the Gu, so it went back to tasting.

On the second day, its feelings began to change.

It was so slight at first that the Gu thought it was its own mood. Its rage arrived a heartbeat later than it used to, and cooled a heartbeat sooner. Its joy ended a breath before it should have, and left behind something gentler, almost like contentment. The old griefs it kept near its center still tasted of grief, but under the grief there was now a faint sweetness, as bitter tea is softened by a single drop of honey.

The Gu considerd this for a long while.

Perhaps it was age. Even the sea grows tired. Perhaps it had tasted too much of one thing and was craving another. Perhaps this was simply what feelings did, after enough Ages, when a creature had held them long enough to grow fond of them.

It decided the change was its own, and it was almost pleased by it.

Then, at the edge of its storm, two small things appeared!

The Gu turned a fraction of its attention toward them, as a great animal turns one ear toward a mouse. Small things came to its edge all the time. They came for its feelings, or for the stone, and they went away again, usually weeping and collapsed.

The first was a young man. He looked steady enough from the outside, but the Gu tasted him and found him rich and strange. He carried old fear and older confusion, a split down the middle of himself where two things were trying to be one, and under all of it, a fierce, stubborn love for someone far away.

The second was smaller still, to every sense the Gu had. A slight figure of night-sky skin and faint blue-gold light, standing very still in the silk. The Gu tasted him and found calm, a smooth surface like still water, and underneath the calm, nothing it could name at all. When it reached for what lay beneath, it was like reaching into still water and finding no bottom.

The Gu decided it disliked the taste of him, and set him aside.

Then the still one moved his hand, and the flickering young man’s feelings broke open.

Grief poured out of him so suddenly and so purely that the Gu shivered with the taste of it. It was grief for a death, a hand closing on nothing, a woman walking through colors and gone. The Gu had tasted grief from every corner of existence, and it knew the shape of a loss. This one was different. This grief was for something that was yet to happen.

It was a taste entirely new to the Gu. It turned the feeling over and over in its threads, puzled and fascinated. Grief for a future. Mourning for a road not yet walked. What kind of creature could make another weep for something that was still waiting to happen?

It looked at the still figure again, and the still figure was looking back at it.

A small unease stirred in the Gu’s threads.

Then the young man opened!

His existence spread out from him like a mouth across the sky, vast multicolored jaws as wide as a region of the Chrysalis, and every color along their edges was a feeling the Gu knew, its own feelings, the ones it had kept for Ages, being swallowed as if they belonged to someone else. As its feelings poured into him, the young man flickered, and for a heartbeat something like a Gu, many-legged and bright, showed through him before he was a man again. And at the same moment, somewhere beyond its sight, its feelings were being taken from the inside.

There were two thieves!

The Gu searched its own body for the second, every thread, every color, every old grief at its center, and found nothing. Its feelings were still there, still soft, still faintly sweet. They simply arrived wherever they were going a little lighter than they should have, as though something unseen were tasting each one first.

Was it that horned obsidian creature?!

Fear came then, its oldest feeling, and the Gu did what it had always done when it was afraid.

It reached inside itself for the stone!

It drew the Shard of IT out from its oldest threads, bright as a fallen star, and poured into it every feeling it had, every rage and grief and terror from every corner of its region, enough to shred Gigaparsecs and everything in them. Only a handful of times in all its long life had it done this, and each time existence had broken around it.

The feelings went into the Shard.

They went in thin, and cold, and late.

The Gu felt them arrive and understood none of it. Its rage reached the stone already calm. Its terror reached it dulled and heavy, like something half asleep. And its grief reached it softened by that faint, stubborn sweetness. The Shard pulsed once, weakly.

And the space around the stone felt wrong!

The Gu had held that stone inside its own region for a long time. Every speck of space around it should have belonged to the storm, to the Gu, to its feelings. It reached for that space now and found it smooth and calm and quiet, like the far silk had been, like the still figure had been, as if it had always belonged to someone else.

The jaws were closing. The second thief was still inside it somewhere. And the only weapon it had ever trusted lay dead in its hand.

The Gu ran!

It tore away from its own storm for the first time since it had made it, threads streaming behind it across the Chrysalis, every color of it blazing with plain animal terror. In its panic it let go of the stone. It felt the Shard slip loose behind it and hang alone in the calm air, and it was too afraid to go back.

It looked back once.

The still figure had stepped forward. He reached out, unhurried, and closed his hand around the Shard as if picking up something he had set down earlier. He was still small to every sense the Gu had, still weak, still a creature whose Immensity it could have crushed with a thought. Then he looked up at the fleeing Gu across the distance, and he smiled.

The Gu fled faster!

It ran across gigaparsecs of silk, past drifting Dimensions and old dark regions it had left alone for Ages, and its threads kept shaking. Over and over, it saw the two small figures at the edge of its storm, and over and over, it asked itself the same thing.

What wears that face?

It had tasted every feeling in existence, and it knew the feelings of weak things well. Weak things were loud. They were afraid, and hungry, and desperate, and their feelings spilled out of them in every direction. These two had worn the faces of weak things, and one of them had made a First Gu run while the other had robbed it with a single hand. What kind of terrible thing was walking existence now, small on the outside and bottomless underneath?

When it was far enough away that the silk around it was strange and empty, the Gu finally slowed, and drew its threads in close, and did what it always did after fear.

It reached for its oldest grief, the one it kept nearest its center, and wrapped itself in it for comfort.

The grief held it more gently than it ever had before.

The Gu swore revenge as first...it needed to recuperate. And its emotions right now felt oh...so sweet.

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