Free Web NovelChapter 5352: Destruere I
The moment Noah landed on the Source Leaf-Vessel, he felt its brilliance.
Waves of THE Primordial Source flowed from him into the leaf, and from the leaf back into him, a quiet exchange between two things that carried the same authority, the vessel recognizing what he had recently grasped and answering it.
|You are standing on a rare and pristine object cut from THE Primordial Source Tree. While aboard, your Primordial Source refinement and generation are increased by one hundred percent. All environmental pressures and hostile weavings encountered during transit have no effect on this object or those it carries.|
...!
Simple effects. Good ones. He smiled faintly, holding Seo-yeon’s hand as she settled beside him, taking in the obsidian-gold leaf beneath her feet with wide curious eyes.
He looked at Dame Seraphine ahead of him, and at the Swords arranged around them, and asked the thing he had been turning over since the farm.
"You changed rather quickly the moment you received that Order from above," he said casually. "Who did it come from?"
He had never been one to beat around the bush.
Dame Seraphine turned back to gaze at him, her eyes profound. Around her, even Sir William and the other three Swords showed curiosity, the question apparently one they had been wondering about themselves without asking.
Richard stepped in. He was the small one, pale-haired and sharp-faced, his bright eyes already moving across the group as he spoke, the manner of a being who thought out loud and enjoyed it.
"Yes, Dame Seraphine, it is hardly out of protocol for us to know where a mission came from," he said, light and quick. "We have been playing a guessing game the whole way here. Who could have reached down and redirected you and us so fast? I had three candidates. Botswana had one, and his was wrong. Lianna would not say hers, which means hers was interesting. So please, put us out of our misery, who could have-"
"It came from THE Domicile of THE Queen Regnant."
BOOM!
The silence after was heavy.
Around them, the Leaf-Vessel broke out of THE Source Lands and entered a sea of obsidian Undefinition, everything beyond the leaf turning to black, the unstable rivers of the Gaps streaming past without touching them. Inside that blackness, the party absorbed what Dame Seraphine had just said.
Sir William went somber, his composed features settling into something careful. The muscular Botswana, the scarred mountain of a being, swirled with a sudden roil of violence and power, and then laughed, low and rough.
"Haha. Anything out of THE Domicile means one of two things," he said. "Either someone very close to THE Queen handed down this mission. Or THE Queen herself did." His grim eyes fixed on Noah, assessing.
"So is this one here really that big a deal? What exactly is his anomaly, to warrant attention from that high up?"
...!
Dame Seraphine sneered.
"Do not step out of line," she said. "His weavings are need-to-know, and you do not currently need to know. That is the end of that conversation." Then she paused, and something shifted, a transaction offered.
"If you wish to be useful instead of nosy, here is a task. Whoever among you manages to teach our new friend the Destruere Letter of THE Primordial Tongue, I will request a large volume of Eridarch Ore on your behalf. You all know the essence of Destruere. So explain it to him, each of you, in your own way. After that, I am permitted to show him the intricacies of the letter directly. If he grasps it, he will tell us himself which of your definitions helped him most."
The eyes of every Sword present lit up at the mention of Eridarch Ore.
Noah watched them shift instantly from cautious to interested. The Ore was clearly worth a great deal even to beings of their tier, which told him plenty about where they were going. He set THE Queen Regnant aside for later, a legend he had only heard fragments of, a question worth answering but not now.
Richard came over first, smiling. frёewebnoѵēl.com
"Friend," he said, "are you any good at picking up new things? Destruere is the first letter that gives people real trouble, so do not feel bad if it takes a few tries. Here is what it means, the way I see it." He folded his small hands behind his back and started pacing, clearly enjoying the stage.
"Destruere is not destruction the way a brute thinks of destruction. A brute breaks a thing and is satisfied with the pieces. Destruere is the recognition that everything which exists was assembled out of something simpler, and that the assembly is not permanent. It is the act of reading how a thing was put together, and then politely informing it that the arrangement is over. I think of it as editing, honestly. Every existence is a draft. Destruere is the red pen. You do not hate the sentence. You simply decide it should not be there, and then it is not. Elegant. Surgical! Haha...I find crude applications of it distasteful, but a clean one is a genuine pleasure to witness."
He stepped back with a flourish, satisfied.
Botswana grunted and looked over, and his take could not have been more different.
"He overcomplicates it," the big Sword said, his voice a low rumble. "Destruere is not editing. It is actually honesty. Everything that stands, stands because it has not yet met a force great enough to put it down. That is the only truth at the bottom of existence. Strength endures and weakness ends, and Destruere is simply the act of being that greater force, of meeting a thing and proving that it was never as permanent as it believed."
"I have broken a great many things. Fortresses. Beings. And every single one of them broke the same way, the moment something stronger decided they would. Destruere is not a technique to me. It is a reminder. Nothing standing in front of you is owed its standing. You take it back to nothing, and you do not apologize, because existence never apologized to any of the things it ended first."
He laughed, and the violence swirled around him again!
