Free Web NovelChapter 234: Merely Ancestral Celestials! I
Every choice had an effect and a consequence.
Damian knew this well, and spreading THE Primordial Source filled with his ideas across thousands of miles was a choice large enough to come with both. The boons and the negatives arrived together, the way they always did, and he sat with them now in the garden of the Demon Tower while his Ama and Serala stood beside him and the Demon Emperor knelt where he had been left.
The boons came first, and they were considerable.
Words bloomed before his eyes.
|All lifeforms imposed under the effects of your Scale of Existence will contribute to the refinement and growth of your own Source.|
|However weak a given lifeform’s Source may be, a fraction of it now flows toward your existence. Across the vast domain your Scale of Existence covers, this contribution is continuous and cumulative.|
...!
Yes.
He felt it as he read it. The density and concentration of THE Primordial Source within him began to rise as the seconds passed, a steady climb fed by the many lifeforms now living under the Scale he had pressed across the land. Each one contributed almost nothing on its own. But there were a great many of them, more than he could count, and the sum of all those almost-nothings flowed toward him without pause, and he could feel his existence growing denser with each breath he took standing in the garden.
The boons were grand!
The negatives, for him, seemed to amount mostly to attention.
He had seen the massive pillar of obsidian light rise into the crimson sky when he instated the Scale, and ever since, he had carried a new sensation. It was something like sight, except it was selective, showing him certain things and ignoring everything else. He could sense some of what moved through his domain. Not all of it. Just the parts that mattered to him.
Words confirmed it.
|Within the domain where your Scale of Existence is present, any causality or weaving of existence related to you will be transmitted to your awareness.|
|You cannot sense or observe everything across the expanse of your imposed domain. You can sense only that which relates to you. For example: lifeforms designating themselves as Ancestral Celestials are currently descending toward your location. Their weavings of existence range from Neutral to Slightly Hostile.|
...!
Yes.
Because it related to him, he could feel them. Faintly, at the edge of this new sense, he caught the outlines of lifeforms descending from the distant skies hundreds of miles away. A massive presence among them registered most clearly, something enormous, and around it, a cluster of other beings, all of them above the Ninth Circle, all of them coming his way.
The massive one had the shape of a turtle in his sense of it. The others trailed behind and around it. Ancestral Celestials, the same kind that Zhuque had been, except his faint sense told him these were stronger, the cluster of them carrying the weight of Ancestral Lands far more developed than the feeble cracked Primum he had unmade over the River.
They were powerful!
But... he really could not stress to himself how completely out of place THE Primordial Source was in the Lands of Stone. It was a power far too grand for this world, far above what the Circles or the Ancestral Lands or any framework these beings cultivated toward could measure against. He had watched a single finger stop a Primum Ancestor’s full attack and send it back as fragments. He had watched two Ancestral Celestials get drawn through the air by tendrils they couldn’t resist and reduced to nothing while they were still trying to understand what was binding them.
These descending Celestials were stronger than Zhuque. He didn’t doubt it.
It didn’t matter.
If they couldn’t defend against him pressing the downward arrow on their Source, against him reaching into their existence and reducing what they were, then their strength was beside the point. They could grow their Ancestral Lands as large as they wanted. They could build plains and rivers and mountains and seas within themselves across more centuries than they had already spent. None of it would do a single thing against a power that sat above the entire structure those lands were built within. They were climbing a ladder, and he was not on the ladder at all. He was somewhere the ladder didn’t reach!
He couldn’t truly explain the origins of The Primordial Source and The Primordial Tongue and why someone like him had such a thing...but he did not question.
In the future, he knew he would be able to understand why he received that letter of Persevere and everything else that followed.
Why he, in these Lands of Stone, had access to The Primordial Source!
But for now, instead of worrying about the beings descending toward him, he turned to his mother.
"There will be a few beings coming around to impose their power here and there," he said. "Don’t worry about it too much. I can take care of it." freёwebnoѵel.com
He kept his tone easy, because there was no reason to make it anything else. "For now....Do you wish to return to the Empire, or somewhere else? I have...a small tribe I took to the skies as well, where I’ve been living these last summers."
He didn’t know what she wanted. He had taken her empire’s capital from the Murderous Saint and built a mausoleum for her husband at its center.
He had a floating paradise full of people who would treat her as what she was. He had power enough to give her whatever she asked for and more, and he intended to, the moment she told him what it was!
His Ama smiled at his words.
"I want to go see those who took care of my son all these years," she said.
Damian smiled.
He looked at Serala, who was smiling too, and he nodded.
"Okay," he said. "Let me just turn away a few so-called Ancestral Celestials first."
...!
