I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 697: Memories!

Achilles walked through the towering forest with his hands clasped loose behind his back, and inside his head, a Rhyacian Proterozoic cultivator was dissolving into memory. A genuine Scale 2 was assimilated!

His name had been Pantaleon, and the rest of Pantaleon began to open up for him like a long book being read backward through several floors at once.

Pantaleon, Bronze-tier Prospect of the Eighteenth Auric Lineage.

He had been, by the standard his Collective used to measure power, small.

Small and weak! That was the piece of it that Achilles kept turning over as he walked!

The memories flowed into him in soft bright layers as he moved, and each layer redrew his understanding of the Silver Philotimo a little cleaner than the layer before, until the shape of the Observable he was standing in was finally coming clear.

There were many Scale 2 entities here, a great many more than he had initially grasped, numerous enough to have hierarchies and subfactions and internal politics that would have made Lamashtu’s entire invasion look like a small family argument.

Most and really all of them were what the locals called Bounded Lifeforms, with a touch of dismissive fondness in the term, which referred to beings whose ceilings were fixed and whose foundations did not permit ascent to the Third Scale no matter how much cultivation they poured into themselves.

They would live long powerful influential lives and may die still on the Second Scale, and this was understood by all of them as simply the shape of how things were.

Above them, above everything the Bounded could reach, sat the Gilded Ones!

The Gilded held power that made Lamashtu’s reclaimed Second Scale feel, in retrospect, like a child’s shadow thrown against a wall at dusk, and they were the organizing principle of the entire Observable.

Beings like...Mansa Zulu.

Every Bounded Lifeform in the Silver Philotimo cozied up to them in whatever manner their station allowed, because the Gilded had a gift, and that gift was the architecture of the Ego!

They could existentially engineer the Egos of Second Scale beings, which was to say, they could reach into the fundamental shape of one’s existence and amplify the core Ego threads that ran through it, and the Egos they amplified were unique ones.

Pride, wrath, lust, greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, the seven deep ones, the ones every being worth something had fought with at one point or another, all of them codified here into a cultivation system as though someone had sat down at the beginning of this Observable and written a textbook on how best to feed the worst parts of yourself.

He asked himself why...they didn’t bother with Virtues?

An amplified Ego did something very specific and very precious, and Achilles caught the shape of it as Pantaleon’s memory settled deeper into him.

It granted resistance, which was the real prize, because the bigger your Ego, the more Infinity you could weave through without collapsing into the Gamaidjan, and the more Infinity you could weave through without breaking, the more you could actually do.

A being with a modestly inflated Lust could touch Infinity much more freely.

The Gilded built those Egos and refined them and offered their modifications like sacraments to those who had proven worthy, and the Ego Crystals that the commentator kept laughing about were one of the ways- the ticket of entry into that whole exchange.

Ego Crystals were precipitated pieces of amplified Ego, harvested from events exactly like these Games and traded across the Observable the way old currencies in stunted places had once traded gold, and if you accumulated enough of them as a Second Scale being, you could offer them up to a Gilded as a sacrifice of self, and in return, the Gilded might, if they were pleased, undertake to modify you and upgrade you and tune a deeper Ego in your Existence.

To meet a Gilded One directly was, for a Bounded Lifeform, the dream of an entire existence, and most would never come within a thousand star-seas of one, while a few would see one at a distance in ceremony, and the smallest handful, the truly favored, would be invited into the Chamber of Modifications and come out different on the other side of it.

Pantaleon had dreamed of it every single day of his adult life, and he had never even come close, because his Ego Crystal count had been, by the Collective’s records, middling at best, and he had entered the Last Stand today because the Gilded Ticket that the winner received was one of the fastest known routes upward.

He had come from a line whose Patron had grown tired of middling results, and he had felt the pressure of his lineage’s disappointment every single morning, all of which, Achilles reflected, made Pantaleon’s death today somewhat merciful.

Oh!

He kept walking as the memories kept unfolding inside him.

He learned the names of different Gilded factions, and he learned the cultural difference between the Amplified and the Modified!

He learned a great deal in a very short stretch of walking, and then, he saw her.

A woman stood leaning against one of the nearer trees, small and humanoid and First Scale at the Absolute Depth by the weight of her foundation, which put her at the very top of the crowd of nine hundred First Scale participants the commentator had mentioned at the start of the Game.

Her clothing was torn along the right side, her long dark hair hung stuck to her cheek with something that was not sweat, and one of her arms was held close against her ribs at an angle that made it very clear the ribs were not happy underneath it, while her other hand pressed flat against a shallow depression in the bark of the tree as if she had been using it to stay upright!

Her Civilization was gravely injured.

Her head lifted at the sound of his step, and her face, which had been somber to begin with, sagged even deeper when she saw him standing there.

Then she moved, and her free hand lifted to the air beside her face and from her fingertips the letters bloomed!

Phonemes of The First Tongue!

The letters were small and perfect and burned with four elements all at once.

She looked at Achilles through the glowing letters with that somber pitiful gaze, and she did not speak, and Achilles looked at her coldly.

Then he walked past her without slowing or speaking or turning his head, and the moment he was past her, her face changed.

The somber pity fell off it in a single clean sheet, and what was underneath was savage!

Her teeth showed, her eyes went hard, and the phonemes around her body stopped swirling in their protective shield and began to spiral tighter and faster, each letter aligning to each other letter in a rapid cascade that was no longer a shield being held up but a weapon being formed.

The fire and the water and the air and the earth drew together into a single elongating shape at the tip of her free hand, and they became a word, a Logos of The First Tongue written in four elements at once, burning along its length with brilliance!

HUUM!

She surged forward at Achilles’s back with the Logos extended and her teeth bared, her Absolute Depth foundation pouring every last drop of itself into the strike, and the Logos screamed through the air with the pure undiluted intent to kill, and Achilles still did not look back!

Before the Logos reached him, before her feet even completed their third stride toward him, he simply whispered, soft and calm.

Assimilate.

POP!

She disappeared, and the Logos disappeared with her, four elements and all, in a compression of white tide so quiet the forest barely registered the event, and a single droplet of water hung in the air for half a breath where she had been before being drawn back into Achilles’s.

He kept walking as the glade continued around him as if nothing had happened.

Existence was brutal, and he had always known existence was brutal!

It had always been brutal and it would always be brutal, and the Silver Philotimo was not special for being brutal, only for dressing its brutality in gold robes and ceremonial phrasing, and kill or be killed was the rule here the same as it had been the rule everywhere he had ever stood!