I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 742: Eridarch! II

Achilles put the Eridarch Ore against his existence and assimilated it right away!

He had been wanting to do it since the crystal first touched his palm, and there was no reason to wait. The obsidian-blue ore sank into THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation, and his Prime Cause closed around it the way it closed around everything now, but the process that followed was not the simple consumption he had grown used to.

The ore resisted at first. Inside it, the Infinity and the Primordial Source were bound together in one lattice, and his foundations gave the familiar warning about the Infinity, the same refusal they always gave. He expected to lose that part the way he had lost the Infinity of the Gilded Ones on the beach, drinking everything around it and letting the rest disperse.

That was not what happened.

His Prime Cause did something he had not instructed it to do. It took the whole thing, the Infinity included, and instead of trying to hold what it could not hold, it broke the ore down into its underlying idea and rebuilt that idea inside him. The reserves of Infinity and Primordial Source in the lattice were spent in the doing, burned up entirely to fuel the result, and when it finished, the prompts told him what he had become.

|THE Prime Cause of Assimilation has Assimilated the Eridarch Ore to provide the best possible result while mitigating the negatives.|

|All reserves of Infinity and THE Primordial Source within the Eridarch Ore were consumed to achieve the penultimate result.|

|You have not gained the inherent current benefits of refining with the ore. Instead, you have Assimilated the Eridarch Ore and gained the capability to produce Eridarch Ore from your own existence.|

|Quintessence is an idea that a single being in the current era is exhibiting. You have managed to momentarily emulate a portion of it.|

|You can produce one unit of Eridarch Ore per hour from your existence. A greater rate of production may bloom as your power grows, or as you Assimilate more Eridarch Ore.|

...!

Achilles stood with that information settling into him, and for a moment he simply turned it over.

He had not become stronger from the ore the way the ore was meant to make beings stronger. He had become the ore. Or something close enough to it that the distinction stopped mattering. His existence had taken one of the most valued progression materials in all of existence and decided the better outcome was to make itself into a source of the thing rather than a consumer of it!

Quintessence. That was the word the prompt had used.

He did not know what it fully meant. He knew it was rare enough that only one being in the current era held the idea, and that he had touched a sliver of it by accident, through the nature of his Cause doing what his Cause did. But...

Which being could claim the very idea of Quintessence across this entire era, when his own existence had only managed to borrow a fraction of it for a single material?

He was still turning it over when Sir George raised a hand for all of them to stop.

"Hoh?"

The Sword of Existence had a cold look on his face. Achilles followed his gaze to the far distance, to the junction where the beach gave way to the forest, and saw what had caught the man’s attention. A group of Gilded Ones sat there, and they had Source Beasts roasting over what they were doing to them, harvesting in the open with the comfort of beings who had not expected anyone to come looking.

Sir George studied them for a moment.

"Well, lookie here. Gilded Ones have truly found their way across." His voice stayed even, but the cold did not leave it. "Okay. The word will be passed up, and we will have more of us cleanse the Strands and the other regions where Source Beasts have been dying in numbers. The Gilded Ones should have been preparing to be found out. It was always going to be an eventuality. This could become a problem, so we will crush them with overwhelming force, traps or plans be damned."

He glanced at Achilles.

"Attendant Adrastia. You did good. You did good."

HUUM!

He drew a sword, and his whole body began to give off waves of THE Primordial Source, the authority rolling off him in a tide that pressed against the beach and the trees and everything between.

In the far distance, the Gilded Ones felt it. They turned, and the comfort dropped off them all at once. One of them roared back toward the others.

"Source Lifeforms! Let the others know!"

Then, the way beings do when they understand these are the last seconds they will get, they threw themselves at Sir George instead of running. Boundless Ego of Ira erupted out of them like a rising sea, Infinity surging alongside it, a Pulse channeling THE Bellum Cause tearing across the distance toward the Sword of Existence with everything they had left to give!

Against Sir George, it amounted to very little.

TING!

The first Gilded One came apart at the waist, cut clean before its Pulse had finished forming.

"Rats that shouldn’t be where they are," Sir George said. He was already moving toward the rest. "Don’t worry. I will catch as many of you as I can."

—

<On Randomness and Chaos>

Most beings, when they looked at the sweep of events around them, saw chaos.

They saw wars begin for reasons no one had intended. They saw fortunes rise and collapse without pattern. They saw a creature wander into the wrong region and die, and another wander into the right one and ascend, and they called the difference luck because luck was the word that asked the fewest further questions.

Randomness was a comfort. It meant no one was to blame. It meant the cruelty of existence was a feature of the machine rather than the choice of a hand on the lever.

Very few ever learned the harder thing.

That more often than not, behind the events that looked most random, there was a hand. Patient, unseen, content to let the pieces believe they were moving themselves. The wars that began for no reason had a reason. The creature that wandered into the wrong region had been guided there by currents it never thought to question.

The hand did not announce itself. That was the whole of its method. A thing that wishes to move everything must first convince everything that nothing is being moved.

And so the pieces went on calling it chaos.

Which was exactly what the hand preferred them to call it!