I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 750: Mining II

Achilles shut out the screams and the cold voice of the Warden and put his focus where it belonged, on the ore in front of him and the slow work of getting it free.

He had the trick of it now, more or less. The ore did not want to leave the rock, and it punished impatience, so he stopped fighting it and started working with it. His Prime Cause of Assimilation wrapped the seam, his amplified Pride threaded all the way through the authority, and he eased rather than tore. Where his first attempt had ruptured his skin, this one held. The splits along his forearms had already closed, his foundations strong enough to mend that kind of small damage on their own, and he kept the pressure steady and patient and even.

The ore came loose.

WUU!

It settled into his hands, and holding it was its own danger. The thing pulsed against his grip, blue and crimson light churning inside it, and he could feel how badly it wanted to come apart. One lapse in the emotion wrapping it, one moment where his Pride thinned or his authority slipped, and it would do to him what it had done to the three Gilded Ones bleeding out across the section. He kept his grip exact and looked at what he had pulled out of the wall.

|Volatile Existential Biomass Ore, Elvarna grade.|

|This ore was bathed in the Intent of a terrifying Lifeform from ages past. Traces of that Intent remain woven through its substance, contributing to both its value and its instability.|

|Caution: handle only with authority wrapped in genuine emotion. Loss of emotional containment will result in detonation.|

His eyes brightened.

Bathed in the Intent of something ancient. The same ore his captor wanted offered up daily was, in itself, a fragment of some old being’s record soaked into compressed Biomass. Or was it one and the same?

He did not get to finish the thought, the one that asked what assimilating a thing like this would do to THE Akashic Seed growing inside him, because the Warden’s voice cut across the section.

"Don’t be too pleased with yourself," it said, cold and bored. "Go offer that to the altar. When you can handle more, you can mine more and hold more. Until then, get a move on."

...!

He had no privacy here. No moment to himself, no quiet corner where he could try something unobserved. The Warden’s attention moved across the whole section, and beings far above him stood in chains all around, and any unusual thing he did would be seen.

So he would not do it yet. Acclimate first. Become one more anonymous back bent over the rock. Learn the rhythms of the place and where the eyes went and where they did not, and then, later, find a way deeper into the mine where fewer things were watching, and there see whether the ore would feed him the way everything else had.

He carried the ore out toward the altar.

The walk took him into the long procession, and the scale of the thing only became real once he was inside it. Thousands of beings moved in a slow line across the Expanse, Source Lifeforms and Infinite Lifeforms and Gilded Lifeforms all mixed together, all chained at the feet, all carrying ore cupped carefully against their chests with the focused care of people holding something that would kill them if they stopped paying attention. There was almost no talking. The only sounds were the grind of chains dragging over stone, the low churn of the Infinity rivers running through the rock, and now and then the distant crack of an ore going off somewhere in the mountain, followed by the silence that came after.

The air tasted of horrid despair and something sharper underneath, the bright burnt smell of raw Infinity exposed to open space. It coated the back of his throat. Everyone in the line breathed it and no one remarked on it, because it was simply the air here, the way despair was simply the mood here, settled into the place so deep it had stopped being noticeable to the ones who lived in it.

Beings who had ruled regions of existence shuffled forward with their heads down!

Oh!

Achilles kept his head up but his pace matched theirs, and he reached the altar in his turn.

Up close the thing was worse than it had looked from a distance. Immense Infinity and crimson brilliance spiraled around it in slow heavy currents, and standing before it he could feel it pulling at his existence, a low constant draw toward the fire at its center. The ore lifted out of his hands on its own, floated forward, and was swallowed by fiery flames that gave off no heat he could feel but consumed the ore completely, Intent and Biomass and all, gone into whatever the altar fed.

|A portion of your daily Unit of Existential Biomass has been offered.|

|Daily quota: not yet met. Continue mining and offering until the Unit is complete.|

He turned back toward the mountain.

He mined again. And then again. Time passed in the Expanse the way it passed in places built to grind beings down, without markers, without relief, one ore at a time. He learned the pace his body could sustain without rupturing, learned how much emotion the wrapping needed and how to hold it steady across the long slow extractions, learned the route to the altar and back until his feet knew it without his mind. He kept his head down enough not to draw notice and up enough to keep watching, always watching, building the map of this place a glance at a time.

He met his quota as the long shift wore on, the last ore floating into the altar flames, the prompt confirming the day’s Unit complete.

Then he sat down in a corner of the nearby jagged mountain, and let himself feel tired.

It was not a tiredness of the body. His foundations did not flag from a day of careful mining. It was the other kind, the weight of a place that wanted you to feel small.

Taylor came and sat beside him, and her usual sharp energy had gone somber.

"Existence itself is scared here," she said, low and heavy. "It keeps telling me. Something terrifying has been waking up, slow, for a long time. And all these beings, everyone chained to this rock, and now us too, we’re all feeding it. Every ore on that altar goes into the same thing. We’re the meal that’s waking it the rest of the way."

A waking thing.

Achilles’s eyes shone in the dim light of the Expanse, because he did not need Taylor to name it.

Was that not THE Sealed One, the thing that had reached down and swept them all here?