I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 751: Mining III

Achilles went up to the Warden and asked calmly, the way a diligent worker asks a foreman for permission to do more work.

"Would it be alright if I mine deeper? I can collect larger ore that way, meet my quota faster, and be more useful sooner."

The Warden looked at him for a long moment, its cold eyes weighing him the way it weighed everything, as a tool that might be worth a little more than it had first assumed. Then it smiled, and the smile had nothing kind in it, only the brutal satisfaction of something that had watched this exact eagerness before and knew where it usually led.

"Occasionally some good ones come over," it said. "Go. Do what you need to do."

...!

That was all Achilles had wanted. He turned and walked toward the nearest mountain, and his eyes, which he kept dull and tired for the Warden’s benefit, brightened the moment his back was to the thing. Let it think eagerness would kill him. Eagerness had never killed him. It had only ever fed him!

The mine opening swallowed him.

Deeper in, the Expanse changed. The chained workers grew fewer but grander, Fourth Scale beings set to the richer veins, their faces set with the same grim focus as everyone else but their chains heavier, their sections more dangerous. He passed them one after another, Swords and Gilded Ones and things he had no name for, all of them bent to the rock, none of them sparing him more than a glance. A new worker heading deeper was not worth their attention. Deeper only meant a faster death, and they had all seen new workers seek it before, had watched them go in bright and come back as crimson lines across the stone, if they came back at all.

The air thickened as he went.

It carried more of that sharp burnt Infinity smell, and under it something heavier, a pressure that pushed against his skin and his existence both, the sense of standing near a great deal of volatile power that had not yet decided to go off. The Infinity rivers ran wider here, their light casting blue and crimson across the tunnel walls, throwing his shadow long and then swallowing it as the currents shifted. The low churn of them filled the space so completely he felt it in his teeth, a vibration that never stopped. Loose ore glittered in the rock on every side, brighter and denser the further in he walked, each vein humming with more of that trapped ancient force.

He kept a mental map as he went. Where the tunnels forked, where the Warden’s attention could reach and where it thinned, where the last chained worker sat before the passages emptied out entirely. A place with no eyes was what he wanted, and the mountain, the deeper he pressed, offered more and more of exactly that. The grand workers fell behind him. The sections went dark and unoccupied. The only company left was the ore and the rivers and the pressure, and none of those would report him to anything.

He kept going until the humming became something he could feel in his bones, and there, set into the wall of a wide hollow, he found it.

A massive ore.

It was larger than any he had seen carried to the altar, embedded deep in the rock, its light pulsing slow and heavy, like something breathing in its sleep. The pressure coming off it made the air shimmer and bend, and the smell of raw Infinity here was thick enough to taste on every breath. A worker meant to handle a thing like this would have needed hours and enormous care, wrapping it layer by layer in emotion-laced authority, coaxing it loose a fraction at a time, and might have died in the attempt regardless when a single lapse let it decide it was done being handled.

Achilles did not need any of that shit. He did not ease the emotion-laced authority around it the way the Warden had taught, did not treat it like the bomb every other worker in the Expanse treated it as. He simply walked up, laid both hands flat against the ore, felt it pulse once against his palms like a live thing, and spoke.

"Assimilate."

BOOM!

The ore came apart into him, and it was not like eating.

He had never eaten anything, not really! He assimilated. He integrated. He made the thing part of himself so completely that the line between him and it stopped meaning anything, and that was what happened now. The Existential Biomass poured into him, dense and volatile and enormous, and with it came the raging Intent soaked through the ore, the record of terrifying old beings that had bathed this substance ages ago. A lesser being would have been torn apart trying to hold that much foreign will. Achilles did not try to hold it. He folded it in. Rather than swallow it and keep it walled off inside him, his Prime Cause simply decided it had always belonged to him, and existence, as it tended to around him now, agreed.

It became him. The quality of his existence began to shift, quietly, at a level below thought, the way it always did when he took in something that mattered. He could feel the old Intent settling into THE Akashic Seed like water finding the roots of a thing that had been waiting for exactly this.

The prompts bloomed as the change moved through him.

|You are Assimilating the scattered Intents of multiple Lifeforms existing outside the scope of Vakochev’s Scales of Existence.|

|THE Akashic Seed is growing rapidly.|

|THE Akashic Seed is now ready to bud a Third Tier Intent of Vakochev’s Scales, a Titan Intent, at any time you choose.|

|The more of this ore you Assimilate, the more foreign Intent from Lifeforms outside the scope of Vakochev’s Scales is integrated, and the higher your chance of eventually grasping an Intent that exists outside Vakochev’s Scales of Existence entirely.|

...!

An Intent outside the Scales.

Achilles stood in the blue and crimson light with that possibility settling into him, and his eyes shone bright in the dark of the mountain. Everyone in this place dug this ore out with trembling care and carried it, one terrified step at a time, to feed a waking horror that would use it to grow closer to whatever it intended to become. He had just made one piece of it part of himself, and instead of feeding a monster, it had offered him a road toward something the Scales themselves did not contain!

The captor had chained him here to be a worker. To mine its meal and pray for a quick death.

It had, without knowing it, buried him inside a mountain of exactly the thing he was built to consume, and then another had given him permission to go deeper!

He looked further into the dark, to where the veins ran richer still, where the pressure grew heavier and the light burned brighter and no eyes reached at all.

He went to find more!