Where the heart had been, where the organs had been, Ozymandias was weaving himself into the very fabric of the corpse.
His tendrils of obsidian-gold, each a filament of insatiable hunger, extended across the ape's colossal body, tracing the veins and arteries, replacing sinew with void, and bone with the concept of recursion!
Within the ape's body, a world of resources waited. The brain, a mass of pure complexity that had processed thoughts of quadrillions, was a meal of unimaginable significance.
The digestive tract, which had broken down concepts as easily as food, contained the wisdom of internal alchemy.
The skeletal structure, harder than conceptual diamond, was a potential treasure trove of structural marrow!
Ozymandias's tentacles found their way to the brain first, and Noah felt a wave of pure thought, uncorrupted by emotion or memory, flow through their bond. The consumption was a clinical, terrifying process.
There was no joy, no rage, no pleasure...only the perfect, efficient conversion of complexity into purity.
The Purest Hunger Consumes: Primordial Brain
Purity Gained: +5,000,000,000,000 (+5 Trillion)|
A wave of radiant black light erupted from Ozymandias as his purity surged, his form becoming more defined, his tentacles growing denser with insatiable purpose!
The purity from the brain was followed by the devouring of the digestive tract. The Purest Hunger Consumes: Primordial Digestive Tract
Purity Gained: +4,500,000,000,000 (+4.5 Trillion)|
The prompt was relentless, each one detailing the consumption of another organ or body part, another leap in power for Ozymandias.
The skeletal structure yielded the greatest gain, its immense toughness and history of resisting entropy converting into a staggering amount of purity. The Purest Hunger Consumes: Primordial Skeletal Structure]
Purity Gained: +6,500,000,000,000 (+6.5 Trillion)|
HUUM!
Khor, who had watched this terrifying ballet of consumption with a knowing smile, floated closer to Noah.
She reached out and, with a touch so light it was almost not there, began to run her hand through his hair. It was an act of ancient affection, an elder stroking the head of a fledgling.
"You play with death, Outsider," she said, her voice a soft hum that resonated directly in his soul, "but you must be careful when playing with the Dead. The Truly Dead Existences... are those that never stay dead, even after their existence is collapsed."
She paused, her touch becoming more insistent, as if she were trying to impart lesson through touch alone.
"Their way of existence is to be. To be, regardless of being alive or not. They are a principle in and of themselves. They hunger for life, but they do not fear death, for death is not an ending to them. They know that even if their physical form is shattered, they will always find a way to be. They are inevitable. And what you seek to do... what you seek to do with that corpse... will it achieve that?"
Her question hung in the air, a chilling note of caution in the symphony of his ambition. She was asking if he, through his acts of necromancy and death, could truly create something that was akin to Dead Existences!
Noah looked down at his primary existence, at his hands that were now capable of holding the weight of existence, and his eyes burned with fierce resolve.
He would answer her question with action!
With Ozymandias, he would light up a shell, a puppet of death, with life itself!
He would achieve the impossible, as he always did!
Khor's hand fell from Noah's head, and with her final word of warning spoken, she moved away. The golden sands of the Shore began to glow with a strange, otherworldly light as she started her work, accelerating its evolution through her unique understanding of inevitability.
At the same time, the colossal, half-eaten corpse of the Primordial Stone Ape, still stuck upright in the sand, began to move.
Countless black tentacles, obsidian and glistening, erupted from the lower body that Noah had not had time to claim..
The tendrils wove themselves together with meticulous, horrifying precision, rebuilding the ape's massive form.
Flesh was replaced with hunger, bone with the concept of recurrence. The Obsidian tentacles even mimicked the fur-like quality and look of the ape's original state, a grotesque imitation of life.
The shell was being made, and soon, Noah would light it up with the glory of Necromancy and Death!
It was unimaginably powerful and ancient, something from the Earliest Folds, and before it, Noah was nothing!
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse