Chapter 2262: The Plan For The Second Tenth(2)

Eos had been pushing multiple fronts in this game at the start; some were obvious, and others were hidden in plain sight. The Painter was also doing the same, but the crux of the entire game was who could do it better.

Who could win an impossible game with impossible stakes?

Eos was Telos; he was the ultimate destination for all life forms. When the Painter saw this purpose, to a being like it, all it was was an endless ladder for the lesser life forms to strive towards, but never reach, but to Eos, this was a path, and it was one that he would illuminate.

Andar would no longer be Eos’s son after the second crossing.

He received it at the rate at which the Painter applied the pressure, meaning that the harder the Painter pressed, the more pressure entered the converter, the more ascension-energy came back.

The Painter was right, but Truth can mean many things at the same time.

Andar felt himself becoming, and it was the strangest thing that he had ever felt, and this was coming from a mage who had experienced all flavors of eternity.

The category of tenth-dimensional was contained only to one entity in any given Existence, by the Painter’s cosmology, now that category was about to contain two, and so, the relationship between the two beings in the category could no longer be father-and-son, because father-and-son was a relationship that required asymmetry of category, and the asymmetry was being erased.

It was a good thing then that there was something here that could give that pressure, and the difficulty of it all was how to make this being exert this pressure without revealing what it was going to become at the other end.

With this fuel, the becoming was no longer at the rate the substrate had set. The becoming was now at the rate the Painter could press, and the Painter could press very hard.

The new substance was no longer becoming; it became.

Andar was crossing the final threshold.

The first threshold had been ninth into proto-tenth, paid for with the step’s toll, the loss of his original form.

The Painter, focused on stopping the light, did not see the substrate beneath Andar glowing.

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𝚏𝑟𝘦𝗲𝘸𝔢𝘣𝖓ℴ𝒗ⅇ𝑙.𝘤𝖔𝗆

This pressure was going to transform into ascension-energy for the being who stood on it.

A drop of tear fell from his eyes, but he paid the toll and gave up his relationships.

The proto-tenth-dimensional state had been the becoming-itself, the substance of threshold, the layer that allowed a being to transition without yet being either side.

He had been becoming since he crossed the threshold of his house and stepped into the Grand Void.

Even with his light, it would be supremely difficult for others to step on this road and see it to its completion, but he knew that his children were capable.

The converter built by Eos changed the rate, as the Painter’s eleventh-dimensional pressure, returned as ascension-energy, gave Andar’s becoming the fuel his becoming needed to accelerate.

He would be Eos’s equal.

Eos had been building it across the entire battle, drop by drop, while the Painter believed Eos was simply bleeding its grief to the tower.

The Painter, in its eleventh-dimensional rage, had never noticed.

The blood had been building a substrate beneath where Andar would stand.

Eos would make a path where others would follow, even if he had to build that path with his flesh and blood.

Still, the becoming had been gradual, at a rate that proto-tenth-dimensional beings naturally became, which was a rate the substrate had set for the long ages before Origin.

At this moment, there should have been an eruption of energy so vast that the Eternal Tower should have lit up a vast portion of the Grand Void, but Prime was in the past of the Eternal Tower, and he consumed that light even before it was born.

The converter returned the force to Andar, but the form of the force, on return, was no longer pressure. The form of the force, on return, was ascension.

You see, the Painter had thought that Prime was going for its foundation, but the truth could mean many things at the same time, and until this moment, even Prime did not understand the full reason for his journey into the past.

The force, traveling through Andar’s body, moved into the converter beneath his feet, and the converter received the force and used it for what it had been built to do.

The substrate was a converter, and the tower around Andar was a medium, and all it needed was pressure of a sort that even Eos was not capable of.

It was true that Eos was bleeding his grief, but it was also true that his grief was a platform for ascension.

Now Andar stood on the converter, and the Painter’s hands were applying force on the black tower.

The wrapping became continuous with the inside, and the inside became the new substance.

Andar’s body began to finish its ascension from the proto-tenth-dimensional substance, which had been a layer of threshold-medium wrapping Andar’s continuous substance, to something other than threshold.
𝖿𝖗ⅇ𝔢𝖜𝖊𝚋𝙣𝚘𝓋𝑒𝔩.𝕔ℴ𝑚

The blood of Eos had not just been pouring on the ground for nothing; all of it was on Serathis’s substrate, and this had always been the plan from the start.

Nothing gave Andar more pride than to be his father’s son and the husband to his lovely wife, but he was losing both of these in a single moment that was seemingly extending into eternity.

The Painter, in its rage, was applying the force faster. The converter was returning it faster, and Andar’s ascension was accelerating.

Now, it was all up to the talent, character, and tenacity of the being if they would succeed.

Andar received the ascension-energy through the same body that the Painter was crushing from above.

Not in power, Eos could never be equaled, since he was Telos, and that carried a weight that nothing could match, but in category.

This simply meant that Andar could become a tenth-dimensional being, but it would take an extremely long time, so much so that many eternities would crumble to dust before this process was completed.

The second threshold was proto-tenth into tenth, and the second threshold had its own toll, and the toll was the impossibility of remaining a son.

In that moment, from the beginning of everything to the present day, Andar… existed, standing beside Telos.