I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 730: Existential Intermission

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The Gilded Ones of THE Braneworld Observable Existence carried tremendous knowledge within their foundations, and I carried all of it out with me.

From their memories, I learned that THE First Cause of their Observable Existence did not divide along a single axis when it occurred. It divided along nine simultaneously, each axis producing what they called a Prime Cause, foundational experiential truths upon which every subsequent Civilization and every subsequent arrangement of power across their full history had been built.

These were not Civilizations in the ordinary sense that Existences anchor during their advancement. A Civilization is a personal expression of authority.

A Prime Cause is the foundational substrate from which entire categories of Civilizations draw their legitimacy, the original template upon which all subsequent expressions of authority were modeled.

Nine Prime Causes. Nine truths that existence required to sustain itself as coherent rather than collapse back into the undivided potential that preceded it.

Three interested me most.

THE Consumptio Cause governed transformation, the truth that existence converts whatever it contacts, that consciousness takes what it finds in one form and produces another form from it, and that the direction of this conversion runs always from raw toward refined rather than in the opposite direction.

Every forge that refined a metal, every cultivation breakthrough that converted raw potential into actualized power, every act by which something unformed became something shaped drew its experiential legitimacy from this Cause.

A being tapping directly into THE Consumptio Cause could convert anything into anything, enemies into weapons, realms into ammunition, living beings into raw materials, the abstract into the physical, limited only by imagination rather than capability.

I found this one personally resonant for reasons that should be obvious to anyone acquainted with my history.

The difference between THE Consumptio Cause and what I do is subtle but real. Consumption converts form. Assimilation changes identity. The distinction matters more than it appears to at first consideration.

THE Mortis Cause governed ending, the truth that every consciousness eventually concludes regardless of its cultivation, its power, its Scale, or the Engineering its existence had received from beings far above it. This was the only Prime Cause whose foundational truth could not be permanently resisted by any opposing force.

Every other truth could be countered by a sufficiently powerful expression of an opposing truth, but the truth of ending had simply never been falsified across the full span of recorded existence.

The Gilded Ones of THE Braneworld deliberately avoided anchoring any population’s identity in this Cause. They found the truth of ending uncomfortable enough that they constructed their entire engineering methodology around producing beings who did not have to think about it often.

I found their discomfort more illuminating than any of the Cause’s documented Pulses.

THE Genesis Cause governed beginning, the truth that existence emerges, and that the painful quality of that emergence is the origin from which all other experiences derive their legitimacy. This was the Cause the Gilded could not access.

Their engineering exempted them from the pain of genuine beginning, providing them with amplified Egos and established connections to Observable Force before they had ever experienced the raw emergence that THE Genesis Cause held as its foundational requirement.

The Cause demanded that pain as the price of connection, and the Gilded engineering had been specifically designed to exempt its recipients from exactly that payment. Their entire civilization rested atop the gap where THE Genesis Cause should have been, and the gap had persisted unfilled across seven ages of development because filling it would have required them to experience the thing their engineering existed to prevent.

I spent considerable time thinking about THE Genesis Cause. Something about a civilization that had arranged itself so completely around avoiding a single foundational truth struck me as a structure with a specific kind of fragility built into its center.

The remaining six each governed their own domain with the same foundational authority.

THE Desidero Cause governed wanting, the truth that consciousness is defined by the awareness of absence and the orientation toward filling it.

Every craving, every pursuit, every motivation across any expression of consciousness drew from this substrate.

THE Dominion Cause governed hierarchy, the truth that wherever multiple conscious beings coexist, they will arrange themselves into configurations where some stand above others, not because hierarchy is imposed from outside but because differing capacities produce differing standings and consciousness recognizes this without requiring instruction.

THE Bellum Cause governed conflict, the truth that consciousness encountering other consciousness inevitably produces friction, and friction inevitably produces violence, not as an aberration but as a core function of the arrangement.

THE Cognitio Cause governed knowledge, the truth that knowing is transformative, that what a being learns changes what a being is, and that the full extent of what can be known exceeds the full extent of what any single consciousness can contain.

THE Vigilia Cause governed observation, the truth that nothing across existence occurs without something else perceiving it, and that the act of perception itself alters what is perceived.

THE Immutis Cause governed permanence, the truth that staying the same is the default orientation of all existence and that change is the thing requiring justification while endurance requires none.

Six truths operating alongside the three I found most interesting, all nine together constituting the full foundational architecture upon which THE Braneworld Observable Existence had sustained itself across its history.

What occupied my thoughts considerably in the days that followed was a question the Gilded memories did not answer directly.

If THE First Cause of THE Braneworld Observable Existence divided along these nine axes and produced these nine Prime Causes, did every First Cause divide similarly?

Did every Observable Existence rest upon the same nine foundational truths, expressed through the specific character of each reality’s emergence but recognizable as the same underlying axes beneath the surface differences?

I examined what I knew of the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence, that paradise of flowing rivers and hanging continents that had flourished without the stunting my own reality had suffered.

I examined what I knew of my own Observable Existence, the one that had produced only one Absolute across its entire history because Chaos had been imprisoned before it could permeate during differentiation.

Both held a similar structure.

The same nine truths expressed differently through the specific character of each reality, each Observable Existence reflecting the same foundational axes in configurations shaped by their own emergence conditions and their own First Cause’s particular expression.

The wanting and the hierarchy and the conflict and the knowledge and the observation and the permanence and the transformation and the ending and the beginning.

Present in every Observable Existence I had knowledge of. Present in every arrangement I could examine. Present in every reality that had emerged from a First Cause and sustained itself as coherent rather than collapsing back into undifferentiated potential.

The nine appeared to be universal rather than local, the same foundational truths expressing themselves through different surfaces the way the same mathematics expresses itself through different languages without the underlying relationships changing.

And then there was me.

The Prime Cause that bloomed within my Inner Dominion when the accumulated integration of Aurora energy and Third Scale Gilded foundations and the application of the letter of THE Primordial Tongue, Persevere, finally produced the spark capable of initiating one.

I had wondered what its identity would be. I had looked at the nine and considered which one my existence would reach toward when given the opportunity to anchor itself at the Prime level, which foundational truth my accumulated nature would most naturally express.

It was never going to be anything other than one.

THE Assimilation Cause.

Not among the nine of THE Braneworld. Not a truth their Observable Existence had produced when their First Cause divided. Something belonging specifically to the character of my existence and the foundational truth I had embodied since before my Civilization awakened.

That existence integrates. That consciousness, encountering what is other than itself, does not merely observe or convert or consume but makes the other genuinely part of itself, completely and irreversibly, until the boundary between self and what was consumed becomes a historical fact rather than a present condition.

It could only have been THE Assimilation Cause.

— A.A.