Chapter 4260: A Glorious Engineer! III She gestured towards the pile of Omnichalcum, her tone returning to that of a commander assigning a task. "Go. Familiarize yourself with the metal. I will give you tasks on how to manipulate it. We will exhaust your Everything today and see what its limits are." Noah shook his head internally. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎 Exhaust his Everything? He had no intention of being stuck here doing menial tasks, not when the very air of this place hummed with a power that could erase him from existence if he made a single wrong move. He needed to prove his worth, not as a battery, but as an architect. He walked to the massive pile of Omnichalcum, the cool, inert metal radiating a strange, primordial stillness. He ran a hand over its pristine surface and began to speak, his voice a calm, even current that cut through the sterile silence of the lab. "The problem isn’t the pilot," he said, not as a question, but as a simple statement of fact. Elara, who had been moving towards her workstation, paused. She turned, an eyebrow raised, her expression a mixture of annoyance and curiosity. "What did you say?" "You are trying to rewrite the pilot to fit the armor," Noah continued, his gaze fixed on the mountain of metal, but his words directed at her. "You are performing invasive, bio-conceptual surgery on beings, trying to turn a fish into a bird so it can fly. But you are ignoring the nature of both the fish and the sky. You will only ever end up with a dead fish with useless wings." He said what Ruination had told him simply in the prompts she displayed before! He finally turned to face her, and in his eyes, there was not the look of a student, but of a master. Well, a cheater, really, who was just stealing the work his system had done! "What if the armor was not a suit to be worn, but a partner to be bonded with? What if the pilot didn’t need to be rewritten, but simply given a key?" Elara stopped what she was doing. She listened, her initial annoyance giving way to a focused, analytical intensity. Her eyes shone brighter and brighter as Noah calmly, methodically, laid out the elegant, impossible solution that RUIN/EDEN had presented to him. He spoke of a Core Modulator, a small, stable keyhole of Omnichalcum implanted within the pilot. He spoke of a Symbiotic Interface, of giving the armor itself a nascent, limited consciousness whose sole purpose was to connect with that key. He spoke of an Ignition Sequence, of the pilot not powering the armor, but simply turning the key, allowing the armor to draw its true power from an external, replaceable battery of condensed Everythings. Of course, for what he planned to do...the only battery he would need was his Infinite Mana! When he finished, the silence in the lab was profound. Elara stared at him, her mind, a brilliant engine of logic and science, racing through the trillions of implications of his words. The parasitic relationship transformed into a symbiotic one. The pilot’s existence preserved. The power source made sustainable. It was... perfect. It was elegant. It was a solution that had been staring them in the face for eons, and they had been too blinded by their own complex, invasive methods to see it. "...Could this actually work?" she whispered, the words a fragile, hopeful thing in the quiet of the lab. Noah’s lips curved into a domineering, confident smile. "I’ll put it to the test right now," he declared, his voice a resonant, tyrannical command. "By building an Omnichalcum Core Modulator... and implanting it on myself." Elara was shocked. "What? No! That’s absurd! We have test subjects for this, Fold Dwellers who have willingly volunteered for procedures a thousand times less invasive! You are a valuable asset, an Elderborn. You do not need to risk your own existence on a mere theory." HUUM! But Noah was no longer listening. His body became wreathed in the brilliant, blue flames of his Infinite Mana. He reached out, his hand tapping one of the massive, inert blocks of Early Omnichalcum. The metal instantly blazed with golden lines, its dormant power awakening as it began to float. He tapped another. And another. "There is a story," he began, his voice a low hum as he continued to awaken the metal, block by block, "of a swordsman who was so dedicated to his craft that he was said to be one with his blade. One day, his enemies ambushed him, stole his sword, and surrounded him. They mocked him. ’Without your precious sword,’ they said, ’what will you do now?’" He remembered a story Kazuhiko had told him as he smiled. Dozens of the massive, activated metal blocks now floated around him, a silent, orbiting constellation of pure potential. "The swordsman," Noah continued, his eyes glowing with a profound, almost ancient light, "simply gazed at his enemies and said, ’I have long since become the sword, you bums.’ And he used his own fingers to cut them down." He turned to Elara, his gaze a thing of pure, unyielding tyranny. "Different beings look at tools and weapons in different ways. Some see them as separate, as things to be wielded. I do not. I will not design a tool or a weapon that I will outshine in a matter of weeks or months. What I will design... is something that will be a part of me. Something that will grow with me." HUUM! He gestured to the floating metal. "I will start with this Omnichalcum Core Modulator. And I will make the Living Existential Armor one that grows with its wielder. Don’t Early Creatures utilize Glyphs and Haki that scale with their power? Why can these Armors not be something that boosts and scales the power of Fold Dwellers and Living Existences, a new path to power for those who were not born with it?" BOOM! His words were a thunderclap of ambition in the quiet lab! Elara stared, her mind reeling not just from his words, but from his actions. He was using his Everything as an Elderborn so blatantly, so wastefully! "If you continue like this," she cried, a note of genuine panic in her voice, "you will be depleted soon, even if your idea is sound!" But Noah paid no attention. His mind was on the swirling Omnichalcum around him. Metal that contained the very essence of THE Creature. If he could forge something grand from it, if he could integrate it into his own existence... it would be a new system of power, a third path alongside Glyphs and Haki. With that final, glorious idea, he bellowed a command to the silent observer in his soul. ’RUIN/EDEN. Proceed with the design of the Omnichalcum Core Modulator you theorized. Infuse as much Early Omnichalcum Metal as my existence can handle. After its construction... we will fuse this Modulator into my being and prepare for us to design and forge a Living Existential Armor to attach to it. This... will be the boon I leave the Earliest Folds with.’ |Understood, Master.| HUUM! His own Justiciar armament, but grander. He would attain the very power that those who hid in THE Loom possessed. And he would use that power to achieve his own, impossible solutions. He would build his own path to survival, one forged from the very materials of painted with the Everythings of THE Creature!