Chapter 1917: Transferring Authority (Final) Rowan had speculated that the Primordial Record was far greater than any Singularity, and its importance could be beyond what he might ever comprehend at a lower-dimensional level. This Singularity could hold the key to Eternity, and when Rowan forged the Road of Eternity, it was all leading to his ultimate vision of total mastery of the powers to control eternity. Maybe he might not be the best steward to control all of existence, but the ones in charge were the worst, and anything or anyone else would be better than them. In an existence of infinite possibilities, it took a special kind of incompetence or true evil to pollute and corrupt its entire nature. Rowan believed that the wholesale destruction of Realities and every powerful higher-dimensional being was not just random events by a group of powerful monsters that were cursed by madness and endless hunger, and everything was designed to gather all the power in existence into one place. Why would anyone want to claim dominion over all of existence? It was rather simple, and that was because it gave them the power to do anything they wanted, to become the one who stood above everything. If this were the truth, then the actions of the Primordials and most likely Enoch were going at it in the laziest way possible, but it could also be seen as the most efficient method. They were not trying to bring existence under their banner or convince the powerful to shift their loyalties towards them, just like Rowan was doing with this Reality and all the new Primordials. Instead, they decided to kill everything and hoard all the benefits gained from their slaughter, and when it was over, all of this power would be theirs. Rowan had seen a vision of the past where the Primordials, before their descent into madness, were about to kill the Primordial Beast Torch dragon, and it warned them that they would be betrayed. He had not understood what that meant, but he thought that the Betrayer was Enoch, who might not have informed them that eating so many Realities would lead to madness, or perhaps the Primordial Record was part of that betrayal. Two parties were fighting for the right to control the power stored inside the Primordial Record, and there was Rowan at the center who held the Singulariry, and for the life of him, he could not tell the reason he was allowed the opportunity to control this power in the first place. Was it possible that his bond with the Primordial Record was deeper than he thought, and so the Primordials and even Enoch could not just seize it but must use him as an intermediary? Rowan had many reasons to believe that this must be the truth, because the same incident had happened repeatedly over the years. The Primordials and Enoch trying hard to suppress the things he knew and the truths available to him, they had gone to incredibly great length to ensure that Rowan would never find the truth about his origins or what he was capable of, and this had led to such great losses to him over the years, with the latest disaster, finally making Rowan pull out all the stops. The answer he needed was inside the Primordial Record, and he would not be able to fully control this Singularity or gain its powers if he was still at the eighth-dimensional level. He needed to be a Primordial to find the truth. Yet the path to the Primordial level for him was not easy. His main body Eos was incredibly powerful, and Rowan would bet that since the beginning of existence, there had not been any Old One at the eight-dimensional level who was stronger than him. His essence alone in the eighth dimension was housing multiple Primordials, and he was not fully grown. If this continued in this manner, at the peak of his potential at the eighth-dimensional level, Rowan speculated that he would be able to hold a thousand primordial-level entities inside his realm. This was already a ridiculous number, and it was just a conservative estimate that would not overly strain his essence and energy-regenerative capabilities. However, Rowan now saw that this power was a trap. The Primordials and most likely Enoch had a way to monitor the Primordial Record that he had not fully understood. They had subtly encouraged him to pursue this power. Rowan had enough evidence from the actions of Nyxara, Primordial Soul, ensuring that Rowan suffered incredibly painful losses, from his mother to his children, leaving him with no option but to always push for greater amounts of power. In the short term, this was a good thing, and Rowan grew so powerful that even an Incarnation was able to fight and kill Primordials with multiple stacked origin forces in their bodies; however, if the road to the ninth-dimensional level was a wooden ladder, Rowan had grown too heavy to climb it, and his weight would crush everything around him. This was the ultimate trap; he was made to become truly powerful so that his path to the ninth-dimensional level would become too difficult that it was practically impossible, and how would he be able to access all the power stored over the ages inside the Primordial Record if he was not able to reach the ninth-dimensional level? Rowan could decide to take the risk with his main body and push for the ninth-dimensional level. After all, feeding him so much power also meant that his overall capabilities increased as well. It would have been easy for the Primordials and Enoch to be caught in their own trap when he grew far stronger than they could contain. Still, Rowan expected that the moment he tried to push for the ninth-dimensional level, the sort of hindrance he would receive would be incredible. The war with Death was heating up, even after a thousand years of battle, but this battle would end the moment Eos reached out for the ninth dimension, and he would not be shocked if Death, and also the entirety of the Cradle of Enoch with their guardian beast, chose to attack him all at once. Rowan was not leaving anything to chance; he was finally acknowledging that he held the ultimate price, and everyone who knew this would not allow him to claim it. But he was going to be doing that anyway, but for him to have any possibility of success, it must be done in a manner that could not be suspected. By now, Rowan would have expected the Primordials to suspect that he might be slowly coming to terms with his importance, they had deliberately pushed him to the forefront while underplaying the value of the Primordial Record so that he would not understand how much power he held, but even if Rowan ended up finding the truth, the one thing they knew was that Rowan would not give it up. And so this was what Rowan intended to do. They knew Rowan’s character well enough; they knew that he would rather fight for the opportunity to win than compromise, he would break before he allowed himself to be bent, and so even if he knew the importance of the Primordial Record, they expected that Rowan would be doing the things he was doing at this moment... They expected that he would be creating new Primordials and changing the life of those around him; they expected that he would be striving to reach the level of a Primordial, even while knowing he would be suppressed. This was his only path forward: to fight. Well, Rowan would be doing all of that, but with a bit of spin on the entire thing that no one else would expect, and that little spin had nearly killed him. You see, Rowan would be pushing this Incarnation of his to the ninth-dimensional level, using one of the many Wills that he controlled, and before reaching the ninth-dimensional level, he had moved the Primordial Record into this body, shifting it from his main body, Eos, to the Incarnation Rowan. The Primordial Record did not like the fact that it was moved from his main body into one of his incarnations, but it accepted this move without fighting too much. This was not the act that nearly killed Rowan; the act that did was Eos severing his connection with the Incarnation! At this moment, the Incarnation Rowan was a free agent, and although he could still share his thoughts and actions with his main body, it was no longer seamless, and a request would have to be sent, acknowledged, before it was received.