The Primordial Record

Noah had no time to think about his situation, he was alone, but his prime objective was before him, he had succeeded but the mission was still incomplete, at least for him, he needed to find the reason for the descent of this thing, and whether it came from the heavens above or belonged to hell below.

Behind him, the Null Field had spread, suppressing all the spatial anomalies and extending past him, where it touched the bottom of the crater, hovering over the target.

Noah only had a few seconds to process what was happening when he saw a massive structure or a landmass that appeared to be made from smooth rock with several openings around it, he was moving very fast, but he was astute enough to observe that the shape of the rock was like an egg, and the last of the Purified Aura had just entered into the structure.

He was too close, his speed was too high and he could no longer observe his incoming death. He closed his eyes because he was about to slam into the rocky egg with tremendous velocity.

He found it funny that although the experiences inside the crater had been horrifying, due to the intense speed that was exerted on their bodies as they fell, then he might not have spent even a minute in total falling, yet for him, it was as if several lifetimes had gone by.

Well, he was about to die, and since the mission of the Deific Explorers was now completed, he wondered when he would be resurrected, as much as he wanted to understand what was about to happen, his role in this affair had come to an end.

Unexpectedly, a formless force wrapped around his body and he was repelled with so much force from the stone egg that he slammed into the side of the crater, crushing nearly every bone in his body, he was about to be swamped by darkness when he roared in his heart, "No!"

There were so many reasons why he should allow himself to fall into the loving embrace of death, after all, he had completed the mission, and the Ascendants should be able to arrive at the center of the corruption and find a way to convert it to their cause.

He could die and then when he was resurrected much later in the future, where he would most likely return in victory, and yet, the prime reason he alone survived till this moment still pushed him with an unrelenting force, he needed to see what had fallen from the heavens.

If he died now, everything he would know would be a watered-down version of events, and might not be the entire truth. Noah wanted to roar, but he could not... his body had begun to heal, but his limbs were frozen in place. Something was very wrong here.

There was no conscious thought process that led him to this conclusion, and yet his entire body was frozen in place. He felt like a mouse frozen in front of a snake, and when he wondered why such odd thoughts would enter his mind, he looked forward and saw two golden eyes looking at him, before glancing away disinterestedly.

Noah's heart and every part of his body was seized by an intense pain, he felt his body was on the verge of an explosive transformation, and he knew the end result of that transformation. It was not something he was looking forward to, and then two equally powerful forces, from above and below stabilized his erupting flesh.

The one above was from the seven Ascendent Explorers who had begun entering the earth. Their Aura erupted from their bodies, unhindered by any disruption, and as this Aura swept past his body it was gripped in a new wave of corruption that threatened to turn his body to the formless state of Aura.

Below him was a third power that he had only noticed because of the effects it was having on his body.

There was a massive outgrowth of flesh that was rising from the earth like the world's largest pimple. It pulsed and stretched forward in a sickening display, and even though it seemed like it should be bursting with every motion it made, it just kept swelling.

This force wanted to make his body explode, as every cell in his body would become engorged with sickly pus, and expand thousands of times greater than their natural limits.

Any of this influence should have killed him, but because all three were acting in his body at once, he was stuck in a weird state as they were all balanced. The only thing Noah could do was open his mouth in a wordless scream.

He had a snake for a tongue, the top part of his head had swollen to five times its size, and his nostrils and the lower parts of his neck were nothing but wispy Aura.

It was funny that he had not gone mad, but Noah believed that it was because his mind had simply gone numb, to preserve any shred of sanity he had left, it simply chose to observe.

The stalemate did not last for long, perhaps it was due to the connection that was created in his body by these three entities, he was able to know the moment when something shifted. Inside his body, the snakes consuming his cells turned to the portion that had been filled with pus, and they attacked.

In reality, the massive egg suddenly cracked in six places, and something emerged from those shattered pieces. Noah's strangely clear mind could not discern what happened at first, but then he realized that something did not emerge from the egg, instead it was those cracked pieces that were moving.

What happened next was too fast for him to truly understand, but the scale of it was such that even if he could not comprehend everything, he could still understand a bit of it.

What he saw was that those six massive pieces seemed to be folding amongst themselves before plunging down into the massive pimple below.

Noah watched in fascination as the pimple stretched and was depressed downwards, and no matter how much the six massive figures seemed to push into the pimple, it simply stretched, and suddenly a portion of it exploded, and the six figures had a path into it and they began to crawl inside.

The Aura coming from above suddenly surged and Naoh saw an Ascendant leaving the rest and rushing towards the battle below. A massive hand of fog erupted from the Ascendant and seized one of the rocky figures plunging into the pimple by its ending that would have disappeared into the pimple, but the Ascendant must have underestimated the strength of this figure, for with what seemed like a shrug, the Ascendant's hand of fog was shattered. This destruction did not stop at the hand, it traveled to the body of the Ascendant, and Noah was unable to close his eyes. It was repeatedly fried to ash as he watched the body of the Ascendant Explorer explode more than ten times before it stabilized.

Anytime it exploded it was almost like a star was exploding. Then he felt a tremor from deep in the earth, and Noah wished he could claw out his eyes as he watched what was revealed

below.

Noah began to pray for death. He no longer wanted to understand. It was too much for his mind to bear.