Mansa Nguna gazed at Achilles up and down with the evaluating attention of someone examining a product that had exceeded manufacturing specifications.

She nodded to herself, and then she came over to him with her lazy unhurried pace and began her examination with thoroughness.

She lifted his hands and turned them over, examining the archaic tattoos of undifferentiation that pulsed across his skin with rhythms responding to the amplified Pride now burning within him.

She turned his head with fingers that were clinical rather than gentle, examining his profile from multiple angles with gold eyes that tracked details too subtle for conventional perception. She opened his mouth and looked within with the same unhurried focus she applied to everything, checking something in the configuration of his existence that only someone of her expertise would know to look for.

The golden brilliance of his amplified Pride continued radiating around his form throughout this process, responding to her proximity with resonance that seemed to interest her more than she allowed her expression to fully reveal.

"Of all the various Egos, many fail to perceive that Pride is the sun around which all other stars must inevitably orbit."

"It is the truth, for a being without Pride is a being without the will to hold their own thread against Existence. When we choose to amplify a Bounded Lifeform, it is Pride we reach for before any other resonance, because it is the only fire capable of sustaining the weight of a soul before it is ready to be properly shaped."

She released his chin and stepped back slightly, continuing her examination with the distance of someone shifting from tactile to visual assessment.

"A Bounded soul lives in the blissful, tragic ignorance of their own freedom, never realizing that to be Engineered is to accept a cage of exquisite and permanent design. They do not know the quiet horror of Engineering, or the structural reality where every impulse and every breath is dictated by the one who forged their Engineering."

Her lazy smile remained present throughout these words, the expression of someone who found no contradiction between delivering uncomfortable truths and maintaining perfect comfort with those truths.

"Even among our own kind, the hierarchy is not a matter of merit or struggle but of fundamental architecture woven into the very fabric of our being. Those who are not Superbius are inherently built to listen, their foundations vibrating with the necessity of following the command of the high-born because their very Engineering demands it as the price of their existence."

She walked a slow arc around him as she spoke, her gold hair shifting with her movement, examining him from angles she had not yet covered with the methodical completeness of someone who never left portions of their work unexamined.

"This is how one builds power and, more importantly, how one ensures it never slips through their fingers across the eons. Existence is not a chaotic clash of wills but a carefully managed arrangement of dominance and submission where everyone plays the part they were written to perform."

She paused briefly.

"You might find it cold, perhaps even cruel, but Existence does not care for the feelings of others. To maintain the glory of Existence, one must understand that a tool that thinks it is a master is merely a flaw in the design waiting to be corrected."

She came to stand directly before him with the finality of someone concluding a procedure.

"So, tool, forget all that I said here and return back to your normal mind for now."

Her lazy smile widened with the particular satisfaction of someone watching their Engineering take effect exactly as intended.

"Let us see how you feel."

BOOM!

Achilles’s eyes flashed cold for a fraction of a moment before he performed the best acting of his existence, watching the performance from the inside with perfect clarity while his exterior displayed precisely what she expected to see. Ingenuity returned to his eyes with the gradual quality of someone surfacing from depths they had not consciously descended into, his expression shifting through subtle confusion to the baseline composure of someone who had received Engineering and been reset to their normal state afterward.

He blinked.

Mansa Nguna had returned a few paces away and looked at him with her lazy smile.

He had heard and remembered every word she said.

Every word about cages of exquisite design. Every word about tools and masters and flaws waiting to be corrected. Every word about the architecture of dominance and submission woven into the foundations of those who received her Engineering.

He had integrated all of it alongside everything else she had placed within him.

"Your Pride amplified fifty percent better than all others because you are simply built for it!"

Her gold eyes shone with the specific brightness of someone who had found a specimen worth continued attention.

"Here, let us see how you handle Observable Force and Infinity. You can use them to reinforce your Bones and Organs, to transform them into Proterozoic Bones and Proterozoic Organs, which will give your physical existence a foundation capable of actually containing Second Scale authority without structural degradation."

HUUM!

As she said this, she sent rivers of golden Observable Force flowing toward him alongside something else entirely, a faint river of blue that moved with the particular quality of something that had no business being contained in any channel at all, that seemed to strain against the boundaries holding it even as it flowed with apparent compliance.

Infinity.

Achilles reached his hand out toward the rivers with the careful deliberateness of someone approaching something they respected enough to treat with caution, not revealing that he remembered and heard everything as his expression held only the composed curiosity of a recipient engaging with new capabilities for the first time.

The golden Observable Force reached him first and he accepted it seamlessly, the river flowing into his existence with the comfortable familiarity of something that resonated with the golden currents already producing themselves within his Inner Dominion.

His transformed foundations received the Observable Force with integration that felt almost natural, the authority flowing through channels that seemed to have been waiting for exactly this input.

Then the blue river of Infinity reached his extended fingers.

It wrapped around one finger.

The sensation that followed defied every comparison he had accumulated across his entire existence of consuming and integrating things that should have overwhelmed him. It was not pain and it was not power in the conventional sense he understood power to function, it was something that communicated its nature through sheer weight!

Something with unfathomable weight connected to him.

He felt like the entire architecture of his existence had suddenly been made aware of how small it was, not through comparison with something larger but through direct contact with something that had no size because it contained the concept of size within itself alongside everything else!

The blue river wrapped around a single finger and communicated through that contact the suggestion of depths that had no bottom, potential that had no ceiling, a vastness that made the entirety of Observable Existence feel like a droplet suspended within an ocean that extended in directions droplets could not conceptualize!

Even though it was heavy, even though he felt like he could drown in its weight and be lost somewhere within it that no recovery could reach, his amplified Pride flared at this moment with the brilliant golden fire that Mansa Nguna had carved deeper into his foundations than she had managed with any previous recipient.

He was shocked at the sensation of endless power that threatened to overwhelm him.

Even touching a tiny thread of Infinity, even making contact with what amounted to the most infinitesimal fragment of what the full current represented, made him almost lose himself in the depth of what poured through that single point of connection. The boundary between his awareness and the blue vastness of Infinity became alarmingly thin in the span between heartbeats, his consciousness straining to maintain coherence against something that did not acknowledge the concept of individual identity as a meaningful distinction.

Infinity was dangerous.

The thought of Assimilating it sent blinding signals of danger erupting through every aspect of his awareness with unanimity that he had never experienced from his own existence before.

Blinding, absolute, unanimous signals of danger that suggested his entire existence understood something his conscious mind was only beginning to process.

Even his Civilization of Assimilation, which had consumed Absolutes and Primordial Hearts and the Waters of a Miniature Cause and the memories of a Singular Cognizance, recoiled from the suggestion of consuming Infinity directly with a clarity that communicated one simple truth.

Not yet.

Not even close to yet, and maybe not ever as if he ever did...he would no longer be himself, but merely a river of infinity!