Achilles lay down on one of the empty floating platforms with the calm of someone who had faced considerably worse circumstances. His clothes dissolved away from his form as he settled onto the sleek surface, multicolored authority flowing from his Civilizations to cover his groin area as he laid there with his arms at his sides and his purple-gold eyes fixed on the ceiling of the laboratory.

Like the many corpses surrounding him.

Except breathing!

Mansa Nguna floated over with the unhurried pace that seemed to characterize every movement she made within this space she had clearly inhabited for far longer than most civilizations had existed. She looked down at him with lazy gold eyes that traveled across his transformed physique with scientific interest before landing on the multicolored authority covering his lower body.

She shook her head slowly.

She raised one hand and formed a radiant golden blade made of concentrated Observable Force, the instrument materializing between her fingers. The blade hummed with authority that resonated with the foundational medium of structured reality.

She proceeded to begin cutting open Achilles’s chest cavity.

Achilles did not feel any sense of pain from this. Whether through some property of her technique or through his own transformed foundations processing the intrusion as something other than damage, the opening of his chest registered as sensation rather than agony. He got ready for anything coming, his Architect’s Perception spreading outward to monitor every aspect of what was being done to him while his Civilization of Assimilation held itself in readiness at the edges of his awareness.

Whatever she sent into him, he would Assimilate the Engineering and understand it entirely.

Mansa Nguna worked with the relaxed focus of someone who found genuine pleasure in their craft, her golden blade parting tissue and muscle with precision that left clean edges rather than the brutal damage conventional cutting would have produced. She smiled lazily as she worked, gold hair falling forward as she leaned over his open chest.

"So many Bounded Lifeforms do not even have an idea of true power."

Her voice carried the contemplative quality of someone thinking aloud rather than delivering prepared instruction.

"They cultivate their Civilizations across tens of thousands of years and believe they are approaching the ceiling of what existence can offer. They receive Ego amplification and believe they have touched the highest methodology available to them. They learn to wield Infinity without madness and call themselves complete."

She paused her cutting to examine something within the incision with focused attention before continuing.

"Amplifying Egos is critical, yes. You can then tap into Infinity without losing yourself to THE Gamaidjan, which is genuinely important for anyone who wishes to advance meaningfully within THE Second Scale. But another way to tap into Infinity without utilizing Egos at all is through Causes. Through knowing and understanding Causes."

The golden blade continued its work.

"There is THE First Cause which birthed Observable Existence, and from this Cause came many others, cascading expressions of creative principle that govern different aspects of how reality functions and how consciousness operates within it. Not even Gilded Ones all gain knowledge or access to them."

She tilted her head with the slight angle of someone finding something unexpectedly interesting in what they were examining.

"Ah."

The opened incision revealed layers of muscle and tissue parted with surgical precision until his shining stellar bones became visible beneath, his transformed Primordial Architect physiology displaying architecture that differed from the conventional specimens surrounding.

Achilles kept a straight face throughout, monitoring her instruments and intentions with perception that tracked every movement while maintaining the composed exterior that served him better than any expression of discomfort would have.

The beat of his Heart of a Primordial Architect began ringing out as it became visible, white-gold radiance pulsing with rhythms that filled the laboratory space around them.

Mansa Nguna reached out and grasped his heart.

Her fingers closed around the white-gold structure with gentleness that contrasted with the clinical efficiency of everything preceding this moment, holding the pulsing organ with the careful reverence of a scientist handling a specimen she found genuinely precious.

"Oh, I do not need to do all of this by the way. This is just my particular process."

Her lazy smile appeared without apology.

"But where was I? I was talking about Causes."

She settled into the comfortable position of someone preparing to explain something she found endlessly fascinating to an audience she was not entirely certain could follow the full depth of what she intended to convey.

"You do not know this, but there are actually nine Prime Causes that most powerful Gilded Ones seek. These are not simply variations of THE First Cause or Miniature Causes that Bounded Lifeforms sometimes manage to initiate. They are foundational axioms of existence itself, each one governing an aspect of reality so fundamental that beings who gain access to them transcend what conventional cultivation can achieve."

She paused to allow that weight to settle before continuing.

"One is THE Desidero Cause."

The name emerged with particular care, as if the words themselves carried significance beyond their phonetic content.

"Before any consciousness could think or act or build, it wanted. The first experiential truth that emerged during THE First Cause was the truth that existence is defined by wanting, that the very nature of being conscious involves the awareness of absence and the orientation toward filling that absence. THE Desidero Cause holds this truth as its foundational axiom."

Her grip on his heart remained steady as she spoke, gold eyes distant with the quality of someone recounting something they had spent considerable time contemplating.

"It governs all desire, all motivation, all wanting across every expression of consciousness. Every being that has ever craved something, pursued something, or oriented itself toward an objective it did not yet possess was drawing on the experiential substrate that THE Desidero Cause provides. To have access to THE Desidero Cause is to understand and command the foundational wanting that underlies all conscious action."

As she said this, her body erupted with Observable Force that flowed from every aspect of her existence into the hand that held his heart. The golden light concentrated in her fingers with intensity that made the surrounding laboratory brighten noticeably, authority belonging to a Gilded One channeling through the point of contact between her palm and the white-gold organ.

She began carving something onto Achilles’s heart.

The sensation registered as pressure rather than pain, geometric configurations being inscribed onto the surface of his Heart of a Primordial Architect with instruments of Observable Force. He continued monitoring everything closely, his Assimilation holding itself in readiness at every edge of what she was sending into him, prepared to consume and integrate the Engineering rather than simply receiving it as a passive modification.

Mansa Nguna continued without breaking her focused work, her lazy conversational quality returning even as her technique grew considerably more serious in its execution.

"Then there is THE Cognitio Cause."

Her gold eyes carried particular warmth when she spoke this name.

"The Cause of Knowledge. This is actually the one I seek to have the power of flow through me one day, which is perhaps why I find it easiest to discuss."

The carving on his heart deepened, Observable Force writing configurations that pulsed with authority she was transferring from her own existence into his.

"THE Cognitio Cause holds 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. Every time a being genuinely understands something it did not understand before, it is drawing on the substrate that THE Cognitio Cause provides."

She glanced at his face briefly with expression that held something approaching fondness for her subject matter.

"It is why I like Engineering. It has knowledge embedded in every cut and every configuration. Every specimen teaches me something new about the architecture of existence."

A pause that felt almost reluctant.

"Ah, but you will not remember all of this after your Engineering anyway. Even your mind will be malleable under my command during this process. So perhaps I am simply talking for my own benefit." 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

BOOM!

Her lazy smile returned.

"Hang in there."

BOOM!

Achilles’s expression became heavy as Mansa Nguna erupted with power at this moment, Observable Force flooding into him from every direction simultaneously as she abandoned the conversational pace that had characterized her work until now and became entirely serious!

The golden light that had been flowing gently into the carvings on his heart became a torrent that pressed against the boundaries of his existence with weight demanding either integration or collapse, the Engineering beginning in earnest with force that made the casual preparations preceding it seem like an entirely different procedure.

And at this time...

’Assimilate!’

He bellowed out!