Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5128

Chapter 5128: THE Wyld! II

The primal forest of THE Wyld changed around them as they moved.

Noah perceived every shift of it in something close to slow motion, his Hadean Mind stretching the instants so that he could take each detail fully into himself.

The trees and leaves moved in winds that didn’t come from anywhere. The roots drank from Observable Force without ever seeming to need more.

He studied the plant life closely as they passed.

These plants, these ordinary plants of the ordinary underbrush, felt more indestructible than the defenses of THE Surface Depth entities at the lowest level of Vakochev’s First Scale. A shrub here would have survived blows that would have shattered beings whom he had once considered powerful.

It was fucking laughable!

The small lifeforms scattered as the three of them passed.

Critters darted between the roots. Glowing things no larger than his palm flickered through the underbrush. Each of them carried power that would have placed them as Surface Depth lifeforms anywhere else, and each of them ran from his party with the specific fear of creatures that recognized predators beyond their weight class.

He had explored many regions across his existence.

A Beast World with its wonder. Atlantis, the Demon World with its carved cruelty. The Cultivation World where mortals clawed upward through borrowed breakthroughs...

Every one of them had offered something, and every one of them had been worth the journey. But he had always found a particular joy in places like this, in vibrant ancient forests filled with wonders. They reminded him of his journey back to The Earliest Folds.

A place like this always scratched the itch of exploration!

He always felt, in such places, that he would grasp many more things if he only paid close enough attention.

And he was not staying still.

Just as Emotive was doing what she did with emotions, pulling information from feelings scattered across Observable Existence, he could tap into the Infinity permeating everything around them to read information of his own. Her method was more precise because emotions were individualized, each one belonging to a specific being or moment. His was broader. He had used his weavings of Undifferentiated Fate before to gather information about Alexander, but right now he used something simpler.

He tapped Infinity directly, without invoking the Civilization of Hunger or Undifferentiated Fate, and let flows of information pour into him from every direction.

The region began to map itself across his mind.

The Infinity swirling through this area carried signatures of every life form within it. Small creatures and large ones. Plants and streams. Pockets of denser authority where ancient presences had once passed through and left traces that hadn’t yet faded. He extended his senses outward slowly and then further, handling the influx with care as he familiarized himself with this practice.

He didn’t have Infinity alone.

This place was drenched in Observable Force. Rivers of it cascaded throughout the forest, golden and slow, their currents holding memories of their own that he could taste with the right angle of attention. He tapped into that as well, letting the two streams of information layer against each other in his perception. Infinity gave him the texture of what was alive. Observable Force gave him the shape of what had moved through. Together, they painted the region in a resolution that no single sense could have managed.

Slowly but surely, he familiarized himself with the practice as they went forward silently.

Emotive floated beside him with the reverent gaze he had chosen to ignore.

He looked toward Naldine instead.

Her expression held something nostalgic as she passed through what should have been, by blood and origin, her home.

They were in her home.

But her home was about to get very bloody.

Because at this moment, standing in the filtered light of an ancient forest that had birthed beings she could no longer call her own, Noah found himself realizing something about the Civilizational Holy War that had been quietly assembling in the background of his thoughts.

There were many possibilities to consider.

Yes, he could raise his people as much as he possibly could in the remaining hours. He could push them through accelerated Hadean transformations, put them through forced sparring against Beowulf and THE Living Elemental, refine their bones and organs until the selected 81 stood at capabilities that made their designated opponents regret the day their names had been written into the challenge. When the Holy War began in less than twenty hours, wonder would unfold across Observable Existence. He had already arranged that much.

But wonder wasn’t the only option.

In that remaining window, in those twenty hours, what if those chosen among the 81 Primordial Architects to face his people began dying left and right? What if they began vanishing from their resting places, their training grounds, their quiet moments of preparation? What if their corpses started appearing across THE Wyld? What if he simply carved rivers of blood across this forest until the list of his opponents shortened into something more manageable by the hour?

"We’re close enough now that I can collapse the distance between emotions," she said, her voice holding careful restraint. "Their emotional signatures are within my reach. I can pull us across to their location through that channel if you want. It’s fast and it’s clean. They won’t feel us coming."

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