Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5134

Chapter 5134: Dissection! I

THE Living Emotive had been siphoning emotions across Observable Existence for a time now. She had been cataloguing the flavors of every feeling she could pull down from the ambient currents. She had been doing this with the calm professionalism of someone who knew her own craft!

And she had never, ever, ever felt an Infinity like her Fixation’s.

Like, really. She wanted to be clear about that.

The ones on this island? Fine. Ordinary flavors. Recognizable. Octavius first, because he was the loudest of them, emotionally speaking. His signature rolled across the ambient air in layers, and her senses peeled every layer apart without effort, and every single layer beneath the surface tasted the same.

Greed. Anh, so much Greed!

Not the petty kind. Not the kind lesser beings carried when they wanted a friend’s wife.

This was Greed refined across eons into a discipline. Greed cultivated into methodology. Greed so precisely engineered that it had become the vessel his Infinity rested inside. His sea of it tasted sharp and hungry and organized, and the organization was the whole trick. The Greed held the flood the way a dam held a river, and the river obeyed because the dam had been designed to be obeyed.

Valeria’s Infinity tasted similar, but sourer. Sheesh, so much sourer! Her Greed carried the tang of someone who had watched three failed experiments before this one and had folded each failure into her own ambition. The Rhyacian one collapsed on the ground tasted duller. Just flat Greed, plateaued, the kind that stopped reaching because its owner had stopped reaching. The other Calymmians between them, all variations on the same chord, different notes in the same engineered song.

The Abomination, though.

Oh!

The Abomination!

Emotive’s hair rippled through colors she usually saved for mourning as she looked at it. The emotion pouring off the frozen creature was a single note held too long. Held so long it had stretched past music into something that ate music!

Hunger. Endless Hunger. But the Hunger was already collapsing into THE Gamaidjan around the edges, and where the two met, something that wasn’t quite an emotion pulsed beneath the surface. It was...Madness.

The madness of Infinity on a leash. The leash was fraying. Mmm, she could see it fraying, and Octavius clearly hadn’t finished tying the final knots before her Fixation had shown up with his questions and his Pillar and his extremely inconvenient timing.

Then she turned her senses toward Noah. Her Fixation!

And every comparison broke.

She wanted to say this carefully, because she was feeling a lot right now and she wanted to be a good little witness to what she was experiencing instead of spiraling, which she could absolutely do if she wasn’t paying attention.

His Infinity...didn’t taste of a single Ego.

It tasted of everything.

Her hair burst through colors she hadn’t known lived inside her palette. Layer upon layer upon layer of emotion, each one distinct, each one stable, each one woven into the next without any of them dominating. Calm sat beside rage, and neither contaminated the other. Tenderness coexisted with tyranny in the same breath, and the tenderness didn’t make the tyranny soft and the tyranny didn’t make the tenderness cruel.

Hunger pulsed alongside satisfaction. Pride breathed next to humility. Cruelty held hands with mercy. None of it was contradictory. None of it was warring. None of it was collapsing the others out of the picture, which, like, emotions normally did that, emotions usually wanted the spotlight, and here they were sharing it!

Was that his secret? Was that it? Was that really it?

Oh!

Was that why he was immune to the madness of Infinity?

She thought about it the way she thought about everything.

The engineered ones amplified a single Ego to hold the flood. Simple solution, elegant even, she could respect it. But her Fixation, THE Youngest, had amplified all of them. Countless colors of emotion, each one as cultivated as Octavius’s Greed, each one as refined as Valeria’s cutting discipline, each one its own channel for his Infinity to rest within. If one Ego could hold a flood, then countless Egos could hold an ocean. And the ocean would move through him without madness, because no single weaving would ever be asked to hold more than it had been built to carry.

Her eyes shone brilliantly as she watched him move like a work of art. And he fucking was a work of art!

Then he raised his hands, and his massive Pillar manifested above him, and he said the word.

"Freeze."

...!

And even then her hair kept flickering between silvers and pure radiant whites!

Was her Fixation not truly mad?

Was he?

Wasn’t he?

Mmm. The thought lodged itself in her for a moment, and she turned it over, because comparison was the only tool she trusted when she was this overwhelmed.

She turned her senses back to the Abomination. The creature’s frozen eyes still burned with THE Gamaidjan. When she tasted that madness, what she found beneath it was emotion that had collapsed into a single unstable note. A single hungry scream. A scream that had lost the ability to be anything except itself. That was madness. That was what madness felt like from the outside. One note, forever, no harmony.

Then she turned her senses back to Noah.

His emotions were far too stable for that.

Far too stable. Far, far too stable. Far, far, far too stable!

Countless colors, every one of them distinct, every one of them content to exist alongside every other. Harmony wasn’t even the right word, because harmony implied a small number of notes in agreement. This was a symphony. And the symphony was so large that the absence of any single note would have made the whole composition noticeably smaller.

Her Fixation couldn’t possibly be mad.

No.

He was not mad.

She shook her head slowly, her hair settling into a deep reverent gold, and she kept watching him laugh with his hands raised and his Pillar blazing above him!