Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5210

Chapter 5210: Bellum III

In the inner reaches of THE Sanctum Velanthra, past the outer ring of Dreamstones and beyond the pale rose-gold pathways that the attendants used for their daily maintenance rounds, there was a floating landmass that most visitors to the Sanctum never reached because most visitors to the Sanctum did not stay long enough to discover it existed.

The landmass floated at a height that placed it above the primary Dreamstone arrangement and below the ancient dark sky of the Sanctum’s interior, suspended in the specific manner of something that had always been there rather than something that had been placed. Its surface shone with the blended warmth of gold and crimson, the colors not painted onto it but emanating from within it the way the Dreamstones emanated their Prime Cause energies. At its center stood a tree of multicolored composition, its trunk a deep bronze and its branches carrying leaves that shifted through the full range of Cause colorations depending on the angle from which one observed them, the composite of several Causes having taken root in the same soil and found, across the eons, a way to coexist.

Beside the tree, a lake of extraordinary clarity held its water without a single ripple disturbing the surface, the bottom of it visible in complete detail despite a depth that suggested the lake had no intention of being as shallow as it appeared.

Near the lake sat an old man.

He could not truly be considered an old man by the standards of most beings who would assess him, because his foundations carried the specific density of something that had been refining itself for longer than most calibration frameworks were designed to measure.

But he had the quality of age nonetheless. His hair was white and long, pulled loosely back. His robes were plain in the way that things worn by beings who had long since stopped needing to communicate their standing through fabric tended to be plain.

He was known as Old Man Zeke. The Golden Bastion.

His power sat at THE Silurian Paleozoic Scale, the second tier of THE Third Scale of Existence, which placed him above every Prima Serva in the Sanctum and above every ordinary Ordovician Gilded One who had ever come to touch the Dreamstones with the carefully managed hopes of their own cultivation aspirations.

He oversaw the operations of the entire Sanctum not through administrative authority but through the simple fact that nothing occurred within its borders that he did not perceive and nothing occurred that he could not address if the addressing became necessary.

He had been watching the foreign Luxuria enter.

He had watched the brute-force application of an extraordinarily potent Luxuria Ego wash past his guardians with the casual efficiency of a being for whom the Sanctum’s entry conditions were not obstacles requiring solution but textures in the ambient environment to be navigated around.

He had noted the absence of authorization. He had noted the absence of the proper designation standing. He had noted all of these things and had continued watching, because in his experience, beings who could brute-force entry into THE Sanctum Velanthra were beings worth watching rather than beings worth stopping.

Curiosity was the correct response to capability.

When the foreign Luxuria had moved directly to THE Bellum Dreamstone without pausing at the others, Old Man Zeke had found this interesting. Visitors almost never went to THE Bellum Dreamstone first. THE Desidero and THE Cognitio received the majority of first contacts, their truths more immediately legible to beings whose cultivations had been structured around wanting or knowing. THE Bellum Dreamstone attracted primarily the Ira who had earned authorized access.

Then the foreign Luxuria had placed his palm against the stone.

And then THE Bellum Dreamstone had lit up.

Old Man Zeke had straightened slightly in his position by the lake.

In all his years of standing guard over this Sanctum, across the full span of the eons during which he had watched Gilded Ones of varying designations and varying capabilities approach the stones with varying degrees of prepared comprehension, he had never seen a Dreamstone respond this way. The stone did not respond to contact.

It delivered. It gave. It was the receiver rather than the broadcaster in the arrangement, opening its contents to the being touching it rather than projecting those contents outward.

What was being produced right now was utterly ridiculous.

The stone was screaming.

Not literally, but in the specific existential sense of a Cause that had found an existence it recognized as so thoroughly aligned with its foundational truth that the recognition had to be expressed outwardly rather than contained within the ordinary quiet of the contact relationship.

The Bellum Dreamstone had found something in this foreign Luxuria that it had not found in any prior visitor, and it was broadcasting that finding with the enthusiasm of a mechanism finally deployed in the precise application it had been built for.

Old Man Zeke rose slowly from his position by the lake.

Then.

|An Accomplishment worthy of accolades and being carved on Vakochev’s Scales of Existence has bloomed. A Lifeform on the lower rungs of the Scales has attained perfect resonance with a Prime Cause of an Observable Existence, allowing their name and record to be carved onto the Scales.|

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