Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5320

Chapter 5320: Terrifying! II

<On Impossibilities>

There is a story the old ones tell about the impossible.

In an age that has no number anyone still remembers, there was an Observable Existence crowded with Infinite Lifeforms. This was not unusual for that domain. Its First Cause favored Infinity the way some domains favor war or knowledge, and so the beings who climbed highest within it were beings who had grasped Infinity, and they were many, and they were proud, and they spent their long existences refining their understanding of the infinite.

Among them was one who looked at Infinity and found it insufficient.

His name was Hast, and the others thought him a fool. He had grasped Infinity as they had grasped it. He stood among the highest as they stood among the highest. And yet where they looked at the infinite and saw the summit, Hast looked at the infinite and saw a foothill, and when he said as much, the others laughed, because everyone knew that Infinity was the ceiling of that Observable Existence and to seek beyond it was to seek something that did not exist for beings like them.

THE Primordial Source was for Source Lifeforms. It was in their nature, present at their emergence, the thing that made them what they were. An Infinite Lifeform reaching for THE Source was like a fish reaching for fire. The categories did not permit it. This was known. This was settled. This was impossible!

Hast asked a question that the others had never thought to ask.

He asked who had decided.

Not rhetorically. He genuinely wished to know. Which authority had ruled that an Infinite Lifeform could not grasp THE Source? Which law of existence had been consulted? He searched for the ruling and found none.

He found only the agreement of many beings that it could not be done, and the agreement of many beings, he reasoned, was not the same as a law.

It was merely a habit that had been held long enough to feel like one.

So while the others continued refining their Infinity in the comfort of the known, Hast left.

He left his Observable Existence and went into the spaces between, seeking THE Source with an immensity and a grandeur that the categories said he had no right to, and he was not stopped, because there was no one standing at the boundary of the impossible to stop him.

There never had been. The boundary had been built entirely out of the certainty of beings who had never tested it.

He suffered for it. The path he walked had no map because no one of his kind had walked it, and a path without a map is paid for in ways that mapped paths are not.

But he walked it. And he kept walking it. And in the fullness of an age that has no number, Hast the Infinite Lifeform, who was not supposed to be able to do any of this, drew close enough to THE Source that Vakochev himself took notice of him, and recognized him, and carved his name upon THE Scales among those that are carved there.

He was asked, once, how he had done the impossible.

He said he had not. He said he had merely made a choice and then made an action, and then made the choice again, and the action again, across an age, and that at no point had any of it felt impossible to him.

It had felt only like effort. The impossibility, he said, had lived entirely in the minds of the ones who watched, who saw a being doing what could not be done and called it impossible because the alternative was to admit that the limit they had spent their existences respecting had never been real.

The impossible is not a property of the deed. It is a property of the observer. It lives in the gap between what a being believes can be done and what is simply done in front of them, and the being who stops asking whether others call a thing impossible, and asks instead only whether it can be made through choice and action and the willingness to pay, will find that the wall they were warned of was never a wall.

It was a habit. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

And habits, unlike walls, fall the moment someone declines to keep them.

---

In THE Undefined Gaps surrounding Chernobyl, a being had been watching for a very long time.

Maharanis Vikar was an Ealdor Gilded One, which meant he had existed long enough and climbed high enough that most beings in THE Braneworld would have considered the assignment beneath him.

Watching a dying Observable Existence that everyone already knew served as a base for Source Lifeforms was not the work of an Ealdor. It was the work of someone who had displeased the wrong superior, or someone whose House valued thoroughness over the comfort of its senior members, and the Maharanis House valued thoroughness above nearly everything.

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