Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5366

Chapter 5366: Infinity and THE Primordial Source!

There is an old record, copied and recopied across more generations than its copiers could name, and it begins with two women who should have been enemies and were not.

One was an Infinite Lifeform. One was a Source Lifeform. By the laws of how things are and have always been, they were born to fight each other, the way the tide is born to oppose the shore, and they would likely have lived their whole long existences proving the laws correct, except that they met for the first time on the same day they each met a Primeval One, and a Primeval One does not care which of its prey hates the other.

The record does not say much about THE Primeval One. Records never says much about Primeval Ones.

It says only that the thing was foreign, that it was old in a way that made the two women feel young despite the ages each of them already carried, and that neither Infinity alone nor THE Primordial Source alone was enough to survive it.

They survived because they stopped, in the middle of dying, and did the one thing their kinds never did. They fought back to back. The Infinite Lifeform held the thing with Infinity. The Source Lifeform held it with THE Primordial Source.

And between the two authorities, used at once against a single enemy, they found just enough to live, and THE Primeval One, which had not expected the prey to cooperate, withdrew rather than spend more of itself than the meal was worth.

When it was gone, the two women looked at each other, and neither of them could quite remember why they were supposed to want the other dead.

So they became allies. And because they were both, beneath everything else, the kind of beings who could not leave a question alone, they became something rarer than allies. They became students of each other.

The Source Lifeform taught THE Primordial Source, and THE Primordial Tongue that shapes it. The Infinite Lifeform taught Infinity, and THE First Tongue that emulated it.

And across the years they made discoveries that their kinds had spent eternities too busy fighting to ever make, and the record preserves their words.

"Your Infinity...does not destroy me," the Source Lifeform said, in the early years, with the wonder of a being reporting something that should not be true.

"I took it into myself expecting madness. Every Infinite Lifeform I ever watched was a being holding back a flood, spending half their strength on not drowning. I waited to drown. I did not." She held up a hand wreathed in a thing her kind was never meant to hold.

"THE Primordial Source in me resists it. As long as my reserves are deep enough, as long as the Source within me is potent, the madness finds nothing to take hold of. The Source is a foundation, and a foundation does not go mad. It simply is. And Infinity, set upon something that simply is, becomes a tool instead of a tide."

"And your Source does nothing to my mind at all," the Infinite Lifeform answered, in her turn.

"I expected it to weigh on me. To pull at my Infinity, to contest it. It does the opposite. THE Primordial Source amplifies what I already am. My Infinity reaches further, holds firmer, expresses grander, with the Source feeding it from beneath. Infinite Lifeforms may not need amplified Egos if they have this..." She laughed, the laugh of a being who had found a gift where she expected a burden.

This was the first of their great findings.

An Infinite Lifeform who holds THE Primordial Source is not endangered by it. They are amplified, their Infinity made stronger and more stable on the Source’s foundation.

And a Source Lifeform who takes up Infinity is not driven mad by it, so long as the reserves of their Source stay potent, because the Source is a foundation and madness has nothing in a foundation to grip.

They studied further.

They learned that Infinity is not a substance but a permission, the authority by which a thing is allowed to be without limit, and that this is why it tends to drown its holder, because a permission with no foundation beneath it permits everything, including the dissolution of the one who holds it.

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