Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5409

Chapter 5409: THE Infinite Liar II

How did he survive an encounter with THE Sealed One?

It was an expected question. He had known it was coming the moment the name left his mouth in THE Hallowed Demesne. And yet, standing here, hearing it asked, it almost made him offended, because the question carried an assumption underneath it that he did not care for.

He looked around at the powerful beings gathered in the hall, the shrouds fallen, the kneeling Swords, the horned and the taloned and the serpentine, and then he focused on the pulsing tentacles of THE Queen Regnant.

"A power capable of sending Mesozoic Scale beings like Dame Seraphine away with a flick wasn’t something I could have survived through strength," Noah said, his voice even. " I am strong. I’m also weak. Both are true at once. Sir William, Botswana, Richard, Lianna, they were all killed in front of me by that same power, beings grander than I was at the time, and I survived where they didn’t. Not because I’m grander than they were. Because I am strong, and also weak, in the specific ways that mattered in that moment." He let it sit.

"I came here bringing news of his return after I nearly perished to it. I thought sharing it would let others prepare, so that more beings like Sir William don’t die." His eyes were steady on the writhing visage.

"But I have nothing to prove to anyone in this hall. I came to deliver information, and I’ve delivered it. Whether I’m taken seriously or not is your choice, not my burden."

BOOM!

His words were heavy, and the kneeling Dame Seraphine frowned, the look of a being who wanted very much to tell him to at least mind how he spoke before THE First Sword.

There was a long silence ahead of them. And then, a moment later, the sweet voice came again.

"When it comes to THE Sealed One," THE Queen Regnant said, "almost nothing is what it seems. This is precisely why the questions must be asked, however much they offend a being’s pride. Because one would think that a creature who could grind his own disciples into pills must be a pariah. A monster hunted across the dimensions of existence, fled from, reviled. You would think that because he publicized the slaughter, existence must have turned away from him in disgust." The tendrils around her aperture writhed slowly.

"But that is the great, terrible joke of existence. He shared that record of brutality, and instead of fleeing, the grandest lifeforms of existence flocked to his banner. Even now, eons after the dust of those disciples dissolved on his tongue, his name is spoken with absolute reverence by some. His followers are abundant, scattered across every layer of reality. His name was the grandest in existence before Vakochev, and even Vakochev cannot truly compare."

Noah listened, and did not interrupt.

"Do you want to know why?" she continued. "Because before THE Sealed One, existence was broken. The Infinite Lifeforms drifted through endless fragile states, never stable, always fading back into their own echoes. The exceptional Source Lifeforms were locked into concrete existence, unable to branch, unable to evolve. And THE Sealed One was a pioneer. He was the absolute first to fuse Infinity and THE Primordial Source, the first being to make the two great authorities into one. Everything that came after, every being who ever held both, owes the possibility of it to him."

WAA!

"And he was intoxicatingly charismatic," she said. "He didn’t seduce with soft words or false promises of peace. No. He looked at the dark, weeping nature of existence, the pain, the decay, the raw horror of being alive, and he mastered it. He manipulated the very architecture of negative emotion. Pride. Lust. Envy. He taught his followers that their trauma, their madness, their existential dread, were not weaknesses to be cured, but the purest and most concentrated fuel in existence. He showed them how to weaponize their own corruption. Under his guidance, lifeforms that should have rotted in the gutters of the Undefined Gaps learned to bend the rules of existence to their whim, attaining tremendous levels of power they could never have reached alone."

The tendrils stilled, for a moment.

"He was cruel, yes. But his cruelty was never wasteful. That grand harvest I described to you was a singular moment. A necessary toll for a specific transition, in his reckoning. But for every disciple he ground into a pill, he elevated a thousand others to heights of unfathomable, terrifying power. He handed out keys to dominions that regular minds cannot even perceive. He turned outcasts into apex predators, and those predators remember exactly who gave them their teeth." Her sweet voice did not waver!

"They do not look at the mortar and see a slaughterhouse. They look at it and see the price of absolute perfection. In an existence this indifferent, this cruel, this uncaring of who lives and who fades, he was revered. He still is. That is why they follow him, even now, even knowing what he did, because what he did was the smaller part of what he offered."

"I had to ask my question," she said. "But I will tell you, I knew even before you arrived that you should not be a follower of his. Because the sympathizers and the followers of THE Sealed One are precisely those who would never say anything about him. The very last thing such a being wants is to speak his name before others. They operate in the dark, always, without exception. None of us here mention it lightly, but we have always operated under the assumption that deep within THE Infinite Carcosa of the Infinite Lifeforms, and deep within THE Source Lands themselves, followers of THE Sealed One exist among us. We simply do not know who they are. A being who came here and spoke his name aloud is, if nothing else, almost certainly not one of them."

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