Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5411

Chapter 5411: Estuary! I

Ridiculously, he had gained the immensity of devouring the severed hand, and the records and memories had still gone and corrupted themselves the moment he reached for them again.

Noah turned that over. He had genuinely believed he was not underestimating this being! He had sealed it, drained it, devoured a piece of it, and spoken its name in defiance of its own rules, and he had felt, through all of it, that he had the measure of the thing well enough to keep climbing over it. But to reach across eons and corrupt the records inside a severed body part, after that body part had already been cut away and sealed and buried and finally eaten, was a different order of capability. He had to move THE Riven up onto a far higher pedestal than he had wanted to.

And as he thought about it, a worse question surfaced.

If this thing truly was a master manipulator, THE Primordial Deceiver, THE Infinite Liar, then was that severed hand even truly a piece of its body at all?

Because the math did not sit right. THE Queen Regnant had just told him this being’s name stood grander than Vakochev’s before THE Scales. If Noah had genuinely devoured and refined a hand from something that vast, that foundational, that far above even Vakochev, the gain should have been monstrous. It should have been equivalent to multiple THE Genesis Tesseract, or grander still, the digestion of a piece of the grandest being before the current age. And yes, his gains had been immense, he could feel his Osmontian Source Infinity and his Intent surging wildly even now, with the records gone. But immense was not the same as the scale he would have expected from a true piece of a True Lifeform of the old era. So either the hand had been throttled, deliberately, to give him only a fraction of what it should have. Or it had never been quite what it presented itself as.

"..."

He had to rethink everything about this enemy. Every assumption. Every gain! Every word it had ever spoken to him in his heart. At this exact moment, standing in the Hall of Swords, he set about doing precisely that, and then his veiled Intent buzzed, and he felt the surroundings change.

Well, not the surroundings. Existence itself.

As if he were being moved into a different kind of existence entirely.

HUUM!

|A single instant has been stretched. You and THE Queen Regnant have been placed within a unique Dimension of Existence carved out of a moment too brief to measure. Within this stretched instant, only the two of you exist. Everything else has been set outside of time’s flow. This is her doing.|

...!

Noah gazed around, and saw it. Dame Seraphine, frozen mid-kneel. The other Swords, motionless. Even the powerful personages around the throne, the horned and the taloned and the serpentine beings who exceeded the Fifth Scale, held perfectly still, locked outside the stretched instant. Only he and THE Queen Regnant remained, gazing at each other across a moment that the rest of existence was not permitted to enter.

"I trust every being in this hall with my life," she said, sweet and calm. "I chose them across ages. And yet even I have been given guidelines for what to do should I hear anything at all regarding THE Sealed One. Even those I trust the most, I am instructed to hold at arm’s length when his name enters a room. That is how thoroughly he has poisoned the well of trust across existence. So I have brought us somewhere private, where no follower could overhear even if one stood among us." Her aperture clattered softly.

"Is there more, New Sword? More than the simple passing of word that THE Sealed One has begun to wake? Tell me here, where only I can hear it."

"I know the approximate locations," Noah said, "of where other sealed pieces of him may be. He was cut apart and scattered, and I can sense some the scattering, well enough to point toward it. If those pieces can be found and destroyed before he fully wakes and reassembles his power, that would be the ideal outcome. Far better than waiting for them to stir on their own the way the one in Arkethys did." He held her writhing gaze.

"Because what killed Sir William, what tried to kill me, what swept Dame Seraphine and a Source Lifeform aside like crumbs, was an insignificant thing. A tiny shred of a sliver of him. A waking fragment, not even the whole of a finger. And it did all of that. But...I survived it and read a bit of its Records."

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