Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5528

Chapter 5528: Death! III

<THE True Human Emperor>

Death was not empty.

That was the first thing Noah learned on the other side of it. The immense darkness that had folded around him thinned, and sensation returned without a body to carry it, and he found himself standing upon an endless sea of red.

It was heavy.

Heavy the way a debt is heavy, the way a name spoken at the wrong funeral is heavy, and the red stretched out to every horizon without a single wave, thick and still and patient, and across its surface, floating in their countless numbers...

Were bodies.

All those he had killed.

They floated face-up as far as any sight could reach! The countless he had killed in his home world when it was still tiny. Those from the dungeons, beasts and horrors he had cleaved through by the thousands for essence! Those from the Beast World, from Atlantis, from the Demon World, warriors and monarchs and soldiers who had stood in formations against him.

Those from his Universe. From his Cosmos! From his Wheel of Existence, hierarchies he had erased in afternoons, hosts he had unmade between conversations! From his Observable Existence and every battlefield across every era of his climb, they floated in the red, countless past counting, an ocean floored with everything his ascension had cost everyone else.

And each of them seemed to be looking at him.

Their eyes were open. Every single one! And though no mouth moved, the question rose off the red sea like heat, asked in the countless voices of the drowned, pressing against him from every direction at once.

Why?

Why did we deserve to die?

...!

Noah stood upon the heavy red, and did not look away.

And then, out of the endless sea of blood, directly before him...a body rose.

It came up slowly, red parting off its shoulders, and it did not float like the others. It stood! A figure with light gold hair falling past his ears, fair skin that shone faintly gold as if dawn had been rubbed into it, adorned in a white robe that the sea somehow did not stain, and his eyes, as they opened upon Noah, were cold.

Noah knew him.

The precipice of the Novus Galaxy. The octagonal shattered space. The raving laughter in his closing palm.

It was Aldrich, the Founder of the Celestials!

But there was no madness in him now. Death, it seemed, had returned what desperation had taken, and the being who had died a raving lunatic stood upon the sea of his killer’s making with the cold, composed dignity of what he had been before the end.

"Do you remember my last day?" Aldrich asked.

His voice carried flatly across the red.

"I remember it completely. Death is generous that way. It returns every moment you spent dying, and lets you hold them all at once." His golden eyes did not blink.

"I stood at the very precipice of the Novus Galaxy, at the edge of everything I had ever known, with my essence spent and your tendrils around my limbs. I had been magnificent once. A Founder! Raised up from nothing, given strength, given purpose, given a Galaxy to shepherd. And then I learned what I was. A puppet. A thing on strings, raised up and thrown away like nothing the moment the play required it."

"So I did the only thing a cornered puppet could do. I rang the bell. I broke the barrier of my own home and called destruction down upon the enemy I could not defeat, and I laughed, because it was the first act of my entire existence that no string had chosen for me."

The sea of red was utterly silent around his words.

"And you crushed me. Mid-sentence, mind you. You folded your palm and ended me the way one crushes a bug." His head tilted slightly.

"So I will ask you what all of them are asking." One golden hand swept slowly across the endless floating dead.

"Why did I deserve to die? All I was trying to do was break past the lines of fate laid through me. Past a destiny that others had set! Is that not what you have done at every single step? You defied your system. You defied your Galaxy, your Universe, your Cosmos, your Scales! You have made a crown out of refusing every script ever written for you. I refused ONE script, ONE time, at the very end, with my last breath." His cold eyes fixed on Noah’s.

"Why did you deserve to go on...and I deserved your palm?"

"The dead should stay dead."

...!

"That is my first answer, and it is respect! Your day ended, Aldrich. It ended completely, at the edge of your Galaxy, with your one free act burning in your hands. Nothing I say here can add to it or take from it, and nothing you ask here can reopen it. The dead pleading their case to the living is the living’s dream, not the dead’s right. You had your last day."

"And my second answer is for all of you." His voice carried to every horizon.

"Across existence, all of us seek to defy fate and destiny. All of us! The hierarchies I erased were defying their extinctions, and you, Founder, were defying your strings, and I was defying everything, and every single one of us reached for the same forbidden thing with the same desperate hands."

"Some fail. Some succeed. You did not die because you deserved it. Deserving was never consulted! You simply failed."

"And I...I have yet to fail."

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