Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5555

Chapter 5555: The Well! II

When it came to who should give a test of just how purr they were...Noah turned and looked at a certain Steed!

"You first," Noah said.

Hvitrmarr inclined her horned head and walked to the edge of the pale sand. She simply stepped off, and THE Undivided Well took her.

In truth, the question everyone had come here to ask was answered in that first moment, before anybody had time to be nervous on her behalf.

There was no ripple of refusal, no pause while something unseen considered her. The water opened the way a door opens for a hand that has always had the key.

Compared to the way she moved in the air, she moved through that sea like something coming home. Her white hair fanned out behind her, and the nine First Causes drifting in the weave of her robe brightened as the underlight found them, so that she went down trailing her own small constellation.

Below her, the Blooms turned in their thousands. Radiant flowers of blue and white and pale gold, opening and closing on a slow shared rhythm, and they lit her from beneath as she passed over them. Noah watched from the shore and found he had nothing at all to say about it.

Since she was not the sort to take more than she needed, she chose a bloom about the size of a shield. She closed her hand around its base and drew it free with a care that looked, from above, a great deal more like asking than taking.

Then she rose, and broke the surface without a sound, and came back across the water to the sand. She held THE Vermeil Bloom out to Noah in both hands, and its light shone up into her face.

"For you, Master."

Noah reached for it.

"Hold on."

Ryaenara had already got to her feet, and she said it loudly enough that every head on the shore turned. She was rolling her shoulders, and her eyes were on the sea with the exact expression she wore before a fight she intended to enjoy.

"Before you take that. I want to see... if I’m pure."

"I’ve been alive for too long. I’ve kept my word to people who didn’t deserve it and broken it with people who did, and I have never once pretended to be anything I’m not. If anybody here is exactly what she says she is, it’s me."

She reached the edge and dove, and... the water threw her back!

It happened so quickly that it took a moment to understand!

The surface rippled outward in a hard ring from the point she struck, and it did not part for her, and she came off it in a spray of gold-shot droplets and landed on her back in the sand.

"What?!"

She was furious!

Of course she was up again almost at once. She stared at the water, and then at her own hands, as though they had gone behind her back and done something she had not authorized.

"What?"

She went a second time, faster, and the Well shoved her out again, and she landed skidding through the fine sand. By the third attempt she had stopped being polite about it. Her Intent came off her in a heavy vibrant tide, and she drove herself at the surface like a thrown spear!

Despite all of that, the Well did not fight her. It did not brace, and it did not push back, and it never once answered her power with power of its own. It only declined!

Then nothing happened at all, for a while.

The waterfalls kept falling on the cliffs behind them, and the luminous vines in the silver forests kept breathing their light in and out, and none of it had any opinion.

Ryaenara sat in the pale sand with her Intent still burning around her and nothing anywhere to burn it against, and she looked...lost.

Theron Adranos looked away. There was no judgment anywhere on his worn face!

Noah went and stood beside her as he laughed inside a bit.

"Hang in there. We dont always have to be good at everything. And...So long as you are pure to yourself, I don’t see why it should matter what a lake thinks about it.."

Ryaenara scoffed and stood and dusted off her legs as she voiced out...

"Hmph." She jerked her chin at the water. "Why don’t you try, then? You talk big, but you may not be considered pure yourself, and I would like very much to watch you bounce."

Noah nodded and walked to the edge calmly.

Behind him the shore went quiet in a different way than before, and he could feel all of them at his back.

He asked himself the question honestly, one last time.

Was he pure? He had no idea, but he stepped off the sand anyway!

And....!

The Well opened for him.

|Nature: a self-originated growth. It was not seeded, cultivated, or designed by any hand present in this Dimension.|

|Function, first order: it cures degradation. Terminal Causes, failing anchors, curses seated into a lineage, corruption grown into an existence at the root. What has begun to fail may be made whole. What has been sentenced may have the sentence lifted. May. Nothing is guaranteed.|

|Function, second order: it elevates. In a lifeform that consumes it, the Bloom does not add power. It resolves the existence into a truer version of itself, and grants power as the consequence.|

|Function, third order: in a being that possesses no Cause, the Bloom can potentially precipitate the emergence of one. A Purpose. An anchor where there was none.|

|Ancillary observation, appended by THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard rather than by the Bloom itself.|

|Further: the accessory is not inert. It is seeking. Every Bloom in this water, and in every water like it across this Dimension, is oriented. They have been looking for a very long time, and the Regard cannot determine what for.|

An accessory of something that was...seeking.

Theron had said the legend held that the collar came first and every Panacea was its overflow, and he had used the words runoff and residue, and had clearly never expected either of them to be read literally. But if each of these flowers was a piece shed from something larger, and if all of them were pointed outward and hunting, then what exactly were these Panaceas looking for?

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