Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5564

Chapter 5564: Provenance! III

He asked it inwardly first, of the collar, of the stone, of the trial itself, and got nothing, and so he asked the only thing here that answered questions.

"The lifeforms," he ground out. "The ones with Provenance Essence. What were they? How did they live? What did they do with it?"

|I do not know.|

"You knew enough to theorize the collar requires it."

|I knew enough to fail twice. Those are different quantities of knowledge.| The Voice was quiet a moment.

|What I hold is this. They generated. Where everything else in existence gathers, they produced. I have said this already and I say it again because it is the whole of my inheritance on the subject. Everything else is rumor shaped like information.|

"Then give me the rumor."

|They were few and they were many. They were early. They did not build Pantheons, as far as any account claims, and they did not climb Scales, and they held no Causes that anyone ever recorded, which I have always found either impossible or terrifying, and I have never determined which.|

Noah’s back was beginning to fissure!

He could feel it, not the bones now but the existence itself, hairline fractures spreading through the architecture of what he was, the way the small turning realm in Damodred’s lesson had cracked. Fourth increment. His arms had gone from shaking to a deep steady burn that was worse!

"How," he managed, "does a thing get stronger without gathering? Walk me through it. You’re a Primeval who has died here. What would you have had to do differently?"

|Accumulate better.|

"That...makes no fucking sense."

|Refine what was accumulated until it became indistinguishable from self.|

"That is still external things merely refined!"

|Then I do not know, and that is precisely the point, and you have just found the edge of me.| Something bitter moved through the ancient voice.

|Do you understand what you are asking? You are asking a being made entirely of successful accumulation to describe its opposite. Every instrument I have for thinking about power is an instrument for thinking about acquisition. When I stood where you are kneeling, I tried to bear the weight with everything I had gathered across my whole existence, all of it, ages of it, and the weight went through all of it like it was not there, because it was not looking at what I had. It was looking at what I was underneath what I had, and underneath what I had, there was nothing that I had made.|

"...!"

| I am the wrong lens. I failed here because everything I know is the wrong lens.|

|Look at yourself.|

The fifth increment came down, and Noah’s right knee joined his left in the sand, and the blood was coming from his ears now as well as his nose, and a long crack opened somewhere in the region of his existence where the Foundations lived, and through all of it his mind kept working, because the mind was the one thing in him the stone had not yet reached!

Look at himself.

Fine. What was he?

He was human. He kept arriving at that and it kept feeling insufficient, because human was not ancient, human was not special, human was a small warm mortal category that he had crowned precisely because nobody else thought it was worth crowning.

He was not one of those early lifeforms. He was not born generating anything. He had been born in a house, and everything he had ever become, he had gotten from somewhere!

That was the sentence.

Everything he had ever become, he had gotten from somewhere.

"..."

The Primordial Source. Found. Grasped. Not made!

His whole existence, every layer of it, was magnificent borrowed architecture!

Oh!

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