Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5565

Chapter 5565: Provenance! IV

The seventh increment settled onto his back, and Noah began!

In theory, he understood it completely. Cast out everything that did not generate from him, empty the house of every borrowed beam, and see what was left. In theory it was clean. It was even elegant!

In practice, he was about to reach into his own existence and tear out everything he had ever been and had been building, and his hands were shaking before he started, and not from the stone.

He started with the one that frightened him least.

The Primordial Source. He had grasped it later, integrated it partially. It was dense and patient inside him and it was not his, had never been his, was older than every framework and belonged to all of existence and none of it.

’Cast out.’

He took hold of it with his will and pulled, and it tore free of his foundations like a root coming out of deep soil, and he sent it away from himself, down through the one channel this place had not sealed, into the living Observable Existence he carried, and THE Infiniverse received it in silence and held it, and a piece of what Noah Osmont was became a thing Noah Osmont was storing.

The absence hit him like cold water!

He breathed through it, and the stone pressed down, and he went again.

The Causes!

This one cost him. He had wanted, even in the theory, even while the idea was still glorious and abstract, to keep his nine. His Osmontian Causes, carved from his own identity, Existence and Paradox and Tyranny and the rest. Surely those were his. Surely those counted!

They did not, and he knew it!

They were carved in the shape of a thing called a Cause. And Causes linked to Civilizations and concepts and frameworks that were standing in existence long before he arrived, designed or grown by hands that were not his, and he had made his own versions of somebody else’s idea, which made them his work and not his origination!

So...

’Cast out!’

HUUM!

The nine tore free, and with them the nine First Causes of Hvitrmarr, and as that mixture unwound he felt the bond to a distant queen strain and cry out somewhere far above this place, a single pulse of alarm through a connection stretched thin by the trial’s walls, and he could not stop to answer it.

The Collision of Causes stuttered and went silent inside him for the first time since he had lit it. The drums stopped.

Eighteen anchors sank into THE Infiniverse, and the quiet where they had been was enormous.

And then he stood at the edge of the one that terrified him.

Infinity.

He knelt under the stone with his blood in the sand and looked at it, the deep blue-gold sea of his Osmontian Source Infinity, the thing that had been with him since before the crown, before the Letters, before any of it!

Infinite Mana!

It was THE first gift, the oldest companion, the floor under every floor. He had been the man with infinite mana before he had been anything else at all!

It was all he had begun with.

And it was not his. Infinity was a route, a variety, a framework walked by lifeforms across all of existence for ages before one human picked it up, and the fact that his was the grandest ocean of it anywhere did not change one drop of where the idea had come from.

Noah’s whole existence recoiled from the act!

Oh!

Fear, actual fear, the thing he never showed and rarely felt, moved through him at the prospect of being a man without it!

What was he without Mana?!

But...

He gripped the ocean.

’Even this.’

’CAST IT OUT!’

BOOM!

The sea tore out of him.

It went in one enormous wrenching motion, blue-gold light hemorrhaging out of every layer of his existence at once, pouring away down the channel into THE Infiniverse, and she took it, his ocean, into herself, and Noah knelt in the black sand and felt what it was to be empty of the thing his own name had been built on.

He did not stop!

He could not stop, because stopping now would leave him half-emptied and holding nothing, so he went through the rest of the borrowed house room by room and threw it all out.

’Cast out.’

’I’m sorry,’ he thought, to Emotive, who could not hear him.

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