Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5662

Chapter 5662: How To Kill An Immense One? I

Descartes looked at Noah calmly.

"Do you know what you are, Youngest?" Descartes asked. "Not your titles. Those are decoration. I mean the rare thing. The thing that makes an old creature like me cross a threshold to look at you."

Noah met the deep eyes and said nothing.

"You are one of the few who wants to change the shape of things." Descartes clasped his hands behind his back.

"That is rarer than you would believe. Existence is vast beyond any counting, and it is packed corner to corner with the mighty, and almost none of them want anything more than a larger portion of exactly what already is. A deeper cage. A higher rung. A wider vineyard. They climb and they climb, and not one in a billion ever lifts his head to ask whether the ladder should exist at all."

"And of that one in a billion who does ask, who does look up and hate the ladder and dream of tearing it down, almost every single one lacks the power to so much as scratch it. They rage. They write manifestos in their own blood. They die small, and existence does not so much as pause to note the passing. Vakochev was rare, Youngest. He was one of the ones who both wanted it and nearly had the means. And you already know how that ended."

"He failed," Noah said. "And retreated."

"He failed and retreated." Descartes nodded, unbothered, as though failure were simply a data point and not a tragedy.

"Which brings me to my question. Forget the Scales. Forget the Ruling and the Train and the whole grinding pageant the architects have arranged for us. Set all of it down, and answer me one thing."

The old philosopher’s gaze sharpened to a point.

"How would you kill an Immense One?"

HUUM!

The question landed with weight! It pressed on the concept of the thing, on the sheer blasphemy of the sentence spoken aloud, and Noah felt the subtracted space around them tighten as though existence itself had leaned in to hear.

Noah’s eyes sharpened.

And then he shook his head.

"I don’t have enough information to answer that confidently," he said. "I don’t know."

"Good," the philosopher said. "A man who claims to know is a man who has stopped thinking. But you should know. So let me give you the information you lack."

"To understand how to kill one of Those Who Remain," Descartes began, "you must first stop thinking of them as a wall, and start thinking of them as a kind. And to know their kind, you must set them beside the only thing in existence that shares their nature. You must set them beside a Provenance Lifeform."

"They are not so different as the frightened believe. Both generate their own standing. Both owe nothing to any framework. Both are answered by existence rather than answering to it. The difference between an Immense One and a Provenance Lifeform is not a difference of kind. It is only a difference of degree, and of one other thing. But before I name it, for you to truly understand, I would rather tell you a story."

"Long ago," Descartes said, and the subtracted dark seemed to deepen and settle around the telling, "so long ago that the rulings had not yet been weighed and the architects were young, there walked a company of Provenance Lifeforms. A grand company. They generated their own light, and they wanted for nothing, and they moved through the early dark as sovereigns of themselves, which is the only true sovereignty there is."

"One day, they came upon another of their kind, sitting alone against a stone. He was dying. His light had thinned to almost nothing. His generation had faltered, his essence had begun to scatter, and by every measure the company could take, he had perhaps a handful of years left before he unwove entirely."

"Now, a Provenance Lifeform does not die easily, and does not die often, and to see one of their own kind fading against a stone moved the company deeply. They gathered around him. They offered him their own generation, their own light, the deepest gift one sovereign existence can offer another. They told him they would not let him die. They had the means to arrest his fading, to prop him up, to buy him Ages he could not buy himself."

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