Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5663

Chapter 5663: How To Kill An Immense One? II

"Ages passed. The company of Provenance Lifeforms prospered, and grew, and became a lineage, and the lineage spread its light across the early dark. But existence does not let the sovereign prosper unwatched. There came a day when that lineage crossed another company of Provenance Lifeforms, and this second company was not alone. Behind them stood the aura of one of Those Who Remain, an architect who had taken them as its own, and lent them the edge of its immensity."

"It was not a contest as much as it was an extermination. The lineage that had once shown mercy to a dying stranger was driven to the edge of unmaking, cornered, their light guttering, an entire bloodline of sovereign existences about to be scattered into the dark with an Immense One’s weight pressing down to make certain none survived."

Descartes stopped walking.

"And then another aura rose."

"It came out of the deep dark, vast beyond the reckoning of anyone present, and it was the unmistakable, existense-bending weight of a second Immense One. It fell across the doomed lineage and it stood between them and their end, and the enemy company broke and fled, and the architect that had backed them, an Immense One in its own right, took one look at the aura that had risen to oppose it, and it fled as well. It fled, Youngest. One of Those Who Remain looked at what had come to defend a handful of sovereigns, and it chose flight over ruin."

"The lineage was saved. And they looked up at their impossible savior, this Immense One who had scattered their doom, and they waited to see the face of the architect who had chosen, for reasons none of them could fathom, to spend its immensity on their behalf."

Descartes let the silence stretch to its breaking point.

"It was the dying man. The one from the stone. The one they had fed and forgotten Ages before."

BOOM!

The word landed soft and landed heavy, and Noah’s endlessly blue eyes had gone very still!

"He had not died," Descartes said quietly. "He thanked them. Can you imagine it. An Immense One, a thing that architects now flee, and the first words out of it were thanks, for a store of food left against a stone in a forgotten Age. And the lineage, on their knees before the being that had saved them, asked him the only question that mattered. The question you would have asked. The question I asked, when I first heard this tale. They asked him how. How does a dying sovereign, fading against a stone, refusing all help, become in a few short Ages a thing that Those Who Remain flee from?"

"And he gave them an answer of four words, or near enough, and it is the answer I have carried across every Age since."

Descartes turned to face Noah fully.

"He said: I lived truly. Unfathomably. To exactly who I was. I was true."

BOOM!

The subtracted dark rang with it, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

Noah understood, now, why the old philosopher unmade Primevals with doubt, why he asked a man to prove his own waking life, why he had raised Noah’s own Trueness simply by making him examine it. It was all one lesson. It had always been one lesson!

"So." The old man’s eyes glittered with a cold, absolute logic. "You asked me how to kill an Immense One, and I told you I could not answer that until we had simplified the equation. Now we have simplified it. An Immense One is only a Provenance Lifeform that has gone all the way. So the question is no longer a blasphemy. It is no longer even a large question. It has become a small one, and a plain one, and I will now ask it of you, since you are the one thing in this room built to answer it."

"How does one kill a Provenance Lifeform?"

BOOM!

"Would you be able to tell me that, O Provenance Lifeform?"

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