Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5664

Chapter 5664: The Thing Beneath The Fruit! I

"That is the clean way," Noah said. "The philosopher’s way. You would like it. It is almost bloodless."

"And the second?"

Noah’s endlessly blue eyes cooled.

"The second is not bloodless at all."

"A Provenance Lifeform is true. That is what it is, all the way down, a truth that generates itself and owes nothing. But a truth is only a truth as long as it is whole. So the second way is not to argue with the truth. It is to divide it. You do not try to overpower a sovereign existence and you do not try to trick it into doubt. You get inside the one indivisible thing it is, and you split it into two things that are each almost it, and then you make those two halves true against each other."

His voice stayed level.

"Because a Provenance Lifeform cannot be commanded from outside, but it also cannot survive being two sovereigns in one skin. Set half of its own truth against the other half. Make its generation fight its generation. It will pour its entire infinite wellspring into winning a war against itself, and it will win, and in winning it will have spent everything it was on destroying half of what it was, and what remains will be a sovereign that has already killed the thing it most needed to stay whole. You make it the murderer and the murdered at once, and you simply wait for the survivor to notice it cannot live as half a truth."

The dark was silent.

"One way corrupts the source until it poisons itself," Noah finished. "The other divides the truth until it wars with itself. Both of them work the same way underneath, if you look. You cannot kill a thing that answers to nothing. So you make it the only authority it will ever obey. You turn the sovereign into its own executioner, and you get out of the way."

Descartes nodded.

"Yes," the old man said simply. "Those are...theories and possibilities, but they are possibilities. Keep them in mind, Youngest. Keep them very close, for what is to come."

He turned his face away, toward nothing, toward the whole grinding architecture of the Train that lay beyond.

"You and I should never have met," Descartes said. "In all the vastness of existence, the odds of two beings like us occupying the same small Dimension at the same small hour are so thin as to be a joke. We are ants. Rare ants. The kind of ant that might one day look up at the boot and decide to bite. And existence is very large, and it scatters its rare ants very wide, precisely so that they never meet, never talk, never add themselves together into something the boot has to actually fear."

He gestured, one slow hand, at the sealed borders of the rushing Dimension.

"And yet here we are. Because THE Immense Ones have a way of undoing their own precautions. They cannot help themselves. They gathered us. This Train they built, this grand moving pageant of chained Dimensions, they call it a Narrative, and the young ones aboard it believe they have been offered a stage to win glory on. They have not. It is a prison. You and I have been swept into a prison."

Descartes’ voice grew heavier with every word!

"And it is not even a prison, when you look at it plainly. A prison keeps things alive. This is not built to keep. It is grounds of an execution, and we are the condemned who have not yet been told the sentence, marched together down a hallway that only runs one direction."

Noah listened without a word, and his mind was already moving ahead of the old man’s mouth!

"That tree," Descartes said.

Noah’s gaze had already gone to it.

"Some may think it is a prize. Existence told everyone it is a prize, a Pure Blood Fruit, a ladder to greater Dimensionality, a treasure worth crossing doors and killing for. And it is those things. But that is not why it is here." The philosopher’s eyes glittered.

"It is a lure and it is a net at once. Pure Blood is the blood of the architects. It calls to what is like it. Get near that tree, reach for it, consume it, and the thing wakes and it knows. It knows that something of Immense blood, or something with the audacity to reach for Immense blood, is standing in this Cabin. It is not a fruit. It is a nose. The architects planted a nose in your Dimension to smell whether anything worth executing had washed up in the back of their Train."

"Or so it should have worked," Descartes murmured. "A quiet nose, sniffing for one thing at a time. Except."

He almost smiled.

"Except that I am here. Standing beside you. Two of us, in one small confined space, both of us the exact thing that tree was set to smell. And a nose built to catch a single scent, given two at once, in the same room, does not simply catch them. It grows suspicious. It begins to wonder whether it is being tested, or fooled, or walked into. And even if its suspicion is entirely wrong, even if it decides there is nothing here at all..."

The old philosopher’s calm did not waver, but something in it went very cold.

"I have found, across a great many Ages, that Those Who Remain are thorough. They do not investigate a suspicion. They resolve it."

HUUM!

It climbed on limbs that formed as they climbed. Four of them, vast and jointed wrong, each one ending in a single tapering claw as long as a spear, four spear-claws unfolding from a torso of dark wet crimson that drank the light and gave nothing back.

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