Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5687

Chapter 5687: The Grave Beneath The Eye! I

His Provenance answered!

Prompts bloomed across his vision in cascading waves, and even their text seemed to arrive more carefully than usual, like a Ruination lowering her voice inside a dangerous archive!

|You seek to Dream of THE Immense Ones.|

|Warning: the subjects of this inquiry stand unfathomably above your current Trueness and Provenance. Direct perception of an Immense One through Dreaming is ill advised. Attempting to force direct perception would exhaust your entire Provenance and may draw the attention of the perceived.|

|Your Provenance negotiates.|

|The cemented past is open to you. The Records hold countless moments connected to THE Immense Ones. A connected Dream may be granted: a thread from the past bearing upon the subjects of your inquiry.|

|Cost: 20 Provenance Essence.|

...!

Twenty!

Noah’s eyes remained closed, but his mind whistled at the number!

Twenty Essence, nearly a third of his capacity, drained for a single Dream he could not even steer.

He thought of many things. And then...

"Done," Noah said. "Take it."

|20 Provenance Essence has been drained.|

|A moment connected to THE Immense Ones has been selected from the cemented past.|

|A random Dream emerges: its time, its place, and its witnesses are chosen by weight alone.|

HUUM!

Within the scorching golden waters of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring, the body of Noah began to shine!

It was not the shine of the spring’s essence, and it was not the shine of his body! Light poured out of him from beneath his skin, stellar and blue-gold and impossibly dense, his entire figure condensing into radiance until he blazed within the steam like an unfathomable singularity given the shape of a man, and the faded golden skeletons in the depths below seemed to turn their ancient hollow faces up toward the brilliance!

His Provenance blared, brilliant!

Singularities spun! Two hundred Decillion quarks aligned! The surface of the golden waters flattened outward in a perfect ring around his shining frame, and the doorway of THE Human Dreamer swung wide upon its hinges of identity, opening onto the one landscape where even Immense Ones had left footprints they could never take back!

And Noah began to dream!

...!

---

A dream bloomed.

One moment there was the scorching gold of the spring, and the next moment there was ground beneath his feet and a sky above his head, and Noah stood manifested inside a Dimension that existence had folded shut like a pressed flower!

He looked out, and the place was grand.

Terraced fields rolled away from him in every direction, vast stepped plains of soft luminous soil stacked into the distance like the gardens of a sleeping titan, and the distances themselves were wrong in a beautiful, unhurried way, folding gently so that a far-off ridge might sit behind a near one and above it at the same time without apology!

The air was thick and breathed slow ambient exhalations rolling across the fields in visible ripples of shimmer!

And the sky!

The sky was layered, stratum upon stratum of radiance stacked toward an unseeable ceiling, bands of pale gold and deep amber and drowsy rose all glowing at once, like seven different evenings had been shelved on top of each other and left burning!

No sun hung anywhere. The light came from the layers themselves, and it fell across the terraced land heavy and warm and eternal, the light of a place where time had been asked to sit down and had agreed!

A Dimension locked in the past. Even before any prompt confirmed it, his instincts read it in everything. Nothing here was waiting for tomorrow. Tomorrow had been amputated!

Noah looked down at himself.

His body was his own, stellar and familiar, but it had been dressed! White robes wrapped him in long clean folds, draped over one shoulder and belted at the waist, the fabric faintly luminous and utterly weightless. And upon his face sat a mask!

He raised his fingers and traced it. Smooth gold, warm as skin, covering him brow to chin. Two simple dots for eyes.

And below them, carved into the gold, an eerie, permanent smile!

And...

There were others!

He lifted his gaze, and across the vast terraced fields he saw them, dozens upon dozens of figures scattered through the folded distances, each one seated alone upon the luminous soil, each one draped in the same white robes, each one wearing the same golden mask with its two dots and its eerie smile.

And every single one of them pulsed with an aura his existence now knew intimately!

Provenance Lifeforms!

Dozens of self-generating existences, seated in ordered solitude across a farm-realm outside of time, and before each seated figure... burned a lake!

The lakes were the most interesting things in the whole folded Dimension.

Each one was a slow whirlpool of stellar obsidian-gold, vibrant and deep, and they did not burn with light so much as with WEIGHT, because swirling within every lake were Causes!

Heavy, oppressive, authentic Causes, the critical structure of existence itself, dozens of them per lake, turning in the obsidian-gold like drowned suns, and their combined pressure rolled off the water and pressed against his body even from afar.

And the masked sovereigns were harvesting them!

Noah watched, fascinated, as the seated figures worked with slow eternal patience, their hands weaving above their lakes, drawing the burning Causes together strand by strand, pulling them into clusters, and the clusters into tighter clusters, condensing the harvested structure of existence toward singularities that formed so gradually that the work must have been measured in eras.

A farm. A farm where the crop was Causes, and the farmers were sovereigns of self-generation wearing smiling golden masks!

Noah thought, his mind racing behind the eerie smile.

’Here sit dozens of sovereigns condensing causes by the lakeful. For whom? Sovereigns do not farm for themselves in uniform. Uniforms mean an employer, and employers at this scale mean...’

His existence BUZZED!

HUUM!

It came from nowhere and everywhere, a deep resonant vibration through all two hundred Decillion of his quarks, his Dream Body thrumming like a struck instrument, and prompts bloomed urgently across his vision!

’The favor will not go unpaid.’

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