Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5688

Chapter 5688: The Grave Beneath The Eye! II

A wind rose in the deep gold of the citadel, far off where the stacked tiers burned against the shelved evenings of the sky.

It was not a true wind, for no true winds blew in a Dimension where tomorrow had been cut away, but an exhalation of the land itself, and it rolled outward across the folded distances!

It slid down the ascending architecture and out over the pale meditation halls, where white-robed Provenance Lifeforms sat unmoving as carvings with their auras turned inward.

It crossed the unhurried roads and the solemn processions upon them, stirring the hems of burial-walkers who did not look up!

It swept across the terraced Cause-farms, over a hundred stellar lakes and a thousand drowned suns turning in their depths, and it broke at last, like a tide against a final stone, upon a lone figure in white robes standing above an unclaimed lake, the eerie golden smile of his mask turned slowly across everything!

Noah catalogued everything the wind had touched!

Most of the masked Provenance Lifeforms were exactly as he had first read them, seated before their stellar obsidian-gold lakes in eternal patience, weaving the heavy Causes into condensed strings, rising in solemn processions to cast their chains across the humming grave, the Narrative of THE Unending Burial grinding forward beneath the smug obsidian eye in the layered sky.

But not all of them!

In the distance, past the rolling luminous hills, structures could be seen! Pale halls and terraced pavilions rose from the folds of the land, and among them, other white-robed figures sat in deep meditation, unmoving as carvings, their sovereign auras turned entirely inward.

And further still, small processions of masked figures were moving away from the farms altogether, walking unhurried roads toward the deepest regions of the Dimension, where distant gold structures rose stacked and grand against the shelved evenings of the sky, tier upon tier of ascending architecture!

Likely a central citadel!

He gave a light nod to all of it, and then turned his attention to the resource bubbling right in front of him!

The lake!

His assigned station, apparently, since the Dream had deposited him before an unclaimed one. The stellar obsidian-gold whirlpool turned slowly at his feet, and within its depths, the heavy Causes swirled like drowned suns, oppressive and vibrant and utterly unexplained!

Noah crouched at the lake’s edge, and put his hand into the water.

HUUM!

His existence BUZZED instantly!

The reaction did not come from his skin or his senses. It came from his foundations! All Nine of his Teloi, seated through every one of his two hundred Decillion Provenance Telos Quarks, woke at once, and they surged toward his submerged hand like hounds catching a familiar scent, because the things swirling in this lake were their kin, aims and structures and declarations, and his Teloi pressed up against the foreign Causes and began, seamlessly and hungrily, to take them apart.

Prompts bloomed in cascading analytical waves!

|Your Nine Teloi react to the contents of the lake. Analysis begins.|

|Analysis is seamless. A Telos is an aim and purpose that answers to its declarer. A Cause is a command seated in structure. Your integration is deep enough to read one through the other.|

|Three Provenance Causes are identified within this lake.|

|THE Provenance Cause of the Stilled Wing: a binding Cause. What it settles upon loses the right of departure.|

|THE Provenance Cause of the Lowered Crown: a suppression Cause. What it settles upon has its authority pressed beneath its own standing.|

|THE Provenance Cause of the Quiet Name: a sealing Cause. What it settles upon cannot be found by those who seek it.|

...!

Binding! Suppression! Concealment!

Every lake in this Dimension was growing links for the chains on that grave, and now his Teloi tore into the far more interesting question of WHERE such things came from.

|Origin analysis: these Causes were generated from this Dimension itself.|

|A tool of extremely high Dimensionality belonging to an Immense One is located within this Dimension. Its ambient weight saturates all budding Causes cultivated here. Due to this saturation, the budding Causes attain the significance of Provenance upon maturing.|

|Provenance Causes carry the Dimensionality of their making. They ignore the defenses of those with weak Dimensionality: lifeforms with 60 Attributes or less have a hard time ever denying the effects of such Causes.|

|Mitigation exists: if the targeted lifeform has any Causes standing behind them, the terrifying Dimensionality of these Provenance Causes can be mitigated.|

Noah’s eyes were shining brilliantly behind the mask!

Because they were inherently unique, these Provenance Causes, grown in saturated soil, carrying borrowed depth, capable of ignoring the defenses of nearly everything beneath the sixtieth attribute.

But at the end of the day, when his Teloi held them up to the light and turned them over... they were still just another form of authority and power!

And the mitigation clause sang to him loudest of all. Causes defended against Provenance Causes.

’And my Teloi contribute to my Dimensionality directly,’ Noah thought, ’They are integrated into every quark of my matter, passively applied to my existence at all times. If I simply define and utilize more of what is already mine...’

His Dimensionality would climb without a single external treasure!

It was a grand thread, and he wanted to pull it for a century if he could.

But he cut the experiment short, drew his hand from the lake, and rose. Research was for the safe hours, and he was not in a safe place, and the actual problem still hung unsolved before him.

How did one move against that grave, unseal a piece of Vakochev, and walk out of a pocket of locked time, all under the direct, era-long, trophy-admiring gaze of an Immense One?

He turned toward the grave, weighing angles and blasphemies!

And that was when he saw it.

At one particular lake, off along the curve of the basin, something was laying near the water’s edge, and Noah almost had to rub his eyes as if he was seeing things.

Because he saw...

An obsidian slime!

It was laying down gently beside the lake, if a slime could be said to lay down, a small rounded mass of stellar obsidian resting against the luminous soil, and it was so extremely, absurdly out of place among the robed and masked sovereigns of this Dimension.

He looked closer, and the closer he looked, the less sense it made!

The slime was small, barely the size of a curled hound, its simple body a deep translucent obsidian threaded through with faint drifting motes of stellar light, and set within its front were two eyes of dim crimson, half-lidded, unhurried, fixed upon the distant grave with an expression that should have been impossible for a creature made of ooze!

Melancholy!

It looked ancient in its bearing, in the sheer stillness of it, the stillness of something that had watched eras walk past and had stopped waving at them! Its aura could not be felt at all, not veiled, not suppressed, simply absent, a hole in his perception shaped like a small sad slime!

"Hello."

"..."

"Hello? Obsidian slime?"

...!

"You...can perceive me?"

"Even that Immense One should not be capable of perceiving me right now. How can you...."

"...ah."

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