Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5751

Chapter 5751: The Long Night III

Across the whole of THE Infiniverse, the two sisters worked to shield the dreamers.

Upon the boundless blue-gold sea, THE Infiniverse and Ruination moved their hands in vast and patient rhythm, and waves of infinity and seas of THE Primordial Source surged out from them, rolling across the folded Realms toward the great chrysalis and the countless sleeping bodies within the empire.

The authorities wrapped around each dreamer, layer upon layer, a blanket of the oldest powers there were laid over the people Noah loved and cherished as they lived their centuries in dream, holding the descending cold at bay.

And yet, even as they worked, Ruination’s crimson eyes were troubled!

"A condition was supposedly fulfilled," she said, her voice its usual calm and analytical self, and yet somber beneath it now. "The weaving of existence declared it plainly to all who could perceive, and it came in the very instant that Immense One died. The two are linked. Of that there is no doubt. The question that remains, is the one I cannot yet close."

Her hands never stopped their work!

"Why?"

She turned the problem over as she wove!

"I currently hold a hypothesis. That after a certain number of Immense Ones fell, paired perhaps with other conditions I cannot yet perceive, something was triggered. Something that, in the deep weavings of existence, tied somehow to IT. Atlas was killed. Other Immense Ones have likely been killed across the ages. Vakochev was killed. And now, today, with another Immense One killed before the eyes of his own kind, whatever their deaths mean in the reckoning of existence has tipped a scale that was already tipping."

Her crimson gaze sharpened!

"It has been tipping for a long time. And this last death was the weight that finished it. But why? Why should the deaths of the mighty summon a cold that hunts the mighty? Why?" She said it again, quietly. "Why?"

And at that moment, Noah’s body appeared upon the golden shore!

He came into the Realm calm and unhurried, but his expression was heavy. He raised his hands, and from him a tide of Infinite Sanguine Mana poured out, crimson and gold, and he wove it into thick, warm coats, and he wrapped them around the ones he loved.

He wrapped his floating mother, sleeping in her pool, in a heavy coat of his own vitality! He wrapped little Seo-yeon, and Henry, and Riya, and one by one every other soul dreaming within his empire, layering the warmth of his own blood over them, shielding them with the one authority that answered to nothng but himself.

And as he worked, Noah reflected!

He wondered about his own hand in all of this! He had dreamed, and he had reached across the Cluster and lent his red ink to Calliope.

That lending had led to the emergence of Vakochev! And Vakochev’s emergence had led to the death of an Immense One. And that death had tipped the scale that Ruination spoke of, had fulfilled some final unknown condition, had called down this cold across the whole of existence.

His actions were part of this causality!

And yet...

So were the actions of a great many others! So were the deaths the Immense Ones themselves had dealt across the ages! So was the killing of Atlas, and the killing of Vakochev, and every weight the mighty had ever laid upon the scale! He was one hand among countless hands, one cause among an ocean of causes, and the scale had been tipping long before he ever lent his ink to a bleeding writer.

But that changed nothing about the question at the heart of it all.

Just what was this? What was this emergence of coldness that ignored authority itself, that fell hardest upon the strongest, that reached even into the sealed heart of his empire and touched the skin of a being like him?

Noah finished wrapping the last of the dreamers, and he turned to his Ruination.

"Give me your confirmed analysis of this Condition," he said. "Fully. Everything you have so far."

And Ruination answered,.

|No barrier of THE Infiniverse has been able to halt its emergence. No authority, no sealing, no Elsedimension, no weaving has stopped it or slowed it.|

|It has covered every Realm across the whole of THE Infiniverse. It has covered THE Ymnaros. It has covered every Dimension and Observable Existence over which our influence has ever spread. It is everywhere our reach extends, and it is beyond it also.|

|Effect confirmed: those who hold no authority are affected LEAST. The strongest lifeforms must enact the strongest protections merely to steer clear of the cold. Power is not a shield against this Condition. Power is a target.|

Ruination’s voice continued, and it grew heavier.

"And it is not only the suppression, Master. I have begun monitoring your own existence, and I must tell you what I find there, because you will feel it soon yourself. Your biological systems have already begun to respond. Even now, energy is being metabolized within you, burned and spent, consumed to hold the cold at bay from the inside."

|Master’s biological systems are metabolizing energy at an accelerating rate to resist the Condition.|

|You will begin to feel hunger. Soon.|

"For now," Ruination went on, "the Infinity running through your existence can feed your cells and your quarks faster than the cold can drain them. You can sustain yourself on your own boundlessness, or so I first believed."

Her tone tightened. "But my monitoring shows that even your Infinity is not fully reclaiming everything the cold takes. There is a loss. A leak that your boundlessness cannot entirely close. Which means that in time, even you, Master, may need to consume biological matter to protect yourself from this cold."

|Projection: authority alone will not sustain existence against the Condition indefinitely.|

|All existences, whether of the Finite Verse, the Ineffable Verse, or the Immense Ones themselves, will likely feel the need to consume biological life to sustain themselves against the cold, in addition to spending their authority.|

"And I must be honest with you about the limits of what I say," Ruination finished. "All of this, everything I have told you, is only what we have been able to grasp in the first few minutes of its emergence. We do not yet understand the full scope of this Existential Condition. We understand almost nothing of it. We only see the edges of a thing that is still arriving."

And even Ruination, who was never anything but composed, seemed somber and serious as she spoke those last words.

Beside her, THE Infiniverse stood with her starlit eyes closed, utterly still, her whole vast attention turned inward and outward at once, sensing every change occurring across the whole of her boundless existence, feeling the cold creep into every Realm she held, cataloging a catastrophe she could not stop from spreading through her own body.

And Noah stood upon the golden sands of his shore, and he looked up!

Snowflakes drifted down out of the golden sky and settled upon his skin and did not melt, and the cold pressed at him even through all that he was, and his expression was heavy, heavy with the weight of a thing he had helped to cause and could not yet understand, a catastrophe with no name and no source and no cure, falling silent and white and terrible across the whole of Existence.

---

Another of Noah’s bodies arrived in a place where time had come apart.

It stepped out of a conceptual tear and into a Dimension of deep purple and drifting green, and it was a broken and beautiful ruin of a place! Scattered through the twilight air hung the hands of clocks, thousands upon thousands of them, some vast as mountains and some small as needles, spinning and stopped and spinning backward all at once.

And through them drifted meteorites, tumbling slow across the purple dark, and every one of those meteorites was shaped like a number, ancient figures of stone and starlight wheeling through a sky that had forgotten how to keep time!

This was a Dimension lost to time itself, one of the most profound Elsedimensions Atlas had ever made.

And yet even here, even in this sanctuary of shattered hours, the cold had come.

|THE True Human Emperor / THE Human Dreamer|

|VERITAS: 223|

|PROVENANCE: 275|

|POTENTIA: INFINITE|

|PONDUS: 223|

|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 251|

| THE Enduring Gu Elsedimension Ring +20 all; THE Existential Foundational Narrative Inscription +50 all, folded into the totals above.)|

It was as if this Existential Condition purposefully made things this way.

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