Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5862

Chapter 5862: Hello!

<Existential Interlude- Before They Are Gone>

There was someone, once, who hoped for a small thing.

Smaller than power. Smaller than a throne, or a crown, or a name that would outlast the stars. Only this: that people might know, while it was happening, that they were living through the good times of their lives.

Because most only learn it afterward.

They live through the good times the same way they live through ordinary days. They eat the meal and taste only that it is warm; they sit at the table and hear only the noise; they hold the small hand in theirs and think about tomorrow. And only later, years later, looking back from somewhere colder, do they understand. That was it. That was the best of it. That was the time they would have given anything to return to.

By then, it is already gone.

So that someone hoped people would take a moment. Just a moment, in the middle of it all, to stop. To look around. To realize where they were standing.

To appreciate it.

To understand it.

To be grateful for it, while it was still in their hands.

It is a very small hope. It asks for nothing more than attention.

And only a rare few manage it.

—

<THE True Human Emperor>

Noah sat on the white throne at the bottom of the Descent of Chains, and for once, he simply rested.

His stellar chest lay bare, constellations drifting slowly across it, the frost along his left shoulder glittering faintly. Golden blankets of dreams lay draped over his lap, soft and warm, rising and faling gently. And beneath them, curled against him with her cheek on his chest, Emotive slept.

She slept soundly. Her breath was slow and even, and her hair spilled across his skin in every color at once, shifting only a little now, drowsy hues of gold and rose.

Noah looked down at her.

He lifted one hand and moved her hair aside, gently, until he could see her face. It was fair and peaceful in sleep, her lashes still, her lips slightly parted. All the brightness she carried when she was awake had gone quiet. She looked very innocent, lying there.

His pupil-less gold eyes burned softly as he looked at her.

He thought about everything.

Far above the Evergrave, past THE Undersnow, his Dream was spreading.

He could feel it as he felt his own breath. Silent, unseen, one golden-blue brick at a time, laying itself over the existence of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity. Mountain after mountain. River after river. Dimension after Dimension inside them.

|THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity: more than half rewoven into your Dream.|

More than half!

Lucy’s Legacy, the place that had taken him in and named him its Son, was now more than half his Dream. Its air. Its earth. The space between its mountains. Every particle of it, quietly replaced, while Moriarty hovered above THE Legacy Son’s Mountain and watched a blizzard and saw only snow.

Noah looked at it all, and his existence shone.

It rose up out of him on its own, in a slow swell, exuberance and power together, his constellations brightening across his bare chest until they lit Emotive’s sleeping face in blue and gold. His Dream vibrated, deep and grand, at Order III, all through him and all through everything he had altered, and he felt the shape of what he had become more clearly than ever before.

A Dreaming Human Origin. Something existence first held the day he made himself.

And at this moment, his perception, already so vast, kept stretching.

His eyes pulsed!

Behind the throne, a bubble bloomed!

It rose out of the dark of the Descent, round and shimmering, a sphere of stellar blue-gold light the size of a house. And inside it, a scene moved.

Then another bubble bloomed beside it! And another. And another. One after another after another, until the whole dark behind him was filled with them, hundreds of glowing spheres of dream, drifting slowly upward through the falling snow.

Every one of them held him!

In one, a young man sat in a cheap jacket on the cold floor of a boss room, staring at a green crystal; in another, the same young man knelt in an apartment with a thin skill book open on his knees; in others, an older man lay crushed beneath a stone in the obsidian sands, a figure stood on the chest of a dead Immense One on a frozen plain, and a man knelt in a garden with a grain of something unbearably heavy on his palm.

And further back, much further, the bubbles grew smaller and dimmer and stranger.

A boy, very young, playing in a dusty yard. A child asleep on his mother’s shoulder. And at the very end of the line, in the faintest bubble of all, a small hospital room with tired light, and a woman’s exhausted face, and a newborn crying in her arms.

Beside the bed, in the corner of that faint little room, stood a figure of dreams watching.

Watching himself be born!

Noah looked at all of it.

He could see himself then, and now, and every moment between, all at the same time. His Infinite Dream was happening now, and happening then, and happening everywhere at once, every moment of his life laid out around him like lanterns hung along a long dark road.

He spoke quietly in a frequency only for himself to hear.

"I see...a boy sitting in a small, quiet room," Noah said, "looking down at his empty hands. He holds no authority. No rank. No power at all."

In a bubble near his shoulder, the boy sat on the edge of a narrow bed and turned his hands over, slowly, palms up, as if hoping something might be written there.

"At the exact same time, I am standing in a sunlit clearing, watching a sphere of red fire leave my palm."

In another bubble, a young man stood in a clearing of tall trees behind his dilapidated apartment with his hand out, and a small, ragged ball of fire left it and struck the bark of an old trunk with a dry crack. Smoke curled up. The young man stared at it with his mouth open.

"It strikes the bark of a tree. To that young F Rank hunter, that single flame is an impossible miracle. It is...the center of his existence."

The young man in the bubble laughed out loud, alone in the clearing, and looked at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.

"And every one of them will be surpassed, in time..."

"Show yourself to me. Show me my own dream."