Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5872

Chapter 5872: Pralaya! II

Above them, the great circle began to swirl.

Its markings blazed with obsidian light, and the light was Narrative. Noah could feel it, the same weight he had felt pouring from his own pen, only older, and deeper, and colder. Letters of an ancient tongue chased each other around the rim. Runes turned like the gears of an enormous clock. The whole construct turned slowly over the Ossuary, filling in, line by line, rune by rune, toward completion.

And Lifthrasir spoke, with her eyes still closed.

"Mortal eyes see time as a river that moves. They imagine that yesterday turns to vapor the moment today arrives."

A ring of runes locked into place.

"That understanding belongs entirely to lifeforms trapped inside small, fragile shells."

The circle turned.

"Across the Existential Continuum, reality rests as a single, unyielding monument. I call it THE Block Existence."

In the circle above, a new ring of script began to glow.

"Within THE Block Existence, every coordinate holds equal weight, and equal reality. The first breath drawn in an Observable Existence. The age when its suns burn brightest. The silence that settles after its stars have turned to frost. All of them are happening at this exact instant."

The letters blazed.

"Yesterday, today, and tomorrow stand together, side by side, like neighboring mountain ranges carved into the same solid continent."

Another ring locked into place.

"Consider the simple life of a Gu. A mortal watching it sees an egg buried in wet soil. Waits three centuries for it to crawl up into the branches. Hears it sing for seven days. Then watches its dried husk tumble down into the moss. And to that mortal, the song is over. The Gu belongs to the past."

Her small hands rested on her knees, perfectly still.

"But to anyone who perceives THE Block Existence, the Gu is an unbroken thread, stretching permanently through the continuum. Its sleep in the dark soil, its flight through the canopy, its quiet landing on the autumn floor, all of it is present at once. The Gu is whole across its entire path. It occupies its full length, anchored at every coordinate it ever touched."

The circle was nearly full now, its rings blazing one inside another.

"This truth changes everything. When a blow lands, when a realm breaks, when a sovereign claims a throne, that moment stays anchored in the bedrock forever. Every coordinate keeps its substance. We all live our full span inside one vast, grand carving, finished from the first breath to the last."

Her eyes opened.

"I have known all this, and more, for a very long time."

She looked up at the circle.

"So I will sacrifice all of my weavings. All of the time that was meant to stretch my existence across the continuum. All of it, to make certain I have only a hundred years of life."

Her voice was calm and clear.

"I will achieve my dream."

The last ring of the circle began to glow.

"But in doing so, I will also unleash the narrative I inherited from my mother and my father. And while I live my hundred years, I will need protecting."

She glanced at Lygara, and smiled.

"I would like to depend on Little Lygara here. But I don’t want to burden her."

Her gaze moved back up to the blazing circle.

"So I will burden existence instead."

She laughed, softly.

"Haha. Which is impossible, of course. Existence cares nothing for a little thing like me. So really..."

The last rune locked into place.

"I suppose I am only burdening all the luminous Narratives laid out across existence."

...!

HUUM!

The obsidian rivers came together.

Millions of them, from every direction, thick as mountain ranges, coiling in toward the center of the circle, twisting around each other, binding tighter and tighter until they formed a single vast storm of snaking black authority above the Ossuary.

Noah felt the pressure of it from where he stood.

It was immense. It was crushing. At the very center of that storm, he knew, even someone like Moriarty would have been ground into nothing.

And then, from the heart of it...

SAA!

Pulses of obsidian light burst outward.

Wave after wave, black and glossy, rolling out from the storm in every direction, across the Ossuary, across the Chrysalis, past every boundary Noah could feel, out into existence itself. And as each wave left, the vast obsidian tendrils thinned, and faded, and disappeared, their substance carried away on the pulses, spreading out across the continuum like ink dropped into still water.

|You are observing the unfurling of an unfathomable Narrative.|

|It is spreading across existence.|

|It does not ask permission.|

|It does not stop at any border.|

|Existing Narratives across the continuum have begun to grow murky.|

|Some of them do not yet know it.|

...!

|Classified: THE Kirtimukha.|

|THE Faces That Devour Glory.|

|They are the first two of their kind to emerge.|

|They will not be the last.|

|THE Kirtimukha are lifeforms born of a grand Narrative. Wherever that Narrative spreads, they will emerge.|

|They have already begun to emerge in other regions across existence. Not only here.|

|Their core capability: they devour Narratives.|

|Legends, titles, prophecies, the weight a story gains by being believed: THE Kirtimukha consume it, and grow stronger for every Narrative they eat.|

|A being whose Narrative is devoured loses the weight it gave them.|

|Their existence carries the natures of two grand Narratives already unfolding across existence:|

|The Narrative of Calamity.|

|And the Narrative of ?????|

...!

|Their sole purpose: to strengthen themselves, so that THE Child of Calamity, Lifthrasir, may live her hundred years in peace, until her death.|