Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5875

Chapter 5875: True! I

Far away, in another region of THE Chrysalis, the rivers ran in every color.

They wound through the shimmering dark in long braided channels, each one a different hue, and each hue a different Provenance. Life ran green. Death ran pale violet. Fire ran gold, Water ran blue, and Time ran a strange purple that seemed to move backward even as it flowed forward. There were rivers of Provenances unknown to most lifeforms, nameless colors, all of them twisting through each other and parting again in a vast, endless space, with the falling silk of the Chrysalis drifting down into their currents.

And in the rivers, Gu swam.

Rare Gu. Thousands of them. Of every Provenance. Glittering beetles of living flame darting through the gold. Pale moths of Death drifting over the violet. Long silver centipedes of Time coiling against the current. Each one a treasure that lifeforms in Legacies would have spent whole lives searching for, and here they swam by the thousands, as common as minnows.

Then a tear opened above.

A Kirtimukha stepped through.

It landed in the rivers with a vast, heavy splash, and the Rare Gu scattered like sparks. It stood knee-deep in the many-colored currents, serene, its eyes closed, and opened its jaws.

And it began to drink the Narrative of Provenance itself.

The rivers bent toward it. Their colors drained into its mouth in long braided streams, green and violet and gold and silver, and with them went their story. The legend of where every Provenance had come from. The weight of every origin.

Slowly, the surroundings began to grey.

And in the next instant, something bloomed!

It came up out of the rivers themselves. Out of every color at once. It unfolded upward from the space like a flower made of every Provenance in existence, and it was a hand.

A humanoid hand. But not human. Its fingers were long and jointed, segmented like an insect’s leg, plated in chitin that shifted color with every movement, green and violet and gold and silver and a thousand shades without names. Fine hairs bristled along its knuckles. Its palm was lined with veins that ran with every Provenance at once. It was larger than a Dimension. It was larger than many.

Up it rose, above the space, and above the Kirtimukha.

Then it came down!

It crashed down upon the Giant with a weight that shook the rivers for light years. Its long insect fingers closed around the Kirtimukha’s body, wrapping it from shoulders to knees, and squeezed.

The Kirtimukha struggled.

It did so emotionlessly. Its serene face stayed blank. Its eyes stayed closed. It strained against the grip with the same blank calm it had shown while drinking, its obsidian arms pushing against the jointed fingers, its jaws still open, still trying to devour the Provenance that held it.

The Hand paid it no mind.

It squeezed harder.

The Kirtimukha’s obsidian body began to crack. Long white fractures raced across its chest, its shoulders, its serene face. Fragments of black stone burst from it and fell spinning into the colored rivers below.

And a voice boomed out across the Chrysalis.

It was many voices: every Provenance at once, speaking together.

|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance is disappointed.|

|"I destroyed this calamity Cycles ago."|

The Hand squeezed. The Kirtimukha cracked.

|"I looked upon it, and found no origin. A thing with such vile beginnings is a thing that should not be. So I unmade it."|

Its tone was calm!

|"And now it has been brought back."|

A long pause, filled with the slow grinding of stone.

|"This is the nature of calamity. It always finds a way back. You may scatter it, and it will gather. You may bury it, and it will dig. You may erase it from every record in existence, and still it will wait, somewhere outside the records, for a crack to crawl back through."|

The Hand’s long fingers flexed.

|"But Provenance is older than calamity. Everything that is, began. Everything that began has an origin. And every origin answers to me. Calamity may return a thousand times."|

Its grip tightened.

|"Provenance will overcome it a thousand and one."|

The Kirtimukha broke!

It collapsed, all at once, its obsidian body crushed inward under a force so far beyond an Ancient Immensity that the rivers for light years around flattened into glass. Black shards sprayed outward. Its serene face split down the middle. Its open jaws were ground into powder. Whatever Narrative it had swallowed spilled out of it in a gasp of colored light and ran back into the rivers it had been taken from.

The Hand opened.

Black dust drifted down into the space and was carried away by the many-colored currents.

Then, as one, they turned. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

<THE Dreaming Human Origin>