Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5877

Chapter 5877: Are You Alive? I

Little Kir One opened its eyes!

They were black, obsidian like the rest of it, glossy and deep, and far back inside them burned a faint light, small and steady, like a single candle at the end of a very long hall.

It looked at THE Verdant Regard.

And for the first time since it had stepped out of the tear in space, it spoke. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

|THE Kirtimukha speaks.|

Its voice was quiet and flat and utterly sincire.

|"Are you alive?"|

HUUM!

...!

The question hung over the arena.

THE Verdant Regard stared at it. Her green light flickered, as if the words had touched something beneath it.

Then the Kirtimukha’s body began to change!

A faint light rose over its skin. Obsidian, like its body, so thin that Noah almost missed it. Where an Immensity would blaze and flare and pour out into the air, this simply settled over the Giant from head to foot, a fine black sheen, close as a second skin, and stayed there.

That was all.

Aura, storm, the wash of power rolling out across a sea of stars: all of it was absent. The vast obsidian titan stood in the arena with that faint film over its body, and to every sense Noah had, it seemed to have grown quieter rather than stronger.

And yet his existence went very still.

Inside his mind, Lifthrasir’s voice came along the thread.

"Do you see it?"

She sounded pleased.

"That is Shinjitsu. Look how little of it there is. Everything Little Kir One is, its Narrative, its Immensity, all of its strength, is held inside its existence. Nothing leaks or shines, and nothing is wasted on being seen. It has all been gathered inward, and pressed into its own truth, and that faint light is the only part of it that reaches the surface."

Noah watched the obsidian sheen.

"Most Immense Ones are loud," Lifthrasir went on softly. "Their power spills out of them in every direction. Light and pressure and grandeur, all of it borrowed, and all of it announcing itself. Shinjitsu is the opposite. It is what remains when you stop wearing what isn’t yours. And what remains, when it is true, has no need to shine."

Across the arena, THE Verdant Regard raised her plum branch.

|THE Verdant Regard speaks.|

Her voice was cold.

|"Alive."|

She lifted the branch high above her head.

|"I will show you exactly how alive."|

Her power came all at once!

Green light erupted from her body in a tidal wave that washed across the whole arena, and behind her, the dark of the Chrysalis split open, and an eye opened in it.

A vast verdant eye, larger than the arena, larger than the Ossuary, its iris a slow whirlpool of green and gold, its pupil a black seed. It hung in the sky behind her, and it looked down.

Its gaze fell on everything.

And everything it looked upon began to grow.

THE Verdant Regard’s Immensity was Regard itself. Whatever fell beneath her gaze became her garden. Its growth answered to her. She could make it bloom in an instant, or wither in the same breath, or take root wherever she pleased. The falling silk of the Chrysalis, caught in the eye’s gaze, sprouted roots in midair and burst into plum blossoms. The swaying destiny-threads at the arena’s edge put out leaves, and the dark itself began to green.

She brought both hands together in front of her chest, fingers interlaced in a tight, deliberate sign.

|THE Verdant Regard speaks.|

|"Orchard of the Unblinking Eye."|

The arena became an orchard!

It unfolded around the Kirtimukha in a single instant: endless rows of plum trees bursting up out of nothing, thousands of them, millions, their branches heavy with blossoms of pink and white and wine-red, filling every direction, sealing the arena inside a realm of green beneath the gaze of the great eye. Inside it, there was no escape from being seen. And everything that was seen was hers to grow.

The orchard turned on the Kirtimukha.

Roots burst from the ground beneath its feet and wrapped its ankles, its calves, its thighs, thick as rivers, driving downward to anchor it. Branches lashed out from every tree at once, a million spears of living wood sharpened to points, plunging toward its chest, its throat, its eyes. Blossoms tore loose and spun through the air in razor storms, each petal an edge. And the great eye above pressed down on it with the full weight of its Regard, commanding its body to bloom, to put out roots of its own from the inside, to split open and flower and wither away to nothing.

It was terrifying!