Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5878

Chapter 5878: Are You Alive? II

Noah watched THE Verdant Regard bleed in the Fiend’s arms, and his mind kept turning.

Shinjitsu.

He had watched an Ancient Immense One unleash an entire orchard of power, an eye that swallowed the sky, a whole region of existence turned into a weapon, and he had watched it slide off a faint black film as rain slides off glass. Half of one percent was all it had taken.

And then the Giant had spoken its verdict over her.

You are not alive.

He understood it now, a little. Everything she had thrown at it had been grand and borrowed. Her title, her Legacy’s rules, the fear others felt when they heard her name. She had worn all of it so long that she had forgotten what was underneath, and when a thing with almost nothing borrowed left on it had reached for what was underneath, it had found very little there at all.

How much of him would it find?

He disliked how quickly that question came to him.

Across the arena, the second Kirtimukha stepped forward to face THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages.

The Gaoler struck first. His cage of grey light swung open, and out of it poured the things he kept: thousands of dimensions, half-spoken words, a sunrise frozen a breath before the sun. They swarmed the Giant, and wherever they touched it, they left its motion unfinished. A step halted halfway to the ground, a raised arm stopped a hair below its peak, and its whole vast body was caught in a hundred moments forbidden to complete, held in place like an insect in amber.

Then the faint obsidian sheen rose over Kir Two’s skin.

And it finished the step.

The dimensions cracked. The half-spoken words came apart into silence. Kir Two’s raised arm completed its arc, slowly, against every unfinished moment wrapped around it, and came down on the Gaoler’s cage with the plain, unhurried weight of a thing that had simply decided to finish what it started.

The cage burst.

Grey light sprayed across the arena. The frozen sunrise inside it shattered like a dropped plate, and the Gaoler was flung back toward the crescent, half his body cracked open, unfinished things spilling out of him like sand from a torn sack.

It had taken less than a heartbeat.

Lifthrasir laughed softly beside Noah.

Then she raised her voice so that the whole Ossuary could hear.

"It seems my little guards are a bit too much for your Ancient Immense Ones," she said pleasantly. "So how about this instead?"

She turned, and her small finger pointed straight at Noah.

"If one of your people can make my friend here kneel, with the pressure of their Immensity alone, I’ll treat it as if you have won. And I’ll trade you the information."

...!

Noah turned and looked at her as if she had lost her mind.

She smiled back at him, perfectly calm.

On the far side of the arena, THE SLEEPLESS FIEND was already moving.

He set the bleeding Verdant Regard down gently in the arms of another Ancient, and drifted forward out of the crescent, his white-hot threads twitching and buzzing with delight, his luminous eyes fixed on Noah.

|"Oh, allow me,"| he said. |"Please. Allow... me."|

THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral looked at him for a long moment, heavy and unreadable. Then, very slightly, he inclined his head.

The Fiend’s grin split his hazy face nearly in hlaf.

Noah turned back to Lifthrasir.

"Why?" he said, quietly, through the thread between them. "Why would you do this?"

Her voice came back along the thread, gentle and certain.

"Because pressure is how truth is found."

She looked at the Fiend, then back at Noah.

"Think of a smith with a lump of ore. He heats it, and he hammers it, and every blow drives something out: slag and air and everything in the metal that is not truly the metal. He cannot reach in and pull the iron out by hand. But he can press, and press, and press, and what survives the pressing is what was real all along."

Her eyes were bright.

"Shinjitsu cannot be taught. No one can hand it to you. I told you that, and it is true. But you and I are linked, however faintly. I can show you how I found mine, what it felt like, and where I looked. I can stand beside you while you look for yours. And under enough weight, the borrowed things in you will start to buckle first. When they do, you will see what is left underneath them."

She smiled.

"That is where your Shinjitsu lives. I am only giving you the hammer."

...!

Noah stared at her.

Then he let out a long breath, and turned, and stepped forward into the empty arena.

He walked out across the sea of stars until he stood alone in the open space where the Verdant Regard had bled, facing THE SLEEPLESS FIEND across a short stretch of snowless dark.

Up close, the Fiend was enormous. A titan of white-hot vigils wound together into the shape of a giant, every thread a sleepless night, millions of them, twitching and buzzing and burning. His luminous eyes looked down at Noah with open, delighted hunger.

Noah knew, beyond any doubt, that this fight was far beyond him.

The Fiend knew it too.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND speaks.|

His voice was soft, almost fond.

|"I have been awake a very long time, little one."|

His threads twitched.

|"I was awake before a glimmer of your existence was alive. I was awake when the path broke. I have been awake through every night of every Age since, watching and waiting. And in all of that time, I have never once met a thing that did not kneel, when I asked it to."|

He leaned down, and his grin widened.

|"Let us see whether you are the first."|

HUUM!

The pressure came down.

It was nothing like the Verdant Regard’s fury. That had been a tide. This was a mountain range falling out of the sky. It slammed down onto Noah from every direction at once, a crushing, grinding, total weight, every sleepless night the Fiend had ever endured pressing down on him together, and his knees nearly buckled instantly.

They stopped short of the ground.

Noah caught himself halfway, his whole body bent beneath the weight, and held.

Because all of this was his Dream.

He had spent the whole of his time in the Ossuary laying his Dream over this region of the Chrysalis, brick by golden-blue brick: the silk, the sea of stars, the snowless dark between them. Every particle of the space around him, every string and wave and fleck of existence for light years in every direction, had quietly become his.

And the Fiend’s pressure had to travel through it to reach him.

So Noah thinned it.

As the weight came down, it passed through air that was his, space that was his, the very fabric of existence around him that was his, and with every particle it crossed, Noah dreamed it a little lighter. He dreamed the air softer, so the weight sank through it more slowly, and the space between them a little wider than it was, and each particle the pressure leaned on into something that gave way under it, absorbing a sliver of the force and passing on less than it received.

It worked, a little.

The weight that reached him was lighter than the weight the Fiend had sent, measurably lighter.

But it was still the weight of an Ancient Immensity.

And it was still far too much.

His knees bent further. His constellations flared and cracked across his bare chest, white fractures running through them. The frost along his jaw splintered. His horns of radiance flickered and dimmed. Deep inside him, he felt his Tree groan under the load, its boughs creaking, its rings straining, and beneath all of it, at the very bottom of him, he felt THE One Foundation take the weight and shudder.

It was the first time it had ever shuddered like this!

The One Foundation was the part of him that refused to kneel. He had believed that, and built himself on it.

And yet it was bending.

|"There,"| the Fiend murmured, almost tenderly. |"You feel it, don’t you? That thing you thought could never bend."|

His grin was enormous.

|"Everything bends, little one. Everything kneels. It is only a matter of weight. Come on, you can still join us..."|

The pressure doubled.

Noah’s knees dropped another inch.

And inside him, along the thread, Lifthrasir’s voice came, calm and clear.

"Don’t push back."

Noah ground his teeth.

He was pushing back with everything. His Dream surged outward against the weight, his seas of blue-gold boiling up around him, his Infinity blazing, every scrap of power he had roaring out of him in a great defiant tide.

And the pressure grew heavier.

"Stop," Lifthrasir said gently. "Listen to me. You are being loud. Everything you are throwing at him is spilling out of you. The Fiend is pressing on anything not wholly you. The louder you are, the more there is for him to press on."

Noah’s knee dipped again.

"Then what do I do?" he boomed through the thread.

"Look inward, rather than out," she said. "Find what anything not truly and fully you, and stop leaning on it."

He tried.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done, harder than writing the Narrative and harder than reaching across Cycles for her dream!

Because everything he looked at in himself felt like it was his.

THE True Human Emperor: surely that was his?

"Who gave you that title?" Lifthrasir asked softly.

The Legacy’s Son, the Epitropos of this region of THE Long Night.

"Who named them? Who decided what they meant? Did you make them true, or did you only wear them?"

The pressure leaned on every one of those names as she spoke it, and he felt each one buckle under the weight, like a borrowed coat torn at the seams. The Legacy’s Son was a title Lucy’s Council gave him; the Epitropos, a seat set in its place by a hand still unknown to him.

The power from THE Long Night. The cold he absorbed. THE Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin from Vakochev he swallowed to form his root. The Lesser Kryos, The loot stemming from giving from THE Tide.

He had worn them all, and grown strong in them.

And none of them were holding him up.

|Shinjitsu has emerged within you.|

|It cannot be granted. It cannot be inherited. It cannot be stolen or devoured.|

|You found it yourself.|

|Assimilation Rate: 0.1%.|

|Your Attributes are reacclimating under the emergence of your Shinjitsu.|

|What you held is becoming what you are.|

|VERITAS: Order III.1 → True Order III.1.|

|PROVENANCE: Order III.1 → True Order III.1.|

|PONDUS: Order III.1 → True Order III.1.|

|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Order III.1 → True Order III.1.|

|POTENTIA: Infinite. True.|

...!

|True Order: an Order held wholly as your own. It bends less beneath any weight that is borrowed.|