Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5890

Chapter 5890: A Glorious Undertaking!

The glass halls healed slowly around Noah, crack by crack, and he stood in the middle of them and thought.

Two dreams, two deaths. He had lost every Dimension in his Dream to a single light, and he had lost Emotive to a ring of hunters one breath away from winning. Both times he had learned something.

He laid the pieces out in his mind.

The first piece was a place. He knew exactly where THE First Gu of Emotions floated now, at the heart of its storm of feelings in the Chrysalis, and he knew that a Shard of IT sat somewhere inside it.

The second piece was fear. That vast creature, halfway to Unfathomable, had run. It had run from Achilles once he had grasped Shinjitsu, and it had weakened with Emotive inside its threads. Those two had touched it where raw power had failed. This was a unique situation that was likely never to repeat outside these two factors!

Emotions and Assimilation!

The third piece was time. The hunters of Provenance had come much later on. So this time there would be no army and no noise, and he would finish long before their entry.

The fourth piece was Rose. She had died because she was standing there.

Noah looked at the pieces for a long moment, and then he smiled.

Defeating a First Gu was far beyond him, and he had no need to. He only needed it to let go of one thing.

He stepped into a new window of possibilities!

|Quantum Dream 3 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 0.2%.|

|Hour 1: You take Emotive and travel toward the region of THE First Gu of Emotions, through empty places only.|

|Hour 2: You arrive at its edge. Ling, Poona, and THE Thinker are still two days away.|

|No army follows you. No Narratives notice you pass.|

The glass shifted to show the storm of feelings again, churnning red and blue and gold at the heart of the Chrysalis, and the great shape of colored light floating at its center. This time the edge was quiet. There was only one body of Noah’s, standing in the drifitng silk far outside the storm, and Emotive beside him with her hands clasped and her eyes bright with interest.

"Oh, I do love it when you plan," she murmured.

|Hour 2: Your Dream begins to spread through the empty silk around the region, silently.|

|You leave the storm itself untouched.|

|Hour 6: Your Dream cautiously reaches halfway around it.|

|Hour 19: Your Dream surrounds the region on every side.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions notices nothing.|

In the glass, Noah watched his Dream close around the storm like a hand closing very gently around a candle flame. Every bit of empty silk and space on every side of it became his, through and through, while the storm itself stayed exactly as it was, wild and unaware that everything beyond its edges had quietly changed owners.

|Hour 20: Emotive slips into the outermost threads of THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|She takes one thread at a time, so slowly that each one still feels like its own.|

|Your Dream flows in alongside her, quiet as breath as you really lean in to the cautious route.|

|Hour 23: A quarter of Emotive is woven into its existence.|

|Hour 26: A third of her is woven in.|

|It has noticed nothing.|

Emotive went in. Her fourteen colors threaded themselves along the edges of the Gu’s own threads until they looked like part of the same weave, and every feeling that passed through those threads now passed through her first. She tasted each one, kept a little, and let the rest pass on as if nothing had changed.

Noah’s Dream went with her, thin as a whisper, holding the space around every thread she touched.

Then he reached for Achilles!

|Hour 27: You pull on your connection with Achilles Adrastia.|

|You bring him here alone.|

|Rose stays where she is, far away and safe.|

Achilles arrived at the edge of the silk with a jolt, his eyes flicking wildly from Noah to the storm. Noah raised one hand before he could speak.

"Look," Noah said, and showed him.

He gave Achilles a memory from another road. It was the storm, the army breaking, the pure crushing power of the Gu bearing down, and Rose walking through the colors to take his hand. Then it was the white flash of the Shard, and the emptiness after, and his own hand closed around nothing.

Achilles staggered! His whole existence shuddered!

"What you saw happened on another possibility of existence. On this one, it has not happened yet." He turned his head toward the storm. "That is the thing that killed her there...in another flow of time."

It was a cruel thing to show a man. Noah showed it anyway, because a man who has seen it will fight a First Gu, and a man who has only heard about it will hesitate.

Then he gave him the rest.

"There is something called...Shinjitsu"

He met Achilles’ eyes as he began to infuse him with knowledge and the plan!

|You share the knowledge of Shinjitsu with Achilles Adrastia.|

|It cannot be granted. It can only be shown.|

|Achilles Adrastia grasps it faster this time.|

|Faint multicolored glimmers rise over his existence.|

Noah smiled thinly.

|Hour 28: Achilles Adrastia begins to assimilate THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|His existence opens into vast multicolored jaws.|

|At the same moment, Emotive reaches halfway into its existence.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses the threats at once.|

|It panics.|

|It reaches inside itself and pulls out the Shard of IT.|

In the glass, the great jellyfish of light flared every color at once, and from deep inside its body it drew out a small, glowing object, bright as a fallen star.

|It pours its Emotions into the Shard.|

|Half of the Emotions it pours now pass through Emotive first.|

|Patientia slows them. Temperantia sets them a limit. Acedia lets them grow heavy and dull.|

|The Emotions reach the Shard thin and cold and late.|

|The Shard does not ignite.|

|The space around the Shard has always been your Dream.|

The Shard pulsed once, weakly, and went still!

The Gu stared at it! Its colors flickered in confusion, then in alarm, then in plain shock, because Achilles’ jaws were closing in from one side and something inside its own body was eating it from the other, and the one weapon it had trusted had just failed in its own hand.

|THE First Gu of Emotions cannot be defeated by you.|

|It does not need to be.|

|It runs.|

|In its panic and its existence having its two halves murky and chaotic, it leaves the Shard behind.|

The great shape of colored light tore away across the Chrysalis, its threads streaming behind it, and the small bright stone hung alone in the air where it had been.

<THE First Gu of Emotions>