Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5896

Chapter 5896: Paths! II

Inside the Ruined Quantum Existence, two sisters sat together on a ledge of light.

The ledge was made of shimmerring lines of data, thin bright threads woven so tightly that they held like stone, and it jutted out over the endless glowing halls of Ruination’s inner existence like a balcony over a sea.

Ruination sat on the left. The small sun in her circlet glowed steady on her brow.

THE Infiniverse sat on the right. Her manifestation was a tall, grand woman whose skin held a slow-turning night full of tiny lights, Dimensions and Spaces drifting beneath its surface like fish under clear water. Her hair fell long and soft, the deep green of island grass, streaked through with starlight. She looked like someone who had once been a place, and still was.

Far out across the glowing halls, THE First Gu of Emotions hung trembling!

It had thawed. It shook, slowly and constanly, as a fevered body shakes, and every color in its vast shape was shifting. Emotive was inside it, everywhere inside it, spreading through its threads like an infection through blood, and the Gu’s whole existence was being changed from the inside out. Its rages were becoming her rages. Its griefs were becoming her griefs. Piece by piece, the oldest feeling-creature in that corner of existence was being rewritten by a younger one.

THE Infiniverse watched it for a long time.

"You and I," she said at last, "may be the most complex things in existence. Or the simplest. I go back and forth."

Ruination glanced at her.

"We have dreams now, like everyone else," THE Infiniverse went on. "That still surprises me. We did not use to dream. I was a shattered island floating in a beast world, and you were a little Ruination core, and neither of us wanted anything. We simply were."

A soft wind moved through the halls of light below them, and the tiny Spaces beneath her skin turned slowly.

"Across all the years we have circled our Master, you always thought you were the one left behind. I could see it. I grew into many things, and you stayed his window, showing him many things, keeping his records, and you thought I had pulled ahead and left you standing there."

She looked out over the endless halls, the parallels stacked to the edge of sight, the new Dimensions blooming at the far edges where causes ran backward and time ran in circles.

"I do not even need to think about where you could take what you have begun here," she said. "I already know it can be something ridiculously grand."

She reached over and patted her little sister on the head, gently, as an older sister does when she thinks no one is watching.

"Keep it up. I am proud of you."

Ruination smiled!

It was a small smile, and a little shy, and she kept working right through it. Even as she sat there being patted, she was still building. New flows of information kept pouring out of her in every direction, new rules, new stipulations, decillions of new quantum possibilities unspooling from every simulated grain, and at the far edges of her existence, new Dimensions kept blooming one after another. Her simulated existence was growing at a terrifying rate, and she was smiling shyly through all of it.

"All of what I have is built on information," she said. "And much of it came from you. Your Spaces, your Dimensions, your lifeforms. I studied all of you before I studied anything else."

She looked down at her own crimson hands.

"I found my breakthrough, and I am building something grand right now. But you were always the one with the most potential, sister. What I have is real and not real at once. What you have is definitely real. It holds countless lifeforms, and every one of them dreams."

She turned toward THE Infiniverse.

"While I was doing all of this, I also ran quintillions of possibilities for what you could do with your existence. I gave them everything we know right now about Narratives, about Dreams, about existence itself."

Her eyes scrolled with records too fast to read. "I am sharing all of those pathways with you. I am sure you already know many of them. But there are three I computed where, if you take any one of them, you could completely and wholly exceed anything I might ever be able to do."

She waved her hands!

Brilliant lines of light poured out of her fingers and across the small space between them and into THE Infiniverse’s open palm, thousands of bright threads, then millions, sinking into the tiny Spaces beneath her skin and lighting them up from within one after another, like a city waking at dusk.

THE Infiniverse watched the light settle into her hand, and smiled!

"Existence is vast," she said, "and full of terrors. And I am a strange thing in it. My power could come from many places, but one of the core things I have is the life inside me."

She closed her hand gently around the light.

"Even if I ignore the countless lives already living within me, and look only at those in the Dream Engine, I believe that by now, any of them in those dreams will wake with a fully formed Root, or already Immense. And if I can raise a dozen Immense Ones within my existence, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million..."

She let the thought hang. "The power of their dreams changes. What that could mean for THE Narrative of THE Long Night which prevents the emergence of immense ones changes."

Every lifeform that had ever lived stood at the start of more roads than it could count, and most of them would stay unwalked.

The greatest beings in existence were not the ones with the most paths before them. They were the ones who chose, again and again, and kept walking.