Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5898

Chapter 5898: Let It Snow! II

The Infinite Quantum Dreams were strange things.

They were possibilities, nothing more. Roads that might be walked, shown to him in blue-gold glass before he ever set foot on them. Every one of them was only a maybe. A single different step, a single different breath, and the whole road could bend somewhere else.

But if he followed everything exactly as he had dreamed it, step by step and breath by breath...

HUUM!

Then he would stand exactly where he stood now.

The Undersnow was real around him. The upward snow hung still in the cold air, the pale roots of the Keepers’ Legacy dangled overhead, and the Hollow Night Immense Ones lay scattered across the frozen floor where they had dropped. Behind him, Kir One stood like a black mountain, still eating, its many faces chewing slowly on the strands of the Long Night that had guarded this place.

And Noah’s hand was buried in THE Curator’s chest!

He had done all of it exactly as the dream had shown him. He had turned his seat inward and followed the flow down. His other body had asked Lifthrasir for Kir One, and she had smiled and said it was always hungry. He had opened the pathway, let Kir One through, and waited in hiding while it ate the Curator’s home and his army and his title one after another. And the moment the Curator staggered, he had stepped out and plunged his hand in, right on time.

The Curator stared at him.

Its blank paper face held no expression, but Noah felt the shock pouring off it all the same, shock and disbelief and a terrible, frantic question.

"Do you want to know how?" Noah said softly.

He tilted his head, studying the blank face a hand’s breadth from his own.

"Your face is screaming for the hows and the whys. Even without a face." He smiled a little. "Don’t worry too much about that. If you had never crossed paths with me, you might have lived a good deal longer. That is all you need to know."

The Curator’s long fingers tightened around the Shard of IT.

"Ah, I won’t say too much," Noah went on. "I always disliked the ones who gave long victory speeches and gloated over their enemies. So I will do my best not to. But I do see the appeal now. When you are standing exactly where you meant to stand, holding exactly what you meant to hold..." He sighed. "One’s tyranny just can’t help but ring a little. Ah..."

BOOM!

His hand drove deeper!

It went down past the Curator’s flesh and robes and cold, into the very center of what the Curator was, and his Shinjitsu went with it. The still gold-blue film around him poured down his arm and into the Curator, and wherever it touched, it began to eat.

It ate the Curator’s existence first, thread by thread, the old Provenance it had been born from and the strange, cold thing it had become. Then it reached the Curator’s authority, the right to rule this stretch of the Long Night, and it began to strip that away too, peeling it loose and turning it over and making it Noah’s own. The Curator’s seat shuddered in his grip. The snow overhead trembled. Every strand of the Long Night still left in this domain bent slowly toward Noah!

The Curator shook around his arm, and as it began to fade into him, it spoke one last time.

"I was a Provenance once," it said, its voice thin as torn paper. "One of the first. I was killed for nothing, and I came back hungry and cold and very sure that I would never be the weak one again. I was not wicked at the start, Dreamer. I was only careful. So I took. A seat, a Shard, the weak of a Legacy that paid me to look away. Every step felt like the only step a sensible thing could take. That is how it goes, Dreamer. Nobody chooses to become what I became. You simply keep taking the next reasonable step, and one day you look down and you are feeding children’s Roots to blank-faced things in the dark. You will end up where I am. Just give it time. You are hungry too. Something just like you will rise one day to take you down as well."

Then the blank face dissolved, and the Curator was gone!

Noah’s Shinjitsu swallowed the last of it whole!

The cold of the whole domain rushed into him at once, the seat, the authority, the Curator’s long, bitter existence, all of it pouring into the gold-blue stillness at his center and being sorted there, borrowed pieces set down, everything else made his.

A wave of power rolled out from him across the Undersnow. The upward snow scattered like startled birds. The dangling roots overhead swayed, and somewhere far above, in the Keepers’ eternal spring, every plum tree shivered at once.

Noah straightened slowly and stood.

He rolled his shoulders, flexed one hand, and let the new weight settle into his existence, his Shinjitsu glinting still and glassy around him, the cold of a second seat humming through his bones.

"In existence," he said quietly, "I doubt there is another thing quite like me..."

Behind him, something crunched.

Noah turned around.

Kir One was still eating! Its one face had become many faces and had spread out across the domain, and every one of them was chewing on a strand of the Long Night, pulling the snow-narrative out of the cold air in long grey threads and swallowing it like noodles.

"Kir One," Noah said. "Leave the rest."

The faces paused.

"I still need it," Noah said. "I have to devour it and change it. You cannot eat every part of the Narrative here."

Kir One looked at him with all its faces at once. Then, slowly, one face closed its mouth.

The others kept chewing.

"All of them," Noah said.

Another face closed its mouth. Then another, very slowly, as if it were being asked to give up something precius. One face at the very bottom kept going, chewing a single grey strand with great care and looking at nothing.

Noah waited.

The last face swallowed, and closed.

The vast obsidian creature turned its open eyes toward him, and was quiet for a long moment.

"Are you alive?" it asked.

"Very," said Noah.

Kir One considered this.

"Unfortunate," it said.

Noah looked at it. It looked back at him. Somewhere behind its head, one of its faces opened its mouth again, very slightly, and quietly took one more strand. 𝖋𝒓𝒆𝚎𝙬ⅇ𝒃𝚗ℴ𝙫𝐞𝕝.𝘤𝔬𝔪

Noah decided to ignore that!

|You have claimed THE Curator’s Epitropos seat.|

|You have devoured THE Curator of THE Unwritten Contingency.|

|Your Shinjitsu has remade this seat. It is your own.|

|You now hold two Epitropos seats, both your own.|

"Why don’t we let it snow here as well?" he said grandly. "Let us all feel the cold equally!"