Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5906

The patchwork dream of THE Sealed One hung around Noah, and at its center, the Regret glowed.

He had seen enough to know what he wanted. A peek was too little, and a borrowed lifetime was too little. He wanted all of it. Every patch, every stitch, every life the Sealed One had carried back across the Ages, and the thing that let him keep carrying them.

He began!

|Quantum Dream 7 continues.|

|Branch 1: You take hold of THE Sealed One’s dream in the tower, and spread into his existence.|

|Minute 2: Control of his existence: 14%.|

|Minute 3: He notices you.|

The smoke turned toward him!

In the glass, at the top of his quiet stone tower, the tall man in plain grey robes stayed perfectly still. He went on looking out at the snow. But inside his dream, every patch in the patchwork rippled at once, and Noah felt an old, careful attention settle on him like a hand on the back of his neck.

“Oh,” said THE Sealed One, very softly, aloud to the empty room. “A guest fucking around in my existence? How rude.”

HUUM!

|Control of his existence: 14% to 22%.|

|He is weaker than an injured Ancient Immense One.|

|And yet his existence is far more intricate.|

|Every patch has its own rhythm. Every stitch has its own lock.|

The Verdant Regard had been strong and simple, one great gaze. This was something else entirely. Each patch of the Sealed One’s dream had come from a different life, and each one fought in a different way: one slipped, one stung, one simply clamped shut, one played dead and then bit. Noah pressed and pressed, and gained ground slowly, patch by patch.

Then the Sealed One reached into the center of himself!

“Do you know what this is?” he asked the snow, almost fondly. “The only thing a Progenitor ever left behind that nobody wanted. They kept it in a box for Ages, these Keepers, afraid to touch it. I took it in.”

He breathed out slowly. “Regret is the most useful thing in existence. It makes even Kings hesitate.”

|THE Sealed One turns the sliver of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor against you.|

It came over Noah like cold water poured straight into his chest.

Regret. It was someone else’s, far beyond the small sharp regrets of a single human life, something immense and ancient and heavier than anything he had ever felt, the sorrow of a being so vast that its regret alone could bend a Legacy. It filled his Dream. For one long moment he wanted to stop, to let go, to ask himself whether any of this was worth it, whether he was about to do something he would mourn for Ages.

He hesitated.

It was only an instant.

It was enough!

|Minute 6: Your Dream hesitates.|

|THE Sealed One collapses his own body in the tower.|

|You have collapsed with it, partly. You withdraw.|

|Minute 7: THE Sealed One returns.|

|He returns from somewhere else.|

|Branch 1 has ended.|

…!

Noah stared at that last prompt as he moved again!

|Branch 2: You follow the threads of his patchwork outward.|

He went back in, and this time, instead of gripping, he followed.

Some of the stitches in the Sealed One’s dream ran past the edge of him. They ran outward, thin and nearly invisible, out of the tower, out of the Keepers’ Legacy, far across existence, as the roots of a tree can run under a road and come up in a neighbor’s garden. Noah followed them one by one, with the lightest touch.

|The tower is one vessel of THE Sealed One.|

|There are eight others.|

…!

|Vessel 2: in THE Legacy of a forgotten scholar-king, he is a quiet archivist who has catalogued every Narrative in that Legacy for four hundred years.|

|Vessel 3: in THE Infinite Carcosa, he is a pale prince of a drowned court, and every member of that court owes him a debt.|

|Vessel 4: in THE Source Lands, he is a hermit on a mountain no one climbs, and he has not spoken in an Age.|

|Vessel 5: in a small backwater Dimension, he is a child, nine years old, and his mother calls him by a name that means “returned.”|

|Vessel 6: inside a fallen Riven stronghold, he sleeps beneath a sea of black water, waiting.|

|Vessel 7: in THE Legacy of a famous merchant-queen, he is her most trusted advisor. She does not know he is anything else.|

|Vessel 8: among the Hollow Night, he wears a blank face and walks with them, learning how THE Long Night thinks.|

|Vessel 9: in a golden palace in a Legacy of pleasure, he lives among throngs of Luxuria Gilded Ones.|

Noah looked at the ninth one longer than he wanted to.

The palace was endless and golden and warm, its halls crowded with Luxuria Gilded Ones, beautifull and bright and hollow-eyed, every one of them living for nothing but pleasure and every one of them bound to the man at its center.

He lounged among them on a vast golden couch, the same calm face as the man in the tower, and the air around him was thick with something sweet and rotten. Some of the beings around him were laughing. Some of them were crying while they laughed. A few had stopped doing either a long time ago and simply stared.

The vessel in the palace turned his head, as if he had felt someone looking.

“Pleasure is only a leash,” he said lazily, to no one Noah could see. “Hold it gently enough and they will thank you while it tightens.” He smiled the same faint smile. “Every life teaches something. This one teaches that.”

|Each vessel carries a drop of his blood and a sliver of his consciousness.|

|As long as one vessel remains, he will return.|

|Vessel 1, the tower, holds one Shard of IT.|

…!

So that was why the Sealed One’s existence was so intricate. Nine bodies, and a Shard of IT humming inside the patchwork too, holding the stitches together with a weight that no single failed life could ever have managed on its own.

Noah tried taking the vessels one at a time.

|Branch 2: You take Vessel 4, the hermit, quietly. Control: 100%. You collapse it.|

|Within seconds, the other eight vessels know.|

|Vessel 1 uses the Shard of IT. Vessel 9’s palace closes. Vessel 5, the child, vanishes from his mother’s house.|