Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5907

Chapter 5907: Nightmare I

The house was small and quiet, and smelled of bread and woodsmoke.

Noah sat on a low wooden bench beside a nine-year-old boy in a backwater Dimension no one had ever bothered to name. Through the open window, a mother was hanging washing in the yard, huming. The boy’s feet dangled well above the floor. He swung them gently back and forth, and his face, for one moment, was very old.

"Every death teaches," the boy said softly, in the Sealed One’s voice. "I wonder what this one will teach me."

"Nothing," Noah said. "This one is the last."

And everywhere at once, it happened!

He had already moved exactly as the dream had shown him! It was like knowing how a story unfolded and he simply had to follow his previous steps.

Nine vessels across existence collapsed together, and Noah’s Shinjitsu reached into every one of them and ate. The drops of blood went dark. The slivers of thought went quiet. And the slow, patient, certain return of a being who had refused to stay dead for Ages stopped, and stayed stopped.

|THE Sealed One’s existence has collapsed in all nine vessels at once.|

|Your Shinjitsu has broken it down.|

|You have grasped a Shard of IT.|

|You have grasped the sliver of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|

|You have grasped the anomaly that let THE Sealed One always return. ?????|

Beside him, the boy was already fading at the edges, his small hands going thin as paper.

He looked up at Noah, and smiled.

"Are you sure about that?" he asked.

HUUM!

And he was gone.

The bench was empty. Outside, the mother went on humming over her washing, unaware. Noah sat very still and frowned at the place where the boy had been.

Are you sure about that.

It was the kind of thing a dying lifeform said to have the last word. Probably it meant nothing. But this particular lifeform had died more times than anyone Noah had ever met, and had been right about a great many things, and Noah turned the words over carefully before he set them down and kept them.

This motherfucker. He couldn’t possibly have any more surprises, right? Every shred of him was gone!

Noah shook his head and closed his eyes.

Through his bonds and his Dream, he felt every other piece fall exactly where it should: the archivist’s pen lying still in a quiet library, the drowned prince and the black-sea sleeper gone into Ruination’s glowing halls, the golden palace hushed with its Luxuria Gilded Ones blinking like sleepers woken too early, the blank-faced walker gone down Kir One’s throat, the hermit fallen in the snow of his mountain, and the advisor slumped at the merchant-queen’s side.

All of it, exactly as dreamed.

Except for one body, which he had saved for last.

In THE Keepers of Existence, in a quiet stone tower at the edge of the frozen gardens, the body of THE Sealed One stood empty at the window, looking out at the snow.

Noah had taken everything worth taking from it. The Shard, the Regret, the strange stubborn thing that refused to die, all of it already his, exactly as the dream had promised. What remained was only a shell, a tall man in plain grey robes with nothing left inside but a little residual authority, the last echo of a being who had steered a Legacy from behind a polite smile.

Noah had filled that echo with his own words, and set it a few simple directions.

He could have let the body fall quietly. It would have taken the Keepers a little time to notice.

But right now, he wanted to make enemies.

They were already his enemies, of course. The Keepers had come for his head once and would come again. But some part of him, the tyrannical part, the part of his humanity that had always refused to sit quietly and be small, wanted to act out. He had written two Narratives into existence with his own hand, and he meant to live them.

The first had been about where he came from. Existence had produced lifeform after lifeform, Age after Age, until a deadbeat human man and a grand human woman came together, and from them came a glorious mutation, a potential exceeding everything that had come before him.

The second had been about what he would become. THE One the Threads Bend Toward. Chance and fate and long-waiting threads, allies and enemies alike, all of them bending toward him, gathering around him, moving because he was there.