Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5909

Chapter 5909: Nightmare III

Noah lay on the blue-gold water of his domain and looked up at nothing in particular.

Far above, beyond the walls of his Domain, the banner of THE Narrative of Kings hung in the skies of existence. Forty-nine. A small number on a long list, held by a being who, a few years ago, had barely existed at all.

He let his thoughts go wide.

He saw the Keepers under their new snow, a Legacy that had bought its spring with its weakest, now shivering. He saw the Fiend on his terrace with his ever-open eyes, and Moriarty and many others in Lucy’s Legacy, all of them looking up at the same banner and seeing different things in it.

There was the hand that had reached up from beneath the Keepers and closed on empty light. There was a kingship made of returns drifting somewhere through the dark.

From far enough away, it all looked very simple. Pieces moved, threads bent, and every strike was answered, one by one, at its own pace.

From close up, every piece had a face.

He looked at both views calmly, and he found that neither one frightened him.

THE Steward of Returning Ages. The boy’s smile. Are you sure about that?

He could chase that question all through existence and arrive nowhere. Whatever the answer was, it would come to him in time. Most answers did, if one stood still long enough.

For now, there was work to do.

Noah closed his eyes, and moved forward.

He reached for the Shard first.

The cool white-gold stone drifted into his palm, and he swallowed it plainly. It went down into him and flew to the center of his existence, where the other three waited, and the four of them met and pressed together.

They began to hum!

It was different this time. With two, there had been pressure. With three, weight. Now, with four, there was something like a chord, four notes of the same deep sound, ringing together in a way that made the whole of his existence feel, for a moment, like the inside of a bell.

|You have consumed a fourth Shard of IT.|

|It has joined the others within you.|

|Their center cannot be broken down.|

|Everything around them that can be broken down has been made your own.|

|The four Shards are resonating.|

|What they may become together: ?????|

Noah sat very still and listened to that resonance, and wondered.

Four pieces of something unimaginably larger, singing to each other inside him. Whether they would ever become more than pieces, he had no idea. But something in that chord felt like the beginning of a sentence.

He set the thought down, and reached for the knot.

The black thread came to him and coiled in his palm, loosening and tightening, loosening and tightening, patiant as a heartbeat. He swallowed it too, and turned his Shinjitsu loose on it.

It fought in its own quiet way, with no striking and no burning. It simply refused. Every time his truth pulled one strand of it apart, the strand began, slowly and stubbornly, to reach for its neighbor and tie itself back on. It had been doing this for Ages. It knew no other way to be.

But Shinjitsu was patient too.

|Your Shinjitsu is breaking down the anomaly.|

|It reties itself.|

|Your Shinjitsu breaks it again.|

|It reties itself, more slowly.|

|Your Shinjitsu sets down what is borrowed in it, and keeps what can be true.|

|It tries to retie itself one last time, and finds nothing left to hold.|

|The anomaly has been entirely broken down.|

The knot went still.

Then it was simply gone, unraveled to its very end, and Noah felt the whole of his existence settle a little deeper into itself, as if a door somewhere in him had finally finished closing.

|Assimilation Rate: 2.1% to 2.5%.|

|Attributes: unchanged.|

He opened his eyes.

The thin film of his Shinjitsu lay around him, still as glass, a little denser than before. He flexed one hand slowly and watched the light move across his knuckles. It felt the same and not the same, as a familiar room feels after someone has quietly rearranged one chair.

Then he turned his gaze to the last thing floating before him.

The Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor hung in the air, small and grey-blue and impossibly heavy, the air around it hushed.

Swallowing that blindly was out of the question.

So, as always, he would simply dream first, and see how things unfolded.

He lay back on the water and began his next Infinite Quantum Dream.

|Quantum Dream 8 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 2.5%. True Order III.4.|

|Goal: the safe devouring and breaking down of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|

|Minute 1: You reach for the Regret.|

The glass rose around him, blue and gold and endless, the familiar halls of possibility unfolding in every direction like a city of windows.

But...

HUUUM!

Out nowhere....darkness bloomed!

It came in flashes, all at once and everywhere, black blossoms opening in the glass like ink dropped in water. One window went dark, then ten, then a thousand. And from beneath the glass floor, obsidian rivers erupted upward, black and glossy and silent, pouring through the halls of the Quantum Dream as if they had been waiting under it all along!

|Warning.|

|Something unknown has been triggered.|

|Your Infinite Quantum Dream has been affected.|

|Source: ?????|