Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5921

Chapter 5921: Expansion! I

The new region kept growing.

Noah hung in front of the broken opening and watched it spread beneath him. Light years of fresh space unrolling in every direction. Little Dimensions condensing out of grey roads and broken Elsedimensions.

The torn Totems drifting apart like the pieces of a snapped fence. The Undefined Gaps, which had been empty and silent for Ages, now thick with tangled forests of everything no one had ever chosen.

Messy. Unplanned. Far larger than any of them had wanted.

He had done all of it!

And in the opening, rising up out of the Fallow toward everything he had done, came THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened.

It extended rather than climbed.

It came up through the broken door as a frost spreads across a pond, slowly and all at once, and what it spread was stillness. Grey glass, tinged crimson at its edges, rising out of the grey forest in a vast slow sheet. And inside the glass, held, were moments.

A man falling from a great height, stopped a hand’s breadth above the stones. A blade halted a finger’s width from a throat.

A child’s hand sinking beneath black water, stopped just as its fingertips went under. An arrow hanging in the air, its point already touching cloth. A fever-bright face on a pillow, eyes half-closed, the last breath caught halfway out.

Thousands of them, then trillions. Every one of them a death that had almost happened, and then had passed by, frozen in the single instant before it would have.

They were not still because they were dead. They were still because they had been caught at the very edge of it, and held there, forever.

A collector of the worst kind!

The glass stretched across light years, then hundreds of light years. Its center was a shape Noah could barely hold in his sight: a tall, faint, headless figure made of nothing but held breaths, stacked on each other like frost on frost, and across its body, scattered like stars across a night sky, the crimson-obsidian eyes. Hundreds of them. All open. All turning slowly.

Hm!

Ugly, as very old things often are. Patient, too!

|THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened.|

|It holds every death that came within a breath of happening, and did not.|

|It has kept them since before most Legacies were young.|

|It is amused at this moment.|

...!

Behind Noah, two presences arrived.

Moriarty came out of the air with his Immensity still ragged, blood dried dark at the corner of his mouth. THE Thinker came with him, vast and slow and quiet, its great mind turning heavily, both of them hanging in the cold breath of the Fallow behind the small burned figure with the cracked crown.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

They looked past Noah, at the grey glass rising out of the opening, at the frozen moments inside it, at the hundreds of crimson eyes.

"Legacy’s Son," Moriarty said at last, very quietly. "Did you really do this?"

"What even is this?" said THE Thinker.

Noah did not look back!

Did they want an apology? They would wait a long time.

"Did you all not choose me?" he said. "Did you not elect me to lead you toward a grander future? Did you not circle me in the sky and call me the one who would open doors for you, the doors your Founder left closed, the doors you have been staring at for Ages, waiting for someone else to push?"

The Fallow’s cold breath moved his burned robe.

"I have begun to open such doors. Some of them you will like. Some of them you will not. Some of them open onto gardens, and some of them open onto that."

There was no need to gesture at the Stillness. "That is what doors are. That is what you asked for, whether you knew it or not. But maybe, at the end of all this, you will have what you seek. Not all at once. A step at a time. A door at a time."

His voice burned with Tyranny!

"Every great thing begins as a ruin before it becomes anything else. Look at it, and remember it. Do not worry. I do not tend to forget those who lent me a hand. And as for those who become my enemies... well. You can now see a glimpse of the lengths I will go."

...!

Behind him, Moriarty and THE Thinker looked at each other.

Both stayed silent. The look said enough. Moriarty’s eyes went past Noah’s back, down through the growing region, to the Legacy below. The Elsedimensions split down their middles. The gardens burned flat. The halls with their roofs gone. Old Immense Ones lying in the snow. Parts of their home being stretched and remade and mixed with grey roads that had belonged to no one, carried off into a new region that had been nothing an hour ago.

The tattered Legacy lay beneath them like a map someone had torn in half and was still pulling.

Larger now. Somewhat more broken, too. Both of those were his.

As for Noah, his gaze stayed on the opening.

Because the Stillness had begun to use its authority.

He felt it before he saw it. It came out of the glass like a pressure, vast and quiet and absolute, that reached into everything nearby and touched the place in it where it had once nearly died.

Every being has such places. Every life has its near misses. The fall that stopped short. The fever that broke at dawn. The blade that turned. The Stillness reached for all of them at once.

It was barely trying.

Noah could see that clearly. Whatever the Stillness was at full strength, this was a sliver of it. A fucking sliver. A sleeper stretching in its bed. A single slow breath let out in passing.

|THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened has unleashed a Nightmare.|

|THE Held Breath.|

|All caught within it relive the instant before every death they ever escaped.|

|This time, they are held there.|

|Those who cannot pass through the instant will remain in it forever.|

|Condition to clear: ?????|

|This is not a serious attack. It is a passing breath. It remains amused at waking in a relatively new place it has not been to in a long, long time.|

...!

Oh?

A passing breath!

The Nightmare swept out across the new region.

It reached the Iron Psalm first.

The nine met it. They had to. Brunhild’s gates slammed shut across the sky in a great wall, thousands of them, white and iron, and the Held Breath struck the wall and pressed against it, and the gates groaned.

Beautiful work, those gates. Entirely the wrong tool.

The bell-faced Unfathomable rang, and rang again, and again, a deep steady peal like a heartbeat being forced to keep going, and every place the sound reached, the frozen moments trembled and tried to move. The white-stone woman sang louder. The chain wound itself around the Ancients behind them and pulled them close.

And Aethon’s flame rose into a wall of clean pale fire in front of the ranks, and where the Held Breath touched it, the stillness melted. Fire is always moving. Fire is the opposite of a held breath. For a long moment, the pale flame and the crimson glass pushed against each other across the sky, and neither gave.

Some of them were reaching for someone long gone.

|One thousand Root Bearers of THE Iron Psalm have fallen to THE Held Breath.|

|The remaining Newly Risen and Established Immense Ones of THE Iron Psalm have fallen to THE Held Breath.|

|They are held at the instant before death.|

|They will remain there.|