Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5922

Chapter 5922: Expansion! II

Noah looked over what was left.

Below him, the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity lay stretched across the new region in pieces. Elsedimensions split down their middles. Gardens burned flat. Halls open to a sky that was now half grey forest. Moriarty and THE Thinker hung behind him in silence, and below them, scattered across the snowfields and the drifting rubble, more than a hundred old Immense Ones of the Legacy sat or stood or simply lay where they had fallen, staring at nothing.

Defeated. Every one of them.

On the other side of the sky, the Iron Psalm looked no better.

Their gates were still up, their fire still burning, their nine still standing. But behind that wall, their ranks were gone. A thousand Root Bearers hung frozen in crimson glass. Their Newly Risen and Established Ones had fallen to one Nightmare or another. The Ancients who remained huddled together like men who had come to rob a house and found it already burning.

Somber. Every one of them, too.

So who had won here?

The Legacy had lost. So had the Psalm. The Stillness, perhaps, if a thing that old could be said to win anything by yawning.

And him.

Possibly.

He set the question aside. There were more useful ones.

The Legacy, for instance.

It sat now at the very center of the new region, at the exact place where the Undefined Gaps and THE Fallow of Existence had been stitched together. A crossroads. And crossroads were where things passed through. Every Nightmare that crawled up out of the Fallow from now on, every old thing that woke and wandered, would walk straight through what was left of Lucy’s home on its way somewhere else.

Its time there would be short. A week, maybe. A month, if it was lucky. Then one day something would pass through it as the Stillness had, and there would be nothing left to argue over.

It needed to move.

The first place anyone would expect him to put it was THE Infiniverse. His own existence. Safe, familiar, full of his people.

That was exactly why he chose otherwise.

Because the first place he actually thought of was Ruination.

Her Ruined Quantum Existence. A whole existence built inside her out of records and probabilities, growing every moment, full of possibility after possibility after possibility.

Oh!

Yes.

He turned the thought over and examined it properly.

When he had run his Infinite Quantum Dreams, every branch he left untaken had fallen. Down past the possible, into the Fallow, to feed the Grey Mother who had picked them up. Every discarded road had been a lantern lit in her forest. That was how the Butterfly That Wakes had found him in the first place.

Ruination ran probabilities too. Far more than he ever had. Countless Decillions of them. She extrapolated and simulated and branched endlessly, all day, every day.

And none of hers had ever fallen into the Fallow.

The reason was simple. Ruination discarded nothing. Every possibility she extrapolated became part of her Ruined Quantum Existence. Every branch she ran, she kept. The unchosen roads stayed with her. They simply became more of her.

She had been doing, from the very beginning, what he had only learned to do when he answered the moth.

Some of his Kin were a step ahead of him in strange directions!

He reached for her through their bond.

|THE Ruined Quantum Existence is now roughly ten times the size of THE Infiniverse.|

|It continues to expand. Every possibility I extrapolate is added. I am extrapolating more every moment.|

|It is becoming increasingly complex. New kinds of existence continue to form within it.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions, a Half-Unfathomable Immense Lifeform, is ready and stable.|

|It is under Emotive’s control. It keeps its own sense of identity within THE Ruined Quantum Existence.|

...!

Ten times.

Ten times THE Infiniverse, built in a matter of...a day, by a being that had once been a small Ruination core he had barely understood.

Noah nodded lightly.

He sent a single thought back down the bond.

How easy would it be for her to take in something real? An actual piece of existence, rather than a record or a simulation. The Legacy of THE Acharya, for example.

Her answer came almost instantly.

|Ruination: Here is the Assessment.|

|Pros:|

|THE Legacy of THE Acharya is real, and carries a deep history. From something real and old, I can extrapolate far more possibilities than from records alone. My existence will grow faster and richer.|

|Its people will be safe from the Nightmares now passing through the Fallow’s crossing.|

|THE Totems of Dominion are torn. No King’s grid can follow it inside me.|

|If there are hidden dangers within the Legacy that we cannot yet see, THE Ruined Quantum Existence is far safer to hold them than THE Infiniverse, which holds all your people.|

|Cons:|

|The Legacy’s people.|

|A real existence inside a quantum one will change both. The extent: ?????|

|Assessment: the pros heavily outweigh the cons.|

...!

Reasonable, thorough, and a little eager!

Noah nodded.

"Alright," he said grandly. "Get started."

HUUUM!

Deep inside him, through the bond, he felt Ruination begin. A great crimson attention turning toward the Legacy, slow and careful and enormous, like a hand cupping water.

He turned his head.

Across the sky, the nine Unfathomables of the Iron Psalm had their hands full. The Stillness was leaving, but it was leaving slowly, and its Nightmare was still rolling out behind it across the new region, and the nine were fighting it with everything they had. Gates opened and slammed. Bells rang. Fire burned. The chain dragged frozen statues back toward the wall one by one, as if the Unfathomables might still pull a few of their people out of the glass if they worked fast enough.

They had no glance to spare for him.

Good. Now seemed as good a time as any to bring all this to a close.

Oh?

His Dream pulsed. His Nightmare pulsed with it.

Something, far away, had moved.

That was one of the stranger gifts of what he had done. When the Fallow broke through and existence expanded, everything in the region stretched with it. Including his Dream. Every place his Dream had already replaced, the Gaps and the empty dark he had been quietly taking for days, had been pulled wide in the same breath as everything else. What he covered now was nearly five times what it had been an hour ago.

Too wide to hold cleanly, for now. There were holes in it everywhere, stretched-thin places where the new space had grown faster than his Dream could follow, and he was filling them even now, his Dreams and Nightmares replacing existence as fast as they could.

Ul’moreth was working alongside him. So was Emotive, and THE Infiniverse, and Ruination even as she began on the Legacy. All of them, filling the gaps at once.

But even with the holes, what he covered was vast.

And countless Gigaparsecs away, in a stretch of the Undefined Gaps his Dream had replaced long before any of this began, something had just displaced it.

Two somethings.

|You see beneath their robes.|

|Ilarion Vey, THE Watcher of Old Fields.|

|Unfathomable Immense One.|

|Nysa Aurelle, THE Falling Lantern.|

|Unfathomable Immense One. Shinjitsu: 2.2%.|

|Both serve THE Shepherd of Falling Stars.|

|THE Narrative of Kings: Rank 25. Above THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate.|