Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5924

Chapter 5924: Existence I

The Legacy was settling.

Noah stood on a terrace of crimson glass inside Ruination’s existence and watched it happen. Below him, across hundreds of light years, the Elsedimensions of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity hung beneath a sky made of moving records, whole again, their cracks sealed with seams of red light.

Old Immense Ones walked their own halls with the slow, suspicious steps of beings who had woken up in a house they recognized and only half believed. Moriarty paced a ridge far off, his Immensity coiled tight around him, arguing with THE Thinker about something. On a quiet slope, wrapped in a cocoon of gold and black, Theon slept, his Root drinking in the Dream Noah had given him.

And at the Legacy’s heart, in a long silent row, stood the statues.

THE Ruined Quantum Existence was truly grsnd.

Ten times THE Infiniverse. A sky of records that went on forever. An existence that had grown out of a core he had once barely understood, and had kept every possibility it ever touched, and was now holding an entire Legacy like a seed in warm soil.

Remarkable!

Then he turned his attention inward.

The Nightmare face was still on.

He had left it there on purpose. The robe of dreams and nightmares still swept around him. The obsidian crown still turned above his head, its gold ember burning. One eye gold, one eye obsidian. When he looked at himself, he saw both at once, and neither seemed false.

A few days ago, his Assimilation Rate had been 2.1%. Now it was 5%. He had crossed a threshold. He could see beneath robes, dream Nightmares, raise them. In the span of time it took a Root Bearer to brew a pot of tea, he had become something that made Ancients seem manageable.

Fast. Very fast!

And Shinjitsu. He had stopped thinking of it as a power some time ago. It was more like a way of standing. A stillness that let everything around him be exactly what it was, so that he could see it, and so that the truth of him could stand beside it, steady.

The film over his skin was still as glass, and through it now ran veins of obsidian alongside the gold.

It felt like a window that had finally been cleaned on both sides.

Outside, beyond Ruination’s existence, the weave of things was moving.

He could feel it through his Dream, stretched thin across the new region. THE Shepherd of Falling Stars, preparing a road across the Gaps for an army on its very first march.

The nine of THE Iron Psalm, standing watch over a smooth empty hollow. The Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened, wandering. THE Grey Mother, asleep! Well, maybe she had gone back to sleep.

Every one of them was stronger than him.

Every one of them had trouble seeing what he was.

That was the advantage. In any room he entered, someone else was stronger. He was simply the hardest thing to grip. Immensity slid off him. Totems read nothing. Nightmares he could answer. Where others would have been crushed, he survived. Where others survived, he took something away with him.

He liked it.

He liked being a Nightmare. The face suited the moment, and the moment was long. He would keep it. And so long as he kept doing what the old Noah would have shied away from, grand and strange and slightly terrible, his Narrative would keep bending toward him, and existence would keep paying him for it.

Hm.

So. The Gaps!

His attention drifted outward again, toward the stretched places.

When the Fallow broke through and existence expanded, his Dream had been pulled wide with everything else, and there were holes in it now. Thin places. Patches of the Undefined Gaps where the new space had grown faster than his Dream could follow. Some of them had been touched by the Fallow as it spilled through, and they sat there in the dark like bruises, grey and soft and half-real, neither empty nor full, faintly smelling of old leaves.

He had been filling them, alongside his Kin. Replacing them, one after another, with his Dream.

He reached for the nearest one, out of habit.

And his attention slipped.

He was tired, perhaps, as a mind is tired after a long day of very large things. Or he was still half-watching Ruination, still half-amazed. Either way, he reached for the grey patch idly, not quite deciding to.

Replacing it slipped his mind.

He simply let his authority touch it.

His pure authority, the authority of THE Dreaming Human Origin in its Nightmare state, slipped out of him and into the grey patch as warmth leaves a hand laid flat on cold stone. It went in gently, with no push and no overwrite, and stayed, and spread.

The grey patch shivered.

Then it drank.

It drank his authority as dry ground drinks the first rain after a long season, all at once and deeply, and as it drank, it changed. The grey softened. The soft places firmed. The half-real dark of the Fallow-touched gap began to take on a texture.

And then it gave something back.

It rose out of the patch in a fine slow mist. Dark and gold, sandy and glitering, the color of his own Nightmare light, but rawer. Newer. It had no shape at all. It was possibility before possibility, the stuff a Nightmare is made of before anything breathes on it and gives it a face. It drifted up out of the gap and across the light years toward him, and it came straight into him, through the still glass of his Shinjitsu, into the center of him.

His Shinjitsu took it.

There was none of the slow, careful work of breaking something down, none of the grinding effort of setting down what was borrowed and keeping what could be true. His Shinjitsu simply opened, and the mist went in, and it fit. It fit as if it had been made for him. It settled into him and became him in the time it took to breathe out.

|Your Authority has entered a gap of existence influenced by THE Fallow of Existence.|

|You have given it. You have not replaced it.|

|The gap has received your Authority.|

|It has released Nascent Nightmare Essence.|

|Your Shinjitsu has absorbed the Nascent Nightmare Essence.|

|Compatibility: unfathomable.|

|Value: greater than fully breaking down an Established Immense One.|

...!

Huh? What???

But they were still themselves. Still faintly grey, still Fallow-touched, still carrying the strange soft nature of the place they had been. And somewhere inside that nature, his authority had taken root, and the two had grown into each other, and the thing they had become was breathing. Giving. A thin, steady trickle of Nascent Nightmare Essence, rising out of them and coming home to him.