Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5941

Chapter 5941: Not A Lifeform!

THE Primordial Source stretched out in every direction as an endless obsidian sea, black and still and heavy, with no shore and no horizon and no sky above it except more darkness. Its surface did not move unless something moved it, and nothing moved it except the figure standing tall above the water, a titan so large that his shoulders were lost in the dark and his feet rested on the sea without sinking.

That was Vakochev, and far below him, standing on the black water where it held them up, were two small figures who barely reached his ankle.

One of them was Anaximander, slim and dark-haired, with pupils that had turned into two small obsidian singularities and no authority of his own at all. The other was THE Creature, flat and unhurried and silent as always, standing beside his friend with his hands at his sides. Both of them were looking up past Vakochev at the thing that hung in the dark in front of him.

It was a mountain, and it was not really there. It was an illusion that Vakochev had called up out of the Primordial Source, faint and grey and enormous, its peak lost somewhere far above even his head and its roots sinking down through the obsidian sea into a depth that had no bottom. Thin lines ran out from it in every direction, thousands upon thousands of them, branching and branching again into the dark until there were more of them than anyone could count, and at the ends of the lines hung small pale shapes that might have been regions of existence. It was THE Mountain at the Center of Everything!

...!

"Look at it closely," Vakochev said, and his voice moved across the obsidian sea in slow, deep waves that the two small figures felt in their chests.

"Every lifeform that ever learns of this mountain thinks of it as a place. It is not a place. It is the spine of existence, the one thing that holds every region and every Dimension and every place in its proper relation to every other."

He lifted one enormous hand toward the illusion, and the faint lines running out from the mountain brightened one by one.

Then his hand moved, and a great stretch of the illusion lit up gold, vast regions of the mountain’s reach glowing at once.

"For a very long time," he said, "my Scales of Existence covered all of this. They weighed what passed along these roads, and what passed through these regions, and they kept all of it in balance. My Narrative was never a strong one, because all it ever said was that things should be weighed fairly, but it was spread across far too much of existence for far too long, and a weak Narrative spread that wide becomes something no one can stand against. It made me unfathomably powerful, more powerful than I ever meant to be."

The gold across the illusion began to break apart in places, dimming and cracking and going dark in one region after another.

"That drew the ire of many Legacies," Vakochev said, more quietly now. "One by one, and then together, they moved against me in different corners of existence, tearing down my Scales and my existence wherever they could reach it, because none of them wanted to be weighed. And behind all of them, moving in the dark where I could never quite see them, were my true enemies, whose names now sit on the banner of THE Narrative of Kings as if they had always belonged there."

...!

Anaximander listened to all of it with his head tilted, his obsidian pupils following the dark places spreading through the illusion, and THE Creature listened beside him without moving at all. When Vakochev finally fell silent, Anaximander nodded slowly, having followed every word and found it all very reasonable. "Okay," he said. "But I don’t understand what I have to do with any of this? I am...but a simple lifeform, a scholar who is not in anyway involved in any of this. I am thinking of a ridiculous guy who might actually be, but I would have to check with him first..."

Vakochev turned his great head to look down at him. "The Immensity of my Narrative, and everything I once did, is buried now," he said. "Others have laid their own Narratives on top of mine, one after another, until mine is hidden underneath all of them, THE Long Night, THE Narrative of Kings, and many others whose names you would not know. I have been taking back pieces of what I was, slowly, but my enemies did something worse than bury me, because they made existence itself believe that I am something harmful to it."

The obsidian sea stirred around his feet, and the illusion of the mountain flickered. "Now, simply to live, to breathe, to move, or to act at all costs me an effort you cannot imagine, because existence itself pushes back against everything I do," he went on.