Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5943

Chapter 5943: Attunment II

Noah felt the change move through all of him at once. His Dreaming Human Origin swelled, growing fuller and grander and deeper than it had been a moment before, and it began to pour out of him on its own, endless waves of Dreams and Nightmares rolling out across his farm and into the Carcosa around it. Far away, countless distances from here, the piece of him that still stood where the Legacy of THE Acharya used to be felt the same surge, and it gave even more to the existence around it, and that existence gave back more than it ever had before.

He clenched his fist and felt the strength in it, a new and solid weight that had not been there a few minutes ago, and there was no doubt in him that he had grown stronger. He looked at the four Branches of his Tree and at the four flowers blooming on them, glowing softly in the snow, and he thought about how many more flowers could bloom there if he kept going. Every fruit had come from a buried Immense One, and every flower had come from the fruit!

He looked up and around at the sky over his farm, slowly, searching every direction, and there was a hunger in his eyes now that had not been there before. Were there any more enemies out there, he wondered, any more Immense Ones who might come down out of the snow to take what was his, who he could bury and plant and harvest? His smile, as he searched the empty sky, was a tyrant’s smile, patient and very hungry.

HUUM!

The authority he had been giving out to existence came flooding back to him all at once. Waves of Nascent Nightmare Essence poured back across the Carcosa from every direction and into him, more than he had ever received, and inside those waves there was something else, something he had never felt before, thin and bright and threaded through the essence.

He felt himself sink deeper into existence than he ever had, connected to it in a way that was closer and wider at the same time, until it seemed that the line between where he ended and where existence began had grown very thin.

|Your attunement with existence has reached a sufficient level.|

|Awareness of where you are in existence is now possible.|

...!

The information came into him in waves. His eyes flickered, and then they blazed, the gold eye pouring out a beam of gold light and the obsidian eye pouring out a beam of black, both of them stretching out into the falling snow, and in front of him, in the air above his farm, something began to draw itself. It was faint at first, only a few lines, but it grew clearer with every wave, and as it took shape, Noah understood that he was looking at a map.

At the very center of it, very small, one tiny place was lit up. It was his farm, a single bright spot in one small corner of THE Infinite Carcosa, so small that he had to look closely to find it, and all around it the map was dark and hazy in every place he had never been.

As the beams from his eyes reached further, the darkness around his farm grew larger and larger, stretching away in every direction until the whole of it was labeled in faint pale letters, THE Infinite Carcosa, a vast region of shadow with only one tiny point of light inside it.

The map kept growing, and Noah could no longer see any detail inside the Carcosa at all, only its dark shape getting smaller as the vision pulled back. Then, in a far corner of the map, another place lit up, a small bright area where he had first broken open the door to the Fallow, and beside it a wider stretch of faint light where his presence still covered THE Keepers of Existence. It sat inside a dark and enormous landscape labeled THE Undefined Gaps, and his light covered only a very, very small part of it.

The vision pulled back further, and in yet another corner, a third light appeared, very small and very far from the other two, where a piece of him still stood in the Maze of Destiny beside Lygara and the golden walls. Around it lay a vast dark region labeled THE Chrysalis, and here and there across the map, other faint lights flickered where small pieces of his Dream still reached, a scattering of tiny points across an enormous darkness. Everything else was hazy and unknown, a darkness so wide that he could not see its edges.

The map pulled back again, and again, and Noah watched the four or five small lights of his presence shrink until they were barely visible at all. Even with all of them added together, everything he had ever touched or walked or given to did not cover even a small fraction of a single percent of what was laid out in front of him!

And as the vision pulled back far enough to show the whole of it at last, all of those vast dark regions together, the Carcosa and the Gaps and the Chrysalis and Source Lands and countless others he had no names for, slowly settled into one great shape, and it was the shape of a mountain.

...!

Noah stared at it with his eyes still blazing, and his breath caught in his chest, because almost all of it was dark. THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rose in front of him, vast beyond anything he had ever imagined, and his whole existence, every place he had ever been and everything he had ever done, was a handful of tiny sparks scattered across its lowest slopes. The rest of it was hazy and unknown, waiting in the dark, and for the first time in a long while, Noah felt very, very small!

He was still staring at the vast dark shape of the Mountain on his map when something on it moved. He focused.

Near the small light that marked the Maze of Destiny in THE Chrysalis, a cluster of tiny dots had appeared, blinking on and off together, and they were drifting slowly but steadily toward the light where a piece of him still stood. He focused on them, narrowing his blazing eyes, and the map seemed to lean in closer to show him what they were.

|Detected: 19 Ancient Immense Gu.|

|Origin: THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|

|Purpose: to find and crush Lifthrasir, and the one who brought her weavings back.|

|They are following the trail of her restored Existence to THE Maze of Destiny.|

|Each carries the authority of Provenance. They trace where a thing began, judge whether that beginning is proper, and collapse whatever they find without one.|

|Distance to THE Maze of Destiny: close.|

...!

Noah’s eyes lit up. He knew these hunters as he had come across them in an Infinite Quantum Dream!

Lifthrasir was gone now, safe on her way to her mother with her sisters and her Kin, but the hunters did not know that, and they were still coming for the one who had brought her back, which meant they were coming for him. He looked at his flowering sapling and his four Branches and the soil where fifteen Immense Ones had become fruit, and he smiled a slow, hungry smile.

In the Maze of Destiny, the piece of him that stood beside Lygara raised its right hand. On the farm in THE Infinite Carcosa, the hoe vanished from his grip, and in the same instant it was resting in the palm of his other body, its white-gold blade gleaming in the light of the golden walls. Lygara’s long insect neck turned toward him, and her beautiful face tilted, because she had felt the hoe arrive, and its weavings caused her existence to pulse.

"Some pests are coming here," Noah told her pleasantly, resting the hoe on his shoulder. "Gu of Provenance, nineteen of them, looking for Lifthrasir and for me. I’ll go take care of them, so you don’t have to worry about it."

He paused, and then added with a small, satisfied smile, "Besides, I need them for something."

Lygara looked at the hoe, and then at his face, and then she coiled herself a little more comfortably as he disappeared!

---

Existence pulsed and opened wide for him to enter.

He felt little rejection as everything seemed much smoother as he moved gigaparsecs away towards the enemies searching for him!

He met them in the golden seas of THE Chrysalis, a long way out from the walls of the Maze, where they were crossing toward it in a wide formation that filled the sky. They were Ancient Immense Gu, every one of them, and each one was as large as a Dimension, their bodies hard and pale and covered in thin carvings that glowed with the colors of every beginning that had ever been.

There was a centipede of white bone so long that its tail was lost behind it, with legs that touched the air and read the origin of everything they brushed, and a great grey moth whose wings held the beginnings of countless lives painted on them, and a mantis with blades that could cut a thing away from its own start.

The largest of them was a beetle, broad and heavy and armored in plates of dark shell as thick as small Dimensions, and the Provenance carved into that shell burned so brightly that the golden sea beneath it boiled. Behind all nineteen of them, faint and enormous, rose the shape of a vast insect hand as large as a Dimension, its fingers made of every Provenance there had ever been, reaching forward over their heads.

They felt him arrive the moment he appeared in their path, and nineteen sets of eyes turned toward the man in the robe of dreams and nightmares floating alone above the golden sea with a hoe on his shoulder.