Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5945

Chapter 5945: Provenance! II

Noah sat up in the ruins of the Maze with every bone in his body broken. Blood ran out of him in crimson and gold, pooling on the shattered golden stone, and when he looked down he could see places where his body was simply not the right shape anymore.

Then the prompts came, one after another, steady and calm in the middle of all that noise.

|Your existence has been grievously injured.|

|Every bone has been broken. Your body has been torn in 214 places.|

|Your Dream has been cracked. Your Nightmare state has been shaken.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin is infinite. It is restoring you.|

|Recovery: rapid.|

...!

He felt it happening even as he read it, his Dreaming Human Origin flowing back into every broken place from somewhere deep and endless inside him, setting bones and closing wounds and filling the cracks in his Dream with fresh blue-gold light. It was fast, faster than it had ever been, but it was not instant, and for an instant he only sat there in his own blood and breathed.

Then he looked up at the vast pale hand hanging over the ruins with its thousands of cold eyes, and something in him understood, very clearly, that nothing he had faced before had been anything like this.

He did not wait. Behind him, without a sound, he began to open another door to THE Fallow of Existence, weaving his unwalked roads into a long dark thread and turning his Infinite Quantum Dream toward the deep beneath every unchosen road.

Grey and obsidian light began to rise behind him in a slow, silent tide, and he let it rise, because he already knew what he was going to do. He would spread the Fallow here, across this whole stretch of the Chrysalis, and he would give himself into it, fully and truly, more than he had ever given before.

|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|

|One of the eldest of all Gu. It has judged the beginnings of more lifeforms than can be counted, and erased every one it found wanting.|

|Narrative: THE Hand That Holds Beginnings.|

|Immensity: Its Body here holds Excedere Unfathomable Immensity. It stands beyond the Unfathomable.|

|Shinjitsu: estimated above 10%. True rate: ?????|

|You cannot win this fight.|

...!

Noah read the last line twice, and then he let it go, because it was true and there was nothing else to do with it. Beside him, rising out of the rubble with her tentacles spread over him, Lygara looked up at the hand as well, and her beautiful face had gone very still.

"Where is the child of calamity," the Primordial Gu asked, its voice coming from every segment of the hand at once, "who was brought back?"

Neither of them answered. The hand hung over the ruins for a long moment while its thousands of eyes moved slowly between Lygara and Noah, and then all of them brightened together and settled on him, and he felt the full weight of its attention press down on him in a way he had never felt anything press before.

"My Provenance tells me that you, the weak human lifeform, have the answer," it said. "So will you make this easy, or hard?"

...!

Noah said nothing, and the Primordial Gu seemed to find that interesting, because its eyes narrowed slightly and its voice grew softer. "You said that everything is connected, did you not?" it asked.

"You know where the child of calamity is, which means you were involved in her return, or you were the one who caused it, which means that you are where this began. A great many things can happen between a beginning and its end, a great many connections, and I can decide right now what the end of this one will be."

Its eyes moved to Lygara and stayed there, and its voice became colder. "I can make the end of it the collapse of this precious Gu of Destiny beside you. Her Narrative and her Immensity will end by my hand, and they will end because of you. How is that for everything being connected, and is that fair? Or you can change all of it, right now, very simply, by telling me where the child of calamity is."

...!

A voice spoke quietly inside Noah’s mind, and it was Lygara’s.

"Destiny," the Primordial Gu said, almost gently. "You were always the most charming of the Firsts, Lygara, because you truly believe that what happens to a thing is decided by where it is going. But where a thing is going does not matter at all, because everything that has ever happened is decided by where it began."

"Provenance decides connections," it told her, as it caught her threads in its palm and pulled them, and her with them, back across the sky toward itself. "It decides what is connected to what, and why, and what each connection is worth, and existence agrees with my Provenance every single time, whatever your threads might say. Do you know why? Because Provenance is what gives existence its meaning, and its beginnings, and everything that existence is, it owes to Provenance."