Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5949

Chapter 5949: Narrative Wall II

Ever since Noah had established his Infinite Dream, he had believed, quietly and without ever quite putting it into words, that he could not truly be killed.

A body could break and a Dream could collapse in one corner of existence, and he would simply open his eyes in another, whole, because his Dream went on without end and he went on inside it, or at least that was what he believed. It was why he had smiled in the ruins of the Maze while the hand closed over him, and why, when he woke on his farm afterward, he had grieved for Lygara without rage and without any great sense of loss for himself.

But that belief had never been tested against anything as great as THE Primordial Gu of Provenance. He sat on the black-gold soil of his farm with the snow falling softly around him, and in front of him, coiled around the small blue-gold sapling, the Risen Dream of THE First Gu of Destiny lay with her eyes still closed. He had been drawing her back for a long while now, giving his Dream into the faint gold and silver shape of her without stopping, and she was barely more solid than when she had first come out of him.

It was taking far too long, much longer than it had ever taken to bring anything back before, and he frowned at her, because he could not understand why.

He blinked, once and then again, as a dull ache started behind his eyes and spread slowly across his forehead. He raised a hand to rub at it, and before his fingers reached his face, the ache became pain, sharp and deep and rising from somewhere far below his body, from the place where his Dreaming Human Origin lived.

A moment later it was everywhere at once, and Noah bent forward over the soil with both palms pressed flat against it and his breath unsteady, while the snow kept settling on his back.

Against the sapling, the hoe let out a low and unesy hum, because everything moving through his hands moved through it as well. At the far edge of the field, the three hundred and seventeen Nightmares drew back into the grey gaps of the Fallow, and far away on the illusory mountain, Octavius Infinitum opened his eyes and turned toward the farm without knowing why.

Then the prompts came, one after another, and every one of them landed heavier than the last.

|A hidden cost has arrived.|

|Your Dream was collapsed by a lifeform of extremely high Narrative and Immensity.|

|The power of such a lifeform permeates whatever it destroys, and its Narrative spreads across existence long after the blow has landed.|

|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance did not only collapse your Dream. It rejected it.|

|That rejection has wounded your Dreaming Human Origin itself.|

|Your Dreaming Human Origin lost a portion of the brilliance of its pillar of Quintessence.|

|The Empathy of your Human side is deteriorating.|

|In your defense, your existence is transforming these losses into Nightmares.|

|Overcome them and withstand them, or what is lost will stay lost.|

...!

Noah read every line through the pain!

He had always believed his Dream would carry him past death every time, and he understood now that there had been a price on that all along!

|The Nightmares born from your losses have been withstood.|