Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5950

Chapter 5950: Narrative Wall III

Noah still looked ashen, his gold eye still dull and the film of Shinjitsu over his skin still faint and tired, and the faint gold and silver shape of Lygara still lay coiled around the sapling with her eyes closed.

He had not moved for some time, because the question he had asked himself had not gone anywhere.

How could something small keep facing things so much greater than itself, and live? He turned the question over slowly as it was not a new question at all. Small things had been asking it for as long as there had been small things and great things in existence together, and some of them, against every reasonable expectaton, had found answers.

The first answer he found was the simplest, and it was the one every small thing had to learn before any other. The strong did not need to win quickly, because nothing ever truly threatened them, and so they grew careless and certain and bored, while the weak could not afford to lose even once.

A peasant who rose against a king did not win in a day or a season, and if he won at all, it was because he stayed alive through year after year of the king’s soldiers until the king’s attention wandered, or the king grew old, or the king forgot him.

A weak hunter who went after a far stronger one would never trade blows and hope, because one blow would be enough to end it, and so his first and only real goal was to not die. Survival was not the prize at the end of the fight, Noah thought, it was the whole first half of the fight itself, and every small thing that had ever toppled a great one had first refused, stubbornly and for a very long time, to simply be killed.

The second answer was about where to strike. Every great being stood on something, he realized, and whatever it stood on was never as strong as the being itself. A king stood on his granaries and his soldiers and on the story that he could not be touched, so a clever peasant never fought the king at all, and fought the granaries instead, and the story, until the king was standing on nothing.

A weak hunter did not attack the stronger hunter’s sword arm. He found the water that hunter drank from, and the trail that hunter walked every morning, and the one wound that hunter had never let heal.

And a human with a dream, staring up at beings who had lived for billions of years, did not try to match their Immensity, because he never could, but he could look at the thing every Immense One stood on, which was their Narrative, the long story of who they were that held them up and made them great.

The third answer was the one that made him smile, very slightly. The heavier a thing was, the harder it fell, and the more it had to eat to stay standing.

A king’s great army had to be fed every day, so the bigger the army, the deeper its hunger, and a powerful hunter’s terrible speed was exactly what carried him into a pit that a slower man would have walked around.

The strength of the great could become the very thing that broke them, if a small thing found the right place to push. And a being whose Narrative stretched across billions of years did not simply have a great story, it had an enormous wound waiting to be opened, one that would bleed far more than any small story ever could.

Noah sat with that for a long time while the snow fell.

Then he closed his eyes. He sank down into his Dreaming Human Origin, past the new Nightmares that lived there now and past the grey place where his fire had dimmed, and he began to dream possibilities, letting his Dream run fight after fight against beings far greater than himself. He dreamed thousands of them, then tens of thousands, then more than he could count, and he watched every one of them closely.

In nearly all of them, he died. He died to the hand, to the Kings, to things he had not even met yet, and almost every time, he died the same way, in the very first moment, because his Dream was right there in the open and anything strong enough could reach out and close its fingers around it.

He looked at that over and over until he understood it completely, and then he understood what he needed first, which was something standing between his Dream and the hand, something that was not his Dream at all.

A wall, he thought, and not a wall of stone or Immensity, because those could be broken in the same first moment, but a wall made of Narrative. Story laid on story, layer on layer, in front of his Dream, so that anything wanting to collapse him would have to tear through every one of those layers first, and each layer would cost them time, and time was the first answer he had found.

He could build a wall of defenses of his own Narrative!

He could fill it until it was whole, and then begin another on top of it, a second wall and a third, as many as he had grown strong enough to hold, until whatever came for him had to break through all of them before it could even touch the dream underneath.

He dreamed the fights again with the wall in place, and this time he lived much longer in them, but he still lost, because a wall alone could only delay, and he needed a way to win. So he went back to the second answer and the third, and he looked again at the Narratives of the great beings in his dreams, enormous and ancient and stretching back for billions of years, and he thought about how large a wound in a story that size would be.

The pieces came together slowly, one at a time. A Nightmare could be planted, because he had done it already with multiple Immense Ones, and a Nightmare built from a being’s own fear would live inside them wherever they went. If that Nightmare made their Narrative bleed, slowly and without stopping, then the greater the being, the more it would bleed, and if the bleeding flowed back into him, then every great being he cursed would be building his powerfpr him.

There were other pieces of possibilities somewhere past this one, waiting in the dark of his dreaming, but they were not clear yet. But...he actualized the ideas and thoughts!

The Wall! He would build a Wall of Narrative that stacked defenses endlessly!

Noah opened his eyes, and they were brighter than they had been an hour before. He did not have any enemies in front of him to test things out, so the wall would have to start with the only Narrative he had to give, which was his own, and he reached into it carefuly.

It was the story of THE Dreaming Human Origin, a story that was still being lived and still growing with every hour he went on living it, and he opened a small channel from it and let it begin to flow into the place in front of his Dream.

It was slow, much slower than he wanted, but it did not stop, because his story did not stop, and every moment he went on living added a little more to it, and that little more ran straight into the wall. He could feel it rising inside him, thin and pale and only a small way toward full, and the moment it began to stand, his Dream felt safer than it had since the Maze.

|A new Weaving is forming within your Dreaming Human Origin: THE Bleeding Nightmare.|

|A Nightmare planted within a lifeform will make its Narrative bleed. The Narrative it bleeds will flow to you.|

|Narrative Wall: forming.|

|Source: your own ongoing Narrative.|

|While a Narrative Wall stands, anything that would collapse your Dream must break through it first.|

|Because of the nature of your Narrative, your Dreaming Human Origin, and your Shinjitsu, breaking a single full Narrative Wall requires the power, Immensity, or Narrative needed to collapse a genuine Unfathomable Immense Lifeform.|

|When a Narrative Wall is full, what flows in beyond it begins to form the next wall.|

|Narrative Walls built from your own Narrative: up to 3, one for each Level your Tree’s Branches have reached.|

|Narrative Walls built from the Narratives of others: as many as you can take.|

|How much a Narrative Wall can hold, and how much it can defend, will rise with your Dreaming Human Origin and the growth of your Tree.|

|Narrative Wall 1: 0% to 4%.|

|Your own Narrative builds the wall slowly. The Narratives of others will build it far faster.|

...!

Noah read the prompts twice, and then he let out a long, slow breath. He could not kill an Unfathomable Immensity himself, not yet, but once even one of these walls was full, an Unfathomable would need everything it had just to break through it, and he could raise three of them on his own story alone, and as many more as he could take from others!

He looked up as above his head, a long horizontal bar only he could see began to fill up with vibrant obsidian gold stellar light, the label above it being |Narrative Wall- 1x(4%)|.

|Narrative drawn: your beginning, the glorious mutation of existence.|

|Narrative drawn: THE One the Threads Bend Toward.|

|THE One the Threads Bend Toward has been very active. Many threads have bent toward you of late, and its Narrative has grown heavy with them.|

|Narrative Wall 1: 4% to 100%.|

|Narrative Wall 2: 0% to 100%.|

|Narrative Wall 3: 0% to 100%.|

|Narrative Walls built from your own Narrative: 3 of 3.|

|Your Narratives are not consumed. They will keep flowing into your walls for as long as you keep living them.|

|Further walls must be built from the Narratives of others, or if you elevate the Levels of your Branches of THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree|

|Your farm has produced a harvest.|

|Common Narrative Fruit obtained: 15.|