Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5956

Chapter 5956: Devourer

Above his head, the bar now read |Narrative Wall- 8/8x(100%)|, eight walls burning one above another, and a broken one would now come back in about eleven seconds instead of nearly two minutes. Noah let out a long breath, because the Sub-Branch had climbed exactly as fast as his existence had promised, while the four great Branches had only managed two Levels each.

Then a second set of prompts arrived, and these were the ones he had been waiting for.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare: first result.|

|Target: Diomande, Excedere Unfathomable Immense Lifeform of THE Covenant of the Inverted Peak.|

|The Nightmare built from his fear still buds inside him.|

|Narrative bled from Diomande so far: enough to fill one Narrative Wall.|

|THE Bleeding Nightmare is persistent. It will keep bleeding him for as long as it holds.|

|Diomande has begun pressing against it. A target with power this great may tear it out and destroy it.|

|To hook into a target and bind to it irreversibly, THE Bleeding Nightmare must become more complex and more intricate.|

...!

Diomande. Noah turned the name over slowly, and he could still feel the Excedere through the faint thread of the Nightmare, far away in the ruins of the Ashfall Reaches, furious and searching and already pushing at the thing inside him. He had hooked a very big fish, and the hook was small and simple, and a fish that big would not stay on a simple hook for long.

So how did he make it hold? A Nightmare that only sat inside someone could be found and pulled out, but a Nightmare that had grown into the target’s own Narrative, threading itself through every part of their story until removing it meant tearing out pieces of themselves, would be much harder to lose.

He did not know how to make it do that yet, and he stood in the snow thinkng about it, unwilling to let a single drop of Diomande’s Narrative go to waste!

The farm began to buzz under his feet. It was a low, uneasey sound, rising up out of the soil from somewhere deep beneath the field, and a moment later a new prompt appeared.

|The core Narrative of Astarothael cannot be fully broken down.|

|It is too dangerous to keep as it is.|

|Should it be ejected from your farm, or destroyed?|

...!

Noah closed his eyes and felt down into the ground. He and the existence beneath the farm had already broken down most of what Astarothael had been, and in the very center of all that refining, held apart and isolated, there was one piece they could not touch. It was a Narrative, murky and obsidian and white, turbid and vile and very hungry, and even held still in the deep soil, it was reaching out for anything it could eat.

He looked at it for a long time, and he found that he did not want to destroy it, or throw it away. It was vile and hungry and dangerous, a hunger so strong that it had survived falling off the Mountain and burning into its stones for Ages, and that was exactly the thing he had just been wishing his Nightmare had. Why not put it into THE Bleeding Nightmare?

|Warning.|

|The core Narrative of Astarothael is hunger that survived its own death. Placed into THE Bleeding Nightmare as it is, it will try to eat the Nightmare, and then you.|

|There is only one way to remove this danger: raise the Nightmare of Astarothael and bring her under your control.|

|As a Risen Nightmare bound to you, her foul Narrative could flow into THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree, to be refined like everything else.|

|Estimate: if her Narrative can be purified, it could tremendously elevate the capabilities of THE Bleeding Nightmare.|

Noah knelt in the snow, set both palms flat on the black-gold soil, and reached down to the hungry thing at the bottom of his farm. Up close, it was not one Narrative but two, tangled so tightly together that they had nearly become one, and his Shinjitsu pulled them gently apart so he could see what each of them was.

|The core within Astarothael is not hers alone.|

|It is the Narrative of Ammit, THE Devourer, which Astarothael swallowed on her climb up THE Mountain at the Center of Everything and could never digest.|

|Ammit’s hunger is what kept her alive when she fell. It is also what made her vile.|

...!

|Unique Risen Nightmare: Astarothael.|

|Her existence is now wrapped within yours. She cannot act against you.|

|Without Ammit’s hunger, she is only what she was before her climb.|

|What remains of her own Narrative is yours to raise, or to keep small.|

...!

The sapling shook. A fifth Branch pushed out of its glass bark, dark and obsidian-gold, and beside it a sixth rose as well, pale and banded with slowly turning light, while the swirling barriers of his walls turned once around Noah’s body and settled into that sixth Branch, and the thin shoot of THE Endless Retelling bent over and joined it.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare has become a Branch of THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 5.|

|Your Narrative Walls have grown into a Branch of their own: Branch of THE Narrative Wall, Level 5.|

|THE Endless Retelling is now a Sub-Branch of THE Narrative Wall.|