Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5959

Chapter 5959: The Farmer’s Existence

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The mighty Hoe had been lying across THE Farmer’s knees when it happened, and so she felt all of it. When he sank his fingers into the soil and spoke to the cat about wheat and the first farmers, the farm began to move with him, and she moved with it, every one of her five pieces rising and falling in the same slow rhythm as the soil and the rivers and the snow. For a moment there was no line anywhere, not between him and the ground, not between the ground and the sky, not between any of it and herself, and she was only one more part of something very large that was breathing.

Her seams did not ache at all while it lasted. The current that ran through THE Farmer ran through her as well, straight through the center of her and out again into the farm, and she understood, in the slow and simple way she was beginning to understand things, that he had not done anything to the farm. He had only stopped standing apart from it, and everything had settled into its right place on its own.

Afterward, he went on talking to the cat. He asked her about the Mountain and the place near the top and the climb, and she answered in her proud, sulky voice, and the mighty Hoe listened with half of her attention.

The cat had been purified, and her hunger was gone, but she still smelled pungent to the Hoe, sour and old underneath the cleanness, and she did not think that smell would ever entirely go away.

The other half of her attention was on THE Farmer. Since the fifth piece had joined her, she could feel more of him than she ever had, not only the warmth of his authority in her handle but the shape of everything it was connected to, and she found that she wanted to know what that shape was. So she followed his authority outward, gently, along the many threads that ran out of him into existence, until she found one she had never noticed before.

It was crimson and gold, and it did not run toward any place she knew. It ran out of THE Farmer and away into somewhere that was not quite anywhere, toward a weaving of existence that was tied to him alone, and the mighty Hoe blinked, in her own way, and followed it.

She came out in a place that was and was not. A crimson sky hung over everything, written all across with faint scrolling lines that moved too fast to read, and the air smelled of rain on a forest that was very green and very alive. But the forest was not quite there, and neither was the ground beneath it, and everywhere she looked, things were both happening and not happening at once, a tree standing and fallen and never planted, a river running east and west and dry, each possibility laid over the others and all of them real.

This was the Ruined Quantum Existence of Ruination, and the mighty Hoe looked at it with great calm, because it did not frighten her. It was only every road that existence might have taken, kept and remembered instead of thrown away, and she found it rather beutiful.

In one small corner of that vast place, a Legacy stood whole. The Legacy of THE Acharya, which THE Farmer had carried out of the Undefined Gaps and set down here where no one could follow it. Its terraces and towers and long crimson stairs were solid in a way nothing else in that place was, and people moved along them, small and busy and safe, and none of them seemed to know how many possibilities flickered just past the edges of their home.

On one high crimson terrace, a body sat very still, and it was THE Farmer’s. The mighty Hoe looked at it for a moment with something close to fondness, because it was only another piece of him, sitting and watching and giving, just as all the others did.

Then she saw Ruination. She stood at the heart of the Ruined Quantum Existence in a long iron coat, with crimson gold hair that shifted and moved without any wind, and her eyes were scrolling, line after line of record running across them faster than the Hoe could follow. She was not still at all. With every breath she took, the place around her grew, new probabilities unfolding out of her in long bright sheets, roads that existence had not yet walked spreading out and settling into the crimson dark and becoming part of what she kept.

The mighty Hoe watched her for a long time, and then she saw why it was happening so fast. THE Farmer’s authority was here too, flowing into this place in the same slow, warm way it flowed into the farm, and every time it reached Ruination, she took it and unfolded it into more possibilities, and the Ruined Quantum Existence grew larger and richer for it. He was not only giving to the existence that was, the soil and the rivers and the snowing dark. He was giving to everything that might have been as well, and both of them were giving back.

It felt like a grand, endless Tide.

Was this why his authority felt so warm and so pure? The Hoe turned the question over slowly. Perhaps it was because it never stayed in one place, because he passed it endlessly through so many different parts of existence, the real and the possible, the farm and this place and all the others she had not yet seen, and every one of them refined it a little more before it came back to him.

She could not be certain, and she did not try to be. She only watched a little longer, the people of the Legacy going about their evening and THE Farmer’s body sitting still on its terrace and Ruination unfolding road after road into the crimson dark, and once, very briefly, Ruination’s scrolling eyes paused on the place where the Hoe was watching from, and then went on scrolling. Then the mighty Hoe drew herself back along the crimson-gold thread, out of the place that was and was not, and returned to the snow and the farm and the warm hands of THE Farmer, where the cat was still talking.