Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5964

Chapter 5964: The Bounty That Owes Nothing

Astarothael waited until the others were gone, and until the Verdant Regard had disappeared into the grey gaps after them, and until the snow had settled again over the empty rows. Then she hopped down from the porch rail, crossed the step in three small, delibrate paces, and sat down directly in front of Noah’s boots, her tail wrapped neatly around her paws and her bright eyes fixed on his face.

"Essara of Existence are true power," she said. "Not eggs. Not chickens. Taking your own Narrative and your own Immensity and cutting existence itself apart to make something that was never yours into something that is."

She tilted her head. "I can tell you where to go. There are regions of existence where the grain runs so strong and so strange that the Essara carved there are like nothing anyone has seen. I know where some of them are."

Noah said nothing, and she went on, her voice dropping into something warmer and more persuasive. "Or we could go and find one of mine first. None of mine were common, little farmer. Not one." Her ears tipped forward. "Don’t you want to see one? To hold it? Someone as weak as you will likely take years before you are strong enough to carve existence for yourself. I am only offering to shorten the road."

Noah smiled at her, calmly, and did not answer right away. He sat in the doorway with the hoe across his knees and listened to what she had said, and then he listened to himself, to see what in him wanted to answer her.

Not very long ago, he would have wanted it. He knew that about himself. The young man who had first held infinite mana...well, infinite focus with a fireball skill, would have wanted it, and so would the man who had fought his way through everything since, and he would have gone looking for the strongest grain in existence and cut it loose without a second thought, because power was power and the strong took what they needed. That had been true for a long time.

It was not true anymore. Somewhere between the first giving and the chickens in their pen, something in his nature had turned, so slowly that he had not noticed until now, when a cat offered him the most precious thing existence had to give and he felt nothing reach for it.

He tried to imagine carving existence, taking his Narrative and cutting a piece of the thing he was part of, and it did not feel wicked, exactly. It felt unnatural, the kind of thing a farmer simply does not do.

"Astarothael," he said at last, gently. "Do you know what water does?"

The cat’s eyes narrowed. "It is wet."

"It goes down," Noah said. "Always down, to the lowest place it can find. It never fights anything. It gives itself to every field and every root and every living thing it touches, and it never asks any of them for anything back, and it never tries to climb." He looked out over the snowing farm. "And there is nothing in all of existence that can stand against it in the end. Stone wears away before it. Mountains do."

"Existence isn’t a quarry," he went on, his voice quiet and even. "I’m part of it. If I cut a piece out of it to make myself stronger, I’m only cutting a piece out of the thing I belong to, and holding it up, and calling it mine. A tree doesn’t carve the soil. It doesn’t steal from the rain. It drinks what comes to it, and it drops its leaves back onto the ground, and the ground grows richer, and the tree grows taller, and neither of them owes the other anything at all."

He looked down at her, and his eyes were very kind. "You climbed holding everything you’d ever taken, and you told me yourself what happened at the top. I don’t want to hold anything. I want to give, and keep giving, and see what grows." He smiled again. "If that’s the long road, then I’ll take the long road. I’m a farmer. Farmers are good at waiting."

When he finished speaking, the peace in him deepened. It went down through him, down and down, past his Dreams and his Nightmares and the warm steady current at the center of him, and as it went, he felt outward along every thread of himself at once.

He felt the Fallow. He felt the door he had broken open here in the Carcosa, and the one in the Chrysalis where his Dreams still lay scattered, and the one beneath the ruined mountain in the Ashfall Reaches, and the stellar grassland he had grown in the Undefined Gaps. In every one of those places, the grey light of the Fallow had kept spreading since he left it, slow and patient, and alongside it, his Dreams and his Nightmares had kept spreading too, because he carried infinity, and things he gave from infinity did not run out.

He had not been paying attention to how far it had all gone. Now he looked, and it went very far indeed!

Every time he had given his authority to existence, it had not gone to one small place, but out across vast stretches of the dark, settling into everything it touched, and all of it together was larger than the Nova Dream Sector he had once spent building by replacing existence with his Dreams, many times larger. None of it was the Narrative of Kings, or the Long Night, or the two Epitropos seats he held. None of it had been given to him by anyone. It was simply himself, spread out across existence, giving.

And as he understood that, a thought rose in him, quiet and certain. He had written two Narratives, the story of a glorious mutation of existence and the story of THE One the Threads Bend Toward, and both of them were still true, and he was still living both. But neither of them was the story he was living now, sitting in this doorway in the snow, giving himself away to existence and watching existence give back. It was time to write a third.

A scroll unrolled in the air in front of him. It was long and pale and shining faintly at its edges, with blue-gold and obsidian-gold threaded through its fibers, and it hung there in the snowing light waiting for him. Noah lifted one finger, and where he touched the scroll, words began to form, written in his own hand.

"There was a farmer who owed existence nothing, and existence owed him nothing in return.

He tasted everything, the sweet and the bitter and the poison, so that he would know what feeds and what heals and what kills. He did not carve. He did not take. He broke the ground only so that something could be planted in it, and everything he took up from the soil, he gave back with more besides.

He gave freely, without asking where his gifts would fall. And existence, which owed him nothing, gave back to him freely in turn, and what it gave was more than what he had given, because a gift given freely does not come back the same size. It comes back multiplied. It comes back exalted.

So he gave again, and existence gave again, and each time, the gifts grew larger, until the field and the farmer could no longer tell which of them was feeding the other. Neither of them kept a ledger. Neither of them was ever in debt. There was only the giving, going around and around, and everything it passed through grew richer than it had been.

This is the bounty that owes nothing. The more it is given, the more there is to give."

He lifted his finger from the scroll, and it began to shine. The light started in the words and spread out through the whole of it, blue-gold and obsidian-gold and white, until the scroll blazed in the doorway of the little shell house so brightly that the snow falling past it turned to points of light.

|Third Narrative written: THE Bounty That Owes Nothing.|

|It grows from what you already hold: THE Tide That Owes Nothing.|

|It has taken root in THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|What you give to existence freely now returns to you multiplied and exalted.|

|What existence gives back, when you give it on in turn, returns to existence multiplied and exalted.|

|The more each side gives, the more each side receives. There is no debt, and the giving does not end.|

Oh.

Oh!!!

|Pure Existential Essence received in a wild surge of abundance for the first time.|

|Branch of Dreams: Level 7 to Level 9.|

|Branch of Nightmares: Level 8 to Level 10.|

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 7 to Level 9.|

|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 8 to Level 11.|

|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 6 to Level 8. Each wall is now worth 170.|

|THE Endless Retelling: 34 Narrative per second.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 7 to Level 8.|

|Sub-Branch of THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 4 to Level 5.|

|Narrative Walls: 21 of 23.|

THUMP!