Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5978

Chapter 5978: Bloodied, and Calm!

Noah knelt in the broken snow with both hands in the soil and took stock.

Blood ran from his nose and both ears and the corners of his eyes, and his coat had soaked through at the chest and shoulders. His straw hat lay in the snow beside his knee. He could not remember losing it. That was the smallest of his problems.

|Narrative Walls standing: 4 of 26. Around you: 3. Over the farm: 1.|

|Broken out of existence: 7. Rebuilding: 15. Regeneration cannot reach them.|

|Farm Wall: whole.|

Four out of twenty-six. He read it once, and once was enough.

Then he looked down the possibilities ahead, as he always could, and they lay open across the snow all at once. In one, he rose and swung the Hoe, and the Shepherd’s army buried him beside his own coop before the minute was out. In another, he held his three walls and waited, and died more slowly, and the farm died after him. In a third, he did the one thing he had ever been completely sure of, and the road ran on past the edge of what he could see.

Every road where the cup of plum-petal tea inside the shell house was finished began with that third one.

So he gave.

He let go of everything that was left: the last Dreams he had been holding back for the walls, and the last warm thread of the farm’s authority he had kept for himself. All of it went into the ground. He kept nothing!

HUUM!

And at this time.

As he gave absolutely Everything!

Far out across existence, at the edges of every place he had ever given himself to, something that had been gathering for a very long time finished gathering.

It came back to him through the soil, unhurried, and rose into his palm.

It was a seed. Small and plain and brown-gold, no bigger than the nail of his smallest finger, warm and a little rough. Kings went to war for things that blazed. This was nothing that blazed. It was the most important thing he had ever held, and he knew it the instant it touched his skin.

|Quintessara of Existence received.|

|It was not carved. It was given.|

|Rarity: Common. Rare. Exalted. None of these. It is whatever existence is.|

|Shackle broken: none. Nothing ever bound you that you had not first taken.|

|Veins: 1. More will open as you give.|

|Vein 1: THE Harvest of All Things Taken.|

|Kind: Way.|

|Cost: none. It is given.|

|Powers of Existence held by this Vein: 3.|

|First Power: THE Return. Every lifeform your authority or your Bleeding Nightmare touches begins to give back to existence what it has taken to become what it is, in proportion to what it took. What it gives back passes through THE Bounty That Owes Nothing, and returns to existence and to you, multiplied.|

|Second Power: THE Doom Abominations of Existence. From any lifeform afflicted by your Nightmares, Doom Abominations of Existence rise for a moment under your command. They tear apart what was taken, purify it, and return it to existence. They fade when their target is erased, or when you tell them it is enough.|

|Third Power: DOOM.|

|Effect: ???|

|Trigger: ???|

|Ends: ???|

|Against those who took little, it is almost nothing. Against those who took everything, it is everything.|

|Essara carved from existence remember where they came from.|

|Shaped by you: born of one who gave everything and owed nothing.|

...!

The First Power he understood at once. It was giving, turned around. The Second Power he read twice, and down the roads he saw what it would look like. The Third Power he looked for down every road at once as he only saw...

Fog. Wherever DOOM waited, his roads went grey and quiet. Existence had hidden this one even from him.

He closed his hand. The seed sank into his palm and through it, into his chest, and settled near the center of him, and roots went out from it in every direction: down through his Dreaming Human Origin, along every Branch of his Tree, and out into every dark seed of the Bleeding Nightmare he had planted in every lifeform on that field. A small seed. What it had rooted into was the size of a battlefield.

"What...was that?" Lifthrasir asked, barely above a whisper. She stood a few paces off with her cracked arms at her sides.

"Something given," Noah said.

"Given by whom?"

"By everything I ever gave to."

She stared at him. Of every being on that field, she knew best that impossible things happened around him. She was walking around inside one.

He spoke the name of it quietly, and Quintessentially, and let it go down the nearest thread as he locked his gaze with those around him!

"THE Harvest...of All Things Taken."

|THE Return: reaching through every seed of THE Bleeding Nightmare on the field.|

|Status applied to every attacker: [Harvested] (Way, returning, ongoing). What was taken goes home.|

The nearest attacker was a young Half-Unfathomable of the Shepherd’s forces, very young for what he was. A faint thread left him, no more than a trickle, and went down into the soil. He looked at himself, then at the kneeling farmer, and shrugged.

On the western ridge, Thessaly laughed, bright and full of relief. "That? That is what you have been saving?"

Noah let her laugh. He had already seen how long it would last. The Immense One had served in a quiet corner of the Legion and taken almost nothing in his life, and the Return had taken almost nothing back. That was the first rule. The Return was exact. It weighed every being on the field to the last grain of what it had taken, whether Noah wished it to or not.

Thessaly’s sister was not laughing. Phaedra stood on the ridge with her eyes on the threads, the fine dark lines running out from the farm into every lifeform on the field, her own chest among them, and she had gone very still.

Noah rose. He picked his hat out of the snow, brushed it off, and set it on his head, and left the blood where it was. Elpis hummed against his palms when he settled the Hoe in his hands, warm and steady.

He looked east and west at every being that had come to take something from his farm.

"Let’s see," he said, "what all of you have taken."

Every seed he had planted since the first stroke of the war woke at once.

For the ones who had taken little, it was little. For the ones who had taken a great deal, it was everything they had.

At the front of the Shepherd’s army stood the Unfathomable whose phantom was a burning ship. He had climbed the Legion by sailing that ship through one Immense One after another and drowning each of them in fire for the Shepherd’s banner. Noah felt the thread in his chest pull taut, and the Unfathomable’s Narrative began to pour out of him into the soil.

...!

He became shocked!

"What are you doing to me?!" the Unfathomable shouted, clutching at his chest.

"Nothing you didn’t do first," Noah said.

Noah looked at the burning ship behind him, at its blackened hull and its sails of fire, every plank of it built out of someone else, and down the roads he watched it pour back into existence at this pace for a very long time. Too long. Some weeds came up with a gentle pull. Some had to be dug out by the root.

He called the Second Power.

THE Doom Abominations of Existence!

The Bleeding Nightmare seed inside the Unfathomable split open, and something climbed out of it! Something grand!

|Second Power: THE Doom Abominations of Existence.|

|Risen: 4, from the Unfathomable of the burning ship.|

|Target: everything he took.|

Glorious abominations!

|Target erased. Everything he took has been purified and returned to existence.|

"Kill him! All at once! Before he does it again!"

"DOOM."

....!

|DOOM.|

|Trigger: learned. Any lifeform that uses Narrative or Immensity against you.|