Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5982

Chapter 5982: After II

The hours came and went somewhat peacefully.

Elpis was undergoing cycles of sleeping and waking, because her unique existence was still healing and something as simple as sleep did more for it than anything else. She seemed...to still be transforming as sleep was the mechanism thst continued to work best.

It was the simplicity of existence.

Noah stood alone at the end of the row with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his straw hat white with snow, and thought everything through.

Ione Kalliste was walking into the dark toward the Shepherd with everything she had seen behind her eyes, and Phaedra was flying toward her father’s people with her sister’s death and her own blood on her face.

Every one of the Shepherd’s servants on that slope had felt his name leave the banner, and so had every being in existence who kept watch on it, which meant that by now, or very soon, everyone who mattered would know exactly where this farm was.

He looked across the countless possibilities ahead and went straight toward the one where his dream would grow best, and it was the simplest thought he had had all day: a farmer whose field lay in the path of a flood did not stand in the field and wait to see how high the water would come. He moved the field!

He held out his right hand, looked at it for a moment, and closed it, slowly, into a fist.

HUUM!

The farm began to fade, gently, from the edges inward. The far rim of the starlit grass dimmed first and the grey light of the Fallow along it drew in on itself, and then the black-gold soil, every row and every furrow, folded softly into the dark, and the three rivers went with it, still running, along with the coop and its curved walls and the shell house with its round amber windows and the warm gold curve of the Farm Wall over all of it.

He held every grain of it! The whole farm sat in his closed hand, the weight of the soil and the cold of the rivers and the small warm heartbeats of everyone inside, and none of it slipped.

In the coop the chickens murmured uneasily and then settled, THE Emperor Penguin came out and looked around at the folding dark with all six gold eyes and let out a long cry of pure delight, and Thalia stood silently at the edge of the Farm Wall and watched the Carcosa disappear around them. Noah carried them all through the folds of existence, and while he carried them, existence went on unfolding around them!

The Return went on too. Every lifeform that had struck him in the war still carried a seed of the Bleeding Nightmare rooted deep inside it, and wherever they had fled, the Return found them. The Half-Unfathomables who had scattered into the Carcosa felt it first, because they had the least to give back, and some of them lived through it, emptied and shaking and very small, though most did not.

One by one, out across the dark, he felt their threads go taut and then go still, and each time, what they had taken came home to existence, and existence gave some of it back to him, freely and multiplied.

|A thread has ended.|

|What it took has returned to existence, and to you.|

He felt each one and let each one go. The Unfathomables who had limped away from the eastern slope with their Narratives pouring out of them went next, somewhere in the long dark between the Carcosa and wherever they had hoped to reach.

Much later, very far away, two threads went taut at almost the same moment, and through them he could feel a lotus of the Shepherd’s Legion, a great white flower turning slowly in the dark with a hall at its heart, and in that hall a presence so vast and so cold that his threads trembled to touch even the edge of it.

Hoh?

Ione Kalliste had reached her King, as the terrifying power he sensed through her made plain, and then, standing before her King, she died, and the Shepherd of Falling Stars received his report and the corpses together!

|Thread ended: Ione Kalliste.|

|Thread ended: Aethon and many others.|

|What they took has returned to existence, and to you.|

Noah stopped for a moment and thought about all the death of the day. They had chosen to come, and they had chosen to strike, and he did not regret what the Harvest had done, so he went on.

One thread he could not follow. It ran from him out into the dark toward Phaedra, as fine and dark as all the others, and he had felt it pulling at her through the long hours since she fled, until, without warning, it was cut. It never went taut and still as the others had; it was severed cleanly, a little way out from her. Something very large seemed to have stepped into the space between them and closed it, similar to how his Bleeding Nightmare had been stopped by that terrifying Cultist...but somewhat different.

|One thread cannot be followed.|

|Something vast stands between you.|

He reached past the cut and found nothing he could read at all, only a vast, quiet edge and darkness beyond it, and for the first time in a long while he felt something close to awe.

Nearly everything in existence lay open to him, and this did not, and he knew whose hand could close a door such as this.

THE Dissolved Progenitor. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought that this being could become his enemy, and the pressure of that fact alone would have made most beings collapse. But alas. Such was existence!

At last, after some time, he opened his hand, and the farm unfolded into a clearing in a forest! Soil and rivers and rows and coop and house and the gold curve of the Farm Wall came down gently and settled into the ground of a place that was very old and very quiet, and all around it stood trees, tall and thick and ancient, their trunks wider than the shell house and their branches meeting far overhead in a roof of dark green, with warm air beneath them.

The snow of the Carcosa still lay on the roof of the coop and the shell plates of the house, and in the warmth of the forest it began, very slowly, to melt.

This was the Undefined Gaps, and these were the forests where the Legacy of THE Acharya had once stood. The Legacy was gone from here now, carried a little while ago into Ruination’s existence with its halls and its hidden statues, and the forest it had left behind was empty. But the ground remembered!

Night came slowly under the old trees, not like a sun and mood rose or fell around blank space anyways...but he could always mimic light and darkness.

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 12.|

|Shinjitsu Assimilation: 10% to 18%.|

|The next threshold waits at 25%.|

|A carved Essara has returned to existence: Destruction.|

|Existence gives back: Sap of Existence.|