Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5986

Chapter 5986: Provenance and Endings I

Night under the old trees of the Undefined Gaps came down slowly and stayed a long time. It was, by any reasonable measure, a peaceful evening, and Noah was spending it somewhere else entirely.

Some of him was in the Chrysalis. Over the past few hours he had let his existence run out of him a little at a time, thin and patient, until it lay across the small region of the Chrysalis he had extended THE Fallow into, touching everything and pressing on nothing.

He felt the long golden sea there, dimmed and darkened where his giving had once changed it. He felt the broken stretch where the Maze of Destiny used to stand, the scattered grey light of the Fallow door he had opened and lost, and further out, sunk deep into that region and lying cold and patient, his own Dreams, the ones that had come apart when his body died there. Before he went any further, though, he wanted to know exactly where he stood, so he looked.

|Narrative Walls standing: 61 of 61. Around you: 60. Over the farm: 1. Each wall is worth 250.|

|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 300. Three walls restored every second.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 13. Sub-Branch of THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 10.|

|Quintessara of Existence: 1. Veins open: 1. Powers of Existence: 3.|

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 12. Assimilation: 22%.|

|Narratives: 4. THE Narrative of Kings: no entry.|

...!

He read it through twice, slowly. Sixty-one walls at 250 each came to just over fifteen thousand, and at three walls a second, he could lose twenty walls and have every one of them back in under seven seconds.

So who could actually hurt him now? Most things, he decided, could not. An ordinary Narrative thrown at him broke against his walls, an ordinary Immensity broke after it, and an Unfathomable with nothing else in its hands could hammer at him for a very long while and gain nothing for it.

The ones who could hurt him were the ones holding Essara. Roxanna had broken eleven walls with a single blow, back when each was worth 240, and she had not merely broken them. She had broken them all the way down, out of existence entirely, and left holes his regeneration could not reach until existence itself chose to close them. Three walls a second meant nothing against a hole that regeneration could not touch. That was what a Power of Existence did. A Narrative argued with his walls; a Power of Existence went underneath them, to the thing the walls were standing on, and pulled.

And hers had only been Rare. So the real question was never how strong an enemy was, in the old sense. It was what kind of Essara they carried, how many, and how many Powers of Existence those Essara held. One Common Essara with a single Power was a nuisance he could outlast. A Rare one was a wound. Several Rare ones in the same chest, each with two or three Powers, was a war. And an Exalted Essara, or a being with more than one? He thought about Phaedra, and how her Exalted Name had reached for him and slid off, and smiled!

Then again, being hurt was not the same thing as losing. The weak hunter’s way still held: stay alive first, for as long as it takes, then strike at whatever the great thing is standing on. His walls kept him alive. The Bleeding Nightmare did the rest, because every being that struck him planted something in itself by doing it, a dark seed rooted wherever its strike had touched him, and that seed was the door through which everything else came in.

Through that door, the Return pulled. Everything a being had taken to become what it was began to flow back out of it, measured exactly against what it had taken, and with it went the grip on whatever Essara it had carved out of existence, because carved things remembered where they came from and wanted to go home. Where the Return was too slow, the Abominations climbed out of the seed and tore the taken things out by hand. And if anything kept striking him with Narrative or Immensity while all of that happened, there was DOOM, waiting quietly until he said otherwise.

Against an Unfathomable Immensity, that was nearly the whole fight. Against an Excedere Unfathomable carrying Essara, it was the same fight, only longer, because those ones could hold their Essara in place by will alone. Phaedra had held her Exalted Essara of Name in exactly that fashion, bleeding for it the whole time.

How long could a being hold out under that? Hours, perhaps, for the strongest. They would hold for a while, and he only had to outlast the while!

Of course, nothing was free, and he went through exactly where his tools went soft. The Return was fair, and fairness cut both ways. Against a being that had taken little, it took little back, and against a being whose power was entirely its own, generated rather than taken, it would find almost nothing to return, and the Abominations would climb out of the seed and stand there with nothing to tear. DOOM...well, he would test that more. Its Effect line still read ???, and he had no intention of guessing at the rest in the middle of a real fight.

And the Nightmares themselves could be pinched out. A thread of his had been cut cleanly on its way to Phaedra by something vast that had simply reached into the space between them, and long before that, a Cultist had stopped his Bleeding Nightmare cold.

So the list of what to watch was short and specific: those whose power was their own, those who never struck first, those who could reach into his threads and close them, and anyone carrying an Exalted Essara whose Powers he had not yet seen. He set the list down carefully in his mind, beside the cup of tea, and left it there where he could see it.

As for what came next, he was already clear. He had stood in the snow of the Carcosa and told every lifeform on that field that he was coming for every Narrative that grew by crushing smaller ones, and every King who ruled them, and he had meant it. That road was laid out in front of him, and he intended to walk it, starting soon.

But first, there was this other thing, the one he could not fully explain. He had won. Any way he weighed it, the war on his farm had been the greatest victory he had known in a very long time, and he had come out of it with more than he had gone in with: a Fourth Narrative, a seed in his chest that existence had given him freely, sixty-one walls, a son standing beside him instead of behind. And yet ever since, something had sat in him that would not settle.

It was not grief, exactly, and it was not guilt. It was quieter than either, and it had a very particular shape: a small cracked girl lying down in the snow beside two dead giants. He had turned it over from every side he could think of and found no lever to move it with. For some reason, he couldn’t just leave it alone!

So for the past few hours, while the tea went cold, he had been sending a thread of his Dream and his existence out across the Chrysalis, looking for the one being in existence who might be able to tell him why that girl had ever needed to die the first time. He was looking for THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.

|A thread of your Dream has found what it was seeking.|

|Origin of the mark: THE Primordial Gu of Provenance.|

|The connection is faint. It can be felt from the other side.|