Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5992

Chapter 5992: Journey To The Center Of... II

The few minutes passed as Noah opened his eyes elsewhere.

He had spent them standing at the edge of the temple, watching the mist rise in its slow white columns, and felt the Gu stir behind him before he heard it.

He turned. THE Primordial Gu of Provenance was rising from the gold dais.

It was the first time Noah had seen him stand. He was taller than he had looked seated, broad through the shoulders, and when he straightened, every eye carved into every pillar of the temple opened at once and watched him do it. The seams along his too-many finger joints glowed faintly. His pale gold eyes were clear and calm, and the body he had spoken through all this time was the body he meant to bring.

"Before we go," the Gu said, "you should have something to call me."

Noah waited.

"Gular." The Gu said it simply, without weight. "It is the name I gave myself, a very long time ago, before I was anything at all."

A name, given freely, by the being that had once killed him!

Noah thought about it for a moment. "Osmont," he said.

"Mmm." Gular smiled faintly. "Shall we?"

He raised one hand and drew it down through the air in front of him, and existence opened.

It parted along a seam that had not been there a moment before, and behind the seam lay an Existential Conduit far larger than any Noah had ever seen. It was a road made of existence folded in on itself, wide enough to swallow the floating island behind them, and its walls were not walls at all. They were regions seen edge-on, whole stretches of existence pressed thin and sliding past one another in long, slow currents of color and dark. It was cold inside!

Gular stepped in. Noah followed.

The Conduit carried them. There was no walking, exactly. They stood and existence moved under them, past them, around them, and the regions in its walls slid by faster and faster until they blurred under unknown quantum weavings of existence.

The first one Noah recognized was the Chrysalis.

It went by beneath them, a long golden sea seen from far above, dimmed in a stretch where his giving had once darkened it. He saw the scar where the Maze of Destiny had stood, the grey glow of his Fallow spreading across one small region.

Next came the Rim.

It was an edge, pale and cracked, a great broken lip of existence where something had once been snapped off and never mended. White cliffs ran along it into the distance, and beyond them was nothing he could name. The hum of the Conduit dropped lower as they passed it. Gular did not look at the Rim at all.

Then the Undefined Gaps, the dark between definitions, and Noah felt his farm body somewhere far off in it, standing at the end of a row in the old forest with the Tree at his back. For a moment he was in both places at once, the cold of the Conduit on one face and the warm green air of the forest on the other!

The light changed.

It came in through the walls of the Conduit, soft and endless, and the regions sliding past stopped blurring and slowed. Beyond them lay a calm so vast that Noah’s eyes could find no edge to it at all. Quiet roads ran through it in every direction, lined far off with white flowers, and the air that seeped in through the Conduit’s walls smelled faintly of them.

This was...

THE Sumeru Elysium?

Gular’s voice dropped. "Keep your threads close while we cross this."

Noah drew his existence further in without asking why. THE Dissolved Progenitor likely kept its watch there. He had cut its daughters down in the Carcosa. He did not need to send it a greeting.

"Somewhere in this place," Gular said quietly, "a house I mean to end is sleeping. Not all of it is asleep anymore. I felt something stir in it, not long ago." He glanced back at Noah once. "Walk softly."

They walked softly. The white flowers slid past along the quiet roads, and the calm pressed in on every side, and neither of them spoke until the Elysium fell away behind them and the Conduit went dark again.

Only then did Noah let his Existence back out!

"May I ask you something?" Noah said.

"You may."

"You call it THE Center. Is that its name?"

Gular was quiet for a while. The Conduit hummed around them, and the regions slid past in their slow, folded currents.

"No," he said at last. "It is only what I call it, because I had to call it something. I am not certain it calls itself anything...you will understand once you get there. The existence there is very...well, you will see. A name will be the least of your worries."

HUUM!

Noah thought of a small blue-gold girl sitting up in a field of snow, choosing a name for herself after he bad talked to her about hope, and of the moment it had settled into all nine pieces of her at once.

"Everything that begins gets named eventually," he said.

"By whom?"

"By whoever nurtures it first."

Gular turned his head and looked at him for a long moment, and the eyes along his knuckles opened, one by one, and looked too. Then he faced forward again.

|Existential pressure: severe. Weak Narratives: fracturing.|

|Narrative Walls standing: 67 of 67.|

|Damage received: a small fraction of the surrounding pressure.|

|Regeneration: exceeds damage before any wall can break.|

...!