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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5208: Bellum I
Chapter 5208: Bellum I
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<The Sanctum Velanthra>The moment the contact with THE Bellum Dreamstone deepened past its initial comprehension layer, the body Noah occupied in THE Sanctum Velanthra felt wholly isolated from his other selves.
The thread connecting him to the Dante body in the vessel was present but distant, the way a heartbeat is present in a finger but not felt there. His other body’s experiences continued, somewhere, but they arrived as background signal rather than active sensation. He did not worry about this. He only focused on what was unfolding in front of him, because something was unfolding, and it demanded the full attention of every perceptual capacity he possessed.
|Record of THE Bellum Cause activating.|
|Every entity that contacts weavings holding a record of a Prime Cause will observe something wholly unique to their own existence. The record does not show the same vision to any two beings. What unfolds before you has been selected by THE Bellum Cause itself based on what your existence requires to comprehend its foundational truth.|
|Observe. You cannot participate. You cannot alter what you witness. You can only watch and receive.|
He was transported.
Or rather, the sensation was of transportation without movement, the specific quality of a perspective shifting rather than a body moving. Around him, existence swirled with multicolored brilliance that did not belong to any Civilization or any Cause but to the raw substrate that Causes were derived from, the primordial potential that preceded every framework anyone had ever built atop it.
Then the image settled.
And Noah saw a wonder.
It was massive in the way that made mass feel like the wrong word, its body covered in layered plates of glacial ice-blue crystal that moved when it moved with the slow grinding authority of tectonic formations convinced of their own permanence.
Its serpentine neck was long, its body low and broad, four legs planted against a snowy mountain with the specific stability of something that had been standing in that exact position long enough that the mountain had adjusted itself around it rather than the other way around.
Its head carried the angular precision of a predator whose entire evolutionary history had been one long argument in favor of forward momentum. Steam rose from the gaps between its crystal plates in slow patient columns that the mountain wind carried away without dispersing.
The word arrived in his mind without him constructing it.
Relictus.
The Relictus rested on the snowy mountain with the quiet of something that had not encountered anything worth moving for in a very long time. The snow around it had compressed into ice under the sustained pressure of its presence.
Then, in the distance, another outline appeared.
Nine heads on a single serpentine draconic body, each head crowned with a floating ring of platinum flame that burned with the steady authority of something connected to a fuel source that did not diminish.
The body moved through the distant void with the unhurried confidence of a being that had never encountered anything that moved faster than it chose to let things move. Nine platinum crowns above nine heads, the flames of each one carrying a slightly different configuration than the others, as though each head had developed its own specific relationship to whatever the crowns expressed.
The two Relictus became aware of each other.
For a single extended moment, nothing happened. Two beings of a category that had never been common enough across existence to develop protocols for encountering members of their own kind, occupying the same vision-space for the first time, regarding each other with the patient attention of consciousnesses making their initial assessments.
And an instant later...
ROAAAR!
They fought.
No territory dispute. No resource competition. No accumulated grievance across prior encounters. Simply two consciousnesses encountering each other across a shared space and producing, with the inevitability that the Dreamstone had been waiting to show him, exactly what consciousness encountering consciousness always produced.
Vibrant power covered both of them as they collided, the glacial crystal plates of the first Relictus meeting the nine-headed serpentine form of the second in an engagement that rewrote the local architecture of the snowy mountain and the void surrounding it with each successive exchange. The snow was gone within the first few seconds. The mountain began to follow shortly after!
|THE Bellum Cause speaks:|
|Consciousness, upon encountering other consciousness, inevitably produces friction, and friction inevitably produces conflict, and conflict inevitably produces violence. This is not a failure of consciousness. This is its first and most fundamental expression.|
|Fighting is not an aberration of existence. It is a core function of it, as essential to the arrangement as breathing is essential to the body. The arrangement of existence requires conflict the way a river requires gradient. Without the differential, there is no flow. Without the flow, there is no movement. Without movement, there is no progression.|
|Fighting produces required weavings of existence. Every engagement between two conscious beings generates a specific category of existential output that no other process can replicate. Adversity, when survived, does not return the survivor to their prior configuration. It returns them to a new configuration that the prior configuration did not have the capacity to achieve.|
|THE Bellum Cause does not celebrate destruction. It acknowledges that destruction is the price of refinement, and that refinement is the only direction existence has ever actually moved in, regardless of what any given being believed about their own trajectory at any given moment.|
|Conflict propagates adversity. Adversity propagates growth. Growth propagates grander conflict. The cycle has no terminal point. This is not a tragedy. This is the mechanism.|
...!
Noah’s gaze was lost in the fighting Relictus.
They tore at each other with the comprehensive commitment of beings for whom the engagement was the only thing currently worthy of their full existence.
Crystal plates shattered and regrew. Nine heads struck from nine directions and were met by a body that had been learning to absorb impact since before the mountain it had been resting on had formed. The void around them accumulated the residue of the engagement in layers of discharged authority and dissolved substance that settled into the surrounding space like sediment.
Then both of them were heavily injured.
The glacial Relictus bled white-luminescent fluid from a dozen wounds across its crystal plating. The nine-headed one had lost two of its nine crowns and carried gashes along its serpentine body that pulsed with the specific light of things trying to decide whether to close or deepen.
Both of them bellowed.
"PERSEVERE!"
BOOM!
