Read Daily Updated Light Novel, Web Novel, Chinese Novel, Japanese And Korean Novel Online.
Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5414: Estuary IV
Chapter 5414: Estuary IV
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
Something true.
Noah looked up at the representation of THE Devouring Estuary, the massive fleshy eye breathing above him, its lemniscate pupil turning slowly as it ate the existence around it!
And he felt every fraction of what it consumed, the loose substance of the stretched instant bleeding upward into that watching eye and infusing itself across the whole of his foundation, his Osmontian Source Infinity drinking it down, his existence growing fractionally richer with each passing moment simply because the eye was open and he was standing there! It was the strangest sensation. He was not doing anything. He was being fed, perpetually, by the bare fact of what he had become!
|THE Estuary Eye, the manifestation of THE Devouring Estuary, has formed above you. It functions as an extension of your own body. You may make it visible or invisible to any lifeform you choose, selectively, showing it to some while hiding it from others in the same moment. It will manifest wherever your existence is present, and it draws on the same inheritance regardless of whether any being can perceive it.|
|The eye does not need to be summoned and does not need to be dismissed. It is you, the way a hand is you. When hidden, the bleed continues unseen; the eye is merely the visible mouth of a process that never stops. You may anchor it above you, send it ahead of you, or let it ride within your existence unseen, and in every case the estuary draws.|
Noah read it and looked at the risen form of THE Queen Regnant!
"What is considered an Inheritance of those that are True," he asked, "from your perspective?"
He did not accept the distinction. He did not deny it either. He simply asked, and let her tell him what she thought she was looking at.
Her tentacles wriggled, and she answered, grandly.
"Those who walk upon the path of both Infinity and the Primordial Source seamlessly can become True," she said. "It is not a thing achieved by power alone, or by record alone. It is a thing achieved by fusion, by making the two great authorities one. And anyone who becomes a True Lifeform is reborn anew in the becoming. Who they were before, and who they are after, are not the same person. The fusion does not upgrade a being. It allows them to undergo a rebirth with a grander version that shares their memories." The pale tendrils around her aperture shifted.
"And anyone who is truly True has Inherited weavings of the power and the immensity that traces back to the ones the Primeval Lifeforms themselves used to pay their respects to. Those Who Remain."
HUUUM!
One would have thought her words would clarify things. Instead she had only laid another layer of mystery over the first. Primeval Lifeforms paying respects to something. Something that remained. A lineage older than the oldest beings he had a name for, and she spoke it like a thing too large to explain in a single breath!
Noah thought about it, and then he made his decision.
"I’ll be honest with you," he said, " I was planning to raise my value and my standing here by revealing a semblance of my true capabilities, just enough that my words would carry weight with you, that you’d take what I came to say seriously. That was the whole plan. And then this surfaced on its own, and I inadvertently revealed rather more than the semblance I intended." His eyes were calm.
"So let me be clear about what I am and am not. I have no connection to Primeval Lifeforms. I have no knowledge of Those Who Remain. Whatever lineage you think you’re seeing, I came to it from nothing, with no inheritance handed to me by anyone. I Am Me. But one thing is true. My Infinity and my Primordial Source...are one."
BOOM!
He raised his hand, and showed her the endless blue.
The deep cerulean of his Osmontian Source Infinity poured off his palm, the fused authority shining, and its light reflected across the glistening tentacles of THE Queen Regnant, glinting on the mottled maroon and grey of her, washing the writhing mask of her head in blue. Her tentacles stayed contained within her grace, held with magisterial restraint, and yet Noah could feel something underneath the restraint as she remained where she was, basking in the blue brilliance of a thing she had perhaps been chasing for a very long time. A longing. A deep quiet longing, from a being whose own two authorities ran nearly fused and not quite, looking at one in whom they had finally become one!
"Why," she said softly, "would you want your words to hold more weight?"
Noah lowered his hand.
"Because I wanted to tell you something," he said, "and I needed you to believe it completely when I did. So here it is. Among those gathered here. Among the beings you trust with your life, the ones you chose across ages." He held her eyeless gaze. "Two of them are Followers of THE Sealed One. I don’t know which two. But I am certain of the number, and I am certain it’s true."
BOOM!
His words echoed out into the stretched instant, and THE Queen Regnant went extremely quiet.
It was not the quiet of shock. It was the quiet of a vast old thing turning a blade over in its mind, weighing the cut. She turned, slowly, the writhing mask of her head moving across the frozen assembly one being at a time, and her attention had gone chilly, glacial, the sweetness entirely absent now as she took stock of what Noah had said and folded it into considerations of her own. Down the kneeling Swords. Across the powerful personages around her throne. One by one, measuring, the way a being measures a room it has just learned contains a knife it cannot see.
Ultimately, she moved.
She released the Dimension of Existence. The stretched instant collapsed back into the normal flow of time, and everyone in the Hall of Swords resumed motion at once, Dame Seraphine and the others rising from their kneel, the assembly stirring, none of them aware that anything had passed at all.
And before any of them could orient, THE Queen Regnant spoke, commandingly, her sweet voice gone hard as iron.
"O Swords of Mine," she said. "Present your Source Hearts to me. This instant."
WAA!
The scene that followed was instant and brutal and ingenious all at once.
A Source Heart was the very core of a Source Lifeform’s existence, the deepest and most guarded thing a being possessed, the one piece they would entrust to no one, because to hold another being’s Source Heart was to hold the power to crush it and end them in a moment. To present it on command was to offer your own throat to the one you presented it to. And THE Queen Regnant had ordered it given without warning, in a single breath, leaving no time to think, only to obey on reflex or to fail to.
HUUM!
Instantly, chests opened across the hall. Dame Seraphine’s. Every Sword who had come with them. Every powerful personage arrayed around the throne, the horned and the taloned and the serpentine, all of them, instantly, their chests parting and their terrifying Source Hearts presented openly to their Queen, trusting her completely, offering the cores of themselves without hesitation because they were exactly what she had believed them to be.
When the instant passed, two beings had not presented their Source Hearts.
Noah was one. He had no Source Heart to present in the way they meant, and he would not have presented it regardless, and THE Queen Regnant’s gaze passed over him and moved on, because she understood his exception.
The other was a being standing on the far left side of her throne.
One being, apart from Noah, who had not opened his chest instantly. Who had hesitated, for a fraction too long, because the one thing a Follower of THE Sealed One could not do, would never do, was hand the core of their existence to another.
And the moment that hesitation occurred, every single surface in the Hall of Swords, every place where an atom flowed, filled with tentacles.
WUU!
They erupted from everywhere at once, the entire hall becoming her body, the writhing flesh of THE Queen Regnant flooding reality itself, and she bellowed, her sweet voice gone to thunderous fury.
"O Batiatus!" she roared. "You dare scheme around me?! In my own home, beneath my own throne, you dare to follow THE Infinite Liar?!"
BOOM!
Terrific power erupted in answer.
The being on the far left, Batiatus, flared with sudden desperate force, his existence blazing as the tentacles closed toward him from every direction, and he bellowed out his own incredulous denial, the sound of a being who had hidden successfully for so long that he had stopped believing he could ever be found, who had not expected this, not here, not now! His power roared up around him in a frantic blaze, because he had not seen it coming at all, and now there was nowhere in the entire hall that was not her!
