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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5554: The Well! I
Chapter 5554: The Well! I
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<THE True Human Emperor>Outside the obelisk, Noah turned and nodded once toward Hvitrmarr.
She understood before the gesture finished. Where a colossal white queen had stood in the ruined gold, white flame gathered inward and folded, gigantic mass drawing down through itself in a spiral of pale sovereign light, and when the light thinned a woman stood in the wreckage of the gardens.
Tall. White-haired. Twin spiral horns of ivory rose back from her temples, and her eyes had not changed at all, gold with ring inside ring for pupils. Her robe was white and dazzling and it was not cloth. Causes moved through it!
She rolled her shoulders once inside a shape she had not worn in a long while, and said nothing.
Ryaenara looked her up and down and made a small sound of pure appreciation as she whistled.
Damodred did not look at all, because a mountain does not turn its head for a change of clothes!
Theron Adranos watched all of it without comment, and then he stepped up to the obelisk.
He set his palm flat against the blue-gold stone. There was no incantation, no weaving, no authority pressed into it, and Noah watched carefully and confirmed what he already suspected. Theron gave off nothing. He simply touched it, and the obelisk knew him!
The light running up its faces reversed.
It poured downward instead of up, sheeting off the carved lines, pooling at the base and spreading outward across the scorched dirt in a slow widening ring, and where the light crossed the ruined ground the ruined ground was not there anymore. A doorway opened in the middle of a butchered garden, and through it came air that smelled of water!
"Come," Theron said. "See it, and then decide."
They went through!
Existence flickered with multicolored light all around as it felt unique!
Noah had crossed the dark between Dimensions on the back of a Steed and much more.
None of it had prepared him for the quiet on the other side of that stone!
|You have entered THE Hallowed Verdance of the Undivided Well.|
...!
They stood on a shore of pale sand so fine it moved like water underfoot, and before them opened a basin without any visible far side. Water filled it. Not dark water and not still water, but a vast luminous expanse of gold-shot turquoise, lit from beneath rather than above, so that the whole immensity glowed upward and cast its light onto everything around it in slow drifting patterns!
Where the shallows lapped the sand they left rings of soft blue phosphorescence that faded and rekindled with each small wave.
Above and around it, the land had grown wild!
Now, he didn’t usually care for environments too much unless it was his own Shore or Infiniverse, but this place...damn, it deserved to be looked at properly as it was too magisterial!
Cliffs of dark stone rose in tiers around the basin, and from every tier fell water, hundreds of falls, some thick as rivers and some thin as thread, dropping in long slow ribbons through air that seemed to hold them a moment longer than it should.
Mist hung in the gaps and caught the underlight, and out of the mist grew forests, huge trees with trunks so pale they read almost silver, their canopies dense and dark and hung everywhere with luminous vines that pulsed faintly in a rhythm Noah realized after a moment was synchronized, the whole valley breathing light in and out together.
Great flat islands drifted above the water, unmoored, drifting slowly on nothing, and they trailed their own waterfalls from their undersides in curtains that fell hundreds of miles and dissipated into mist before they ever touched the sea.
Ryaenara swore quietly, and then swore again with more feeling.
"...!"
And at the center of it all, rising out of the sea, stood the pillar.
It was a tree. But it had no leaves and no branches and no crown, only a single colossal trunk of radiant pale wood climbing up out of the water and continuing until the mist and the distance swallowed it entirely. Its bark ran with veins of light in slow upward currents.
It did not seem to be growing. It simply stood, immense past reckoning, the axis the entire valley had arranged itself around, and the light beneath the sea was brightest at its roots.
And around that trunk, floating some distance out from the wood, hung a necklace.
Noah’s attention locked onto it instantly, and so did everyone else’s.
It was enormous, scaled to the pillar rather than to any wearer, a broad collar of gold that circled the trunk without touching it.
A collar, wide and layered, built of many rows of golden tubular beads strung tight and close so that the whole formed a single deep band, and along its lower edge hung a fringe of small teardrop pendants that swayed gently though there was no wind out over the water.
At its front, where a collar’s clasp would sit, the rows converged into a single broad plate, and on that plate was worked a design Noah could not resolve even with his eyes, something that his sight kept sliding off.
It was translucent as he saw the pillar’s light through it.
An illusion, then, or a manifestation!
Theron Adranos had gone still beside them, and when Noah looked at him, the golden-haired man had lowered his head.
"That is THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity," Theron said, and the reverence in his worn voice was total.
"It is not here. What you are looking at is its manifestation, and it appears in every domain like this one, above every well, in every valley behind every obelisk we have ever guarded. The same collar, the same size, the same silence. A child born in these lands sees it before she sees her own reflection."
He let out a breath.
"It is the legend at the core of what we are."
"Oh?" Noah said.
"I would have to start with the water for you to understand the legend," Theron said, "because the water is what everyone comes to steal, and the collar is what nobody understands."
He gestured out across the luminous expanse.
"This is THE Undivided Well. Look down. Not at the surface. Through it."
Noah looked, and found them.
Beneath the gold-shot turquoise, at depths that shifted as the light moved, they grew in their thousands. Flowers!
Or things that had decided to be flowers, radiant and slow-turning, each one a bloom of layered petals in blue and white and pale gold, and each one shed light rather than reflecting it, so that the entire sea was lit from below by the crop growing in it.
Some were small. Some were the size of islands. They opened and closed on a rhythm that matched the pulsing of the luminous vines in the forests, and looking at them for more than a moment made Noah aware of his own Causes turning inside his chest!
"THE Vermeil Bloom" Theron said. "The Panacea. That is what it is, and the word Panacea is what outsiders call it, and it is not wrong, only small. It cures. It elevates. It has done stranger things than either." He looked out over the water.
"It grew here on its own. Nobody planted it and nobody tends it. It is what made us. Every Superpowered Lifeform who has ever lived traces what they are back to this water, and that is why we are what we are, and why we give off nothing, and why we are hunted."
"It cannot simply be taken," Theron continued. "Every invader for ages has learned this, and most of them refused to believe it until they had thrown armies at it. The Well permits entry only to those who are PURE."
"Not clean. Not innocent. Not good, whatever that would mean. Pure in existence. True to what you actually are, without a seam between the thing you claim to be and the thing you are. The Well reads that, and if it does not like what it reads, you do not enter, and it does not matter in the least how powerful you are."
"And it has an inherent limit of once a year. One entry, one being. Whoever has gone in cannot go in again until the year has turned, no matter their standing, no matter their need. Those who are impure are refused, and those who have already gone are refused, and between those two rules the Well has fed a people for ages and never once been emptied."
Then Theron turned, and looked up at the collar hanging around the pillar, and his whole bearing changed.
"And that is the water," he said. "Now the legend."
"We hold that the collar came before the water."
Theron said it simply.
"That THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity is not a relic of this place but the ORIGIN of it. That every Panacea in every well in every valley of THE Ymnaros bloomed out of that collar’s making, and the Blooms beneath your feet are its overflow. Not a gift it gave. A residue it left." He looked out at the translucent gold.
"If that is true, then everything we are, every Superpowered Lifeform who ever drew breath in these lands, is a downstream consequence of an object nobody has ever worn."
He raised a hand toward it.
"We hold that a Superpowered Lifeform will come who exemplifies what we are more truly than any of us has managed. Not the strongest. We have had monsters. Not the wisest, we have had those as well, and buried them. The one who is most COMPLETELY what a Superpowered Lifeform is, whose existence gives off nothing and contains everything, without a single seam in it anywhere." His voice roughened.
"And when that one comes, they will adorn the collar, and in adorning it they will wield the core power of our kind. The thing itself, at its source, undiluted, the power that the Blooms are only the runoff of. And they will usher in an era of glory for a people who have spent every age we have ever had being farmed for our own inheritance."
Noah studied the hanging gold and did not interrupt.
"We do not know what that power is," Theron admitted.
He lowered his hand. "But we know the sign. When the worthy one finally stands beneath it, the collar’s image will react. It will answer them. And when it answers, a pathway opens, and that pathway leads to the true collar, which does not hang above any well in any valley. It sits at the core of THE Ymnaros itself."
...!
"That is the legend," Theron finished. "My people have died in rows in front of these obelisks for ages, guarding wells full of runoff, waiting for a manifestation to twitch. We have never seen it move."
The valley breathed light in and out around them, and the necklace hung motionless around the radiant pillar, and said nothing to anybody.
Noah nodded slowly, and turned his head away from the collar, and looked out at the sea.
At the Blooms turning in their thousands beneath the gold-shot water, lit from within, growing on their own out of an origin nobody had ever touched.
Was he a pure existence?
He had killed many. He had done many things!
He was greedy, and he was selfish!
"You are welcome to obtain the Panacea yourself, if the Well permits you. And those with you are welcome to try. Any of them. Walk into THE Undivided Well and see whether it lets you through, and if it does, take a Bloom."
He looked at each of them in turn, the horned woman in the Cause-woven robe, the profane Antiquity, the mild scholar, the mountain of calcified scars. "I would not presume to guess which of you it will accept. It has surprised us before, and it has broken hearts here more often than that."
Noah looked out across the luminous sea, at the radiant leafless pillar, at the collar of gold that had never once moved for anyone.
He would see who among his people was pure enough to attain these treasures!
