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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5563: Provenance! II
Chapter 5563: Provenance! II
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|Over time, lifeforms born capable of this stopped arising. Why, I do not know. I do not know, and my information may be incorrect, since everything I hold about them arrived already worn down to rumor.||But the rumor was this. Such beings could look at Those Who Remain and not be afraid.|
...!
|Beings so unfathomably true that they did not have to rely on any external authority whatsoever. Nothing borrowed, nothing gathered, nothing granted. Only themselves, generating themselves, answerable to nothing upstream because there was no upstream.|
Noah listened, and under other circumstances he would have enjoyed every word of it, since wonders of existence and deep history were among the few things he never got tired of.
The enjoyment was somewhat diminished by the sensation of his entire existence being slowly crushed!
The weight had doubled while the Voice talked, and doubled again, and his arms were burning above his head and his knees had bent into the sand, and he got his words out through his teeth.
"Speak a little bit faster."
|THE Aurate Collar is not a tool that just anybody can wield. We theorized, ages ago, that it very likely requires Provenance Essence to use at all. And when candidates who walked its path began being issued Provenance Crystals, objects shed from something rather than made, the theory stopped being a theory.|
|It is also the reason Superpowered Lifeforms were born in THE Ymnaros in the first place.|
|THE Vermeil Blooms, produced as a mere side effect of THE Aurate Collar’s appearance here, are things that elevate the very core of a lifeform. They do not permit the absorption of external authority. They resolve a being into a truer version of what it already was. Exemplification instead of accumulation. That is why you have met beings with no authority at all who emulate as much power as any wielder of Infinity or the Primordial Source, and often more.|
|The runoff of the collar makes small, partial, downstream versions of what the collar requires in full.|
|And so the last trial is the determination of whether you carry the spark to produce Provenance Essence at all. THE Aurate Collar does not require that you produce it here. It only wants to see that the spark exists. The capability. The possibility of the possibility.|
|Those with boundless potential are those filled with endless possibilities. That is the test.|
Noah gritted his teeth and looked up at the stone filling the sky.
"That is fine and all," he managed, "but what the fuck does crushing me have to do with it."
|Above you is something that even I do not understand, and I stood under it twice.|
|What I do know is this. It is a pressure designed to give you the highest chance of producing a spark within your existence. If there is even a glimmer of possibility in you, a one in a million chance, a one in a trillion chance, that you could be like those lifeforms the rest of us have only heard rumors about, then you will be capable of bearing the weight coming down without collapsing, and somewhere in the bearing, the spark will show.|
|If you are not able to, then you will simply be like me, and like the others.|
|Failures. Who came so close, and watched it all slip away.|
The Voice went quiet for a moment, and when it continued, it had stopped performing entirely.
|I have been here once, and I collapsed. And I came back, because I could not stand losing such a thing, and I collapsed again, and that second time I barely managed to save scraps of my existence, and what is speaking to you now is what the scraps became.|
|Let us see whether you suffer the same fate.|
|Or whether you shall be different.|
WAA!
The stone came down.
Not all at once, since nothing about this place was merciful enough to be quick. It came down the way a debt comes due, in increments, each one arriving with its own weight and its own interest, and Noah met the first of them standing!
"I AM!"
The Letter went through him and his body filled, and he held.
The second increment took him to one knee. He felt it land across his shoulders like a continent shrugging, and the obsidian sand compressed beneath his shin into something like glass, and he put both hands up above his head and met the underside of a sky.
His palms touched stone.
That should not have been possible, since the landmass hung far above him, and it was possible anyway, because the weight had stopped being a property of distance. The stone was above him, therefore the stone was upon him!
Those were the rules here, and his hands were now carrying a piece of the sky, and his arms shook to the shoulder.
"I AM OSMONT!"
HUUM!
The affirmation poured down through his arms and his back and his planted knee, and for a moment the shaking stopped, and Noah breathed in the hot stone air and reorganized himself under the load.
Then the third increment arrived, and something in his left forearm cracked.
He heard it before he felt it, a dry sound like the road splitting, and then the pain came up through the bone and he shouted the next Letter into it rather than around it.
"I AM HUMAN!"
BOOM!
The weight paused.
It did not lessen. Nothing here lessened! But it paused, the way it had paused when the Outcasts flinched, as though the claim itself had briefly required consideration, and Noah used the pause to shift his stance, getting the load off the cracked arm and onto his back, bending forward beneath it, and now he knelt in the black sand with a world’s underside pressed across his shoulders and his spine, and he understood that he had arrived at the posture this trial had been designed to produce.
Every candidate across every age had knelt exactly here. Holding exactly this! An entire history of the almost-worthy, folded one at a time into the shape of a figure carrying a sky.
Blood ran from his nose and dripped off his chin into the sand, and the sand drank it without comment.
’What... are you looking for?!’
He asked the distant Aurate Collar that was unfathomably silent!
