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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5603: Thalia! II
Chapter 5603: Thalia! II
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Noah gazed at the woman before him as she blinked and looked toward the food, almost in a daze, then down at her own mended body, and then back at him.And he locked his gaze with hers, and read the many things moving through it!
There was pain there, and relief, and exhaustion, but the biggest of them, the one that pulled at something in his existence, was a longing for a thing that did not seem to exist.
She was looking at him the way a person looks for someone in a familiar face and cannot find them. Searching him and not finding whoever it was she searched for.
She spoke, and her voice came out soft, and low, and carried a strange composure even soaked in her own dried blood.
"You haven’t cooked for me in this place for a long time. I missed it."
...!
Once more, she talked as though she knew him unfathomably well!
Was this truly someone he was with in the future? He could believe it of himself, oddly. He did not doubt that the man he was becoming might stand at a fire cooking for a woman like this. But belief was not knowledge, and there were far too many empty spaces in this, so he asked.
"Before anything else." His voice stayed level. "Is there immediate danger. Right now?"
She closed her eyes, as though searching somewhere deeper than the Realm around them, and when she answered, the softness had a certainty threaded through it.
"There should be some time. And leeway." Her eyes opened. "No matter how powerful a thing is, Existence does not like things moving backward. Me included. THE Sealed One included. Existence is forward looking. I panicked, a little, when I arrived here. That was... unbecoming of me. But there should be some time."
Noah nodded slowly.
And he waved his hand, and offered her the food.
Vibrant grilled and cooked meats arranged themselves on shimmering plates of blue light, drifting toward her across the trembling grass, sweet smoke curling off them, and as they settled before her, he spoke.
"Then tell me if I get anything wrong." He watched her face.
"You and I...are close, in the future. You are a Provenance Lifeform. Something catastrophic has happened in that future, where THE Sealed One somehow obtains IT, and his actions afterward forced you to traverse across time itself. I-"
"You and I are not close in the future."
BOOM!
She interrupted him with those heavy words, and Noah looked at her, and she was smiling. A smile full of pain!
"You were. You are...my Provenance. It is, as you would put it, far more quintessential than any closeness."
The smile turned faintly wry.
"I did not traverse across time on purpose as my Provenance saught to warn you. And THE Sealed One does not obtain IT by mistake. The hands of Those Who Remain are steeped in it. But..."
Her face went pale as she spoke.
Noah frowned, watching the color drain out of her cheeks mid-sentence, watching a fresh thread of stellar blood well faintly at the edge of her half-closed wound!
"Moving across Time of such pivotal weavings is not without cost," she said, quieter now, pressing her hand lightly to her chest.
"Especially for lifeforms of our kind, and our level. Anything I say, anything I reveal, it hurts my Provenance. It hurts what I am. So I must be very selective in what I tell you, because if I reveal something too heavy...I pay dearly. I fainted for hours, just now, on what little I said when I panicked."
She drew a slow breath, and steadied.
"What you began to do is good, actually. Asking me to correct you when you are wrong. The less I speak of the future, the more I am able to do within it."
...!
And with that, in the next moment, she began to eat.
She ate with a quiet, absolute focus, as if the food before her were one of the most important things in all of existence, lifting a sheet of grilled meat with an unhurried grace that made the simple act look almost ceremonial!
Noah was silent for a moment, and watched her.
He watched her delicate features, the freckles scattered light across a face built with no waste in it, watched her lips part to eat and chew, watched the paleness recede as rosiness slowly returned to her cheeks with every bite, the wound at her chest knitting a fraction further as she took in the harvests of his fire.
And every single thing she did, the tilt of her head, the composure, the way she held stillness even while moving, screamed of a unique charm he could not quite put a finger on!
If revealing too much harmed her, then he would not make her reveal.
He would play the guessing game.
So he thought. He set the recent shape of things beside the little she had let slip, and an instant later his eyes lit up, and he spoke.
"Was THE Sleepless Fiend one of Those Who Remain who helped THE Sealed One obtain IT?" His gaze sharpened on her.
"Do I offend them enough, by the time this future comes, that to be rid of me... they allow it? Aid it? They let THE Sealed One reach IT?"
...!
He looked at the face of the Provenance Lifeform, and she locked onto his eyes, and she smiled at him, sadly, and said nothing at all as she continued to eat!
Noah breathed out, and his eyes flashed coldly.
Every choice had a consequence. He had always known that. But he had not thought the butterfly of some future choice of his could grow wings THIS heavy, heavy enough that ancient things would part their hands and let a monster reach for It!
But whatever the future held... the present still mattered most! It always had! The future was a storm on a horizon, and the present was the ground under his feet, and he would keep doing everything he could on the ground he actually stood on!
HUUM!
He rose to his feet.
"Existence is." His voice rolled out quiet and certain over the fire. "The past is set, regardless of what anyone tries to do to it. And it seems even THE Sealed One has trouble collapsing me in that future, because if his reach tries to stretch back into the past to unmake me here... it should face the same difficulty you faced coming back. If not more. Existence does not like things moving backward."
His eyes settled on her.
"Even you, appearing here, in this time. That can be considered a loop being closed, not broken. You were always supposed to be here. At this exact moment. Which means the past is set." He said it again, to himself as much as to her, tasting the certainty of it. "The past is set. So..."
He walked toward her.
And he put out his hand.
"Let us have an official introduction, then. I am Osmont. Noah Osmont." His hand hung in the warm firelit air between them. "And you are..."
And the Provenance Lifeform raised her right hand to his, while she continued to eat with her left, and there was grace in the gesture, and an immensity under the grace, an old regality that no exhaustion and no blood could dim, and she took his hand and answered with quiet, total confidence.
"Thalia Vasiliou." Her eyes held his. "Your future destiny. And your present... Provenance."
BOOM!
