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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5687: The Grave Beneath The Eye! I
Chapter 5687: The Grave Beneath The Eye! I
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His Provenance answered!Prompts bloomed across his vision in cascading waves, and even their text seemed to arrive more carefully than usual, like a Ruination lowering her voice inside a dangerous archive!
|You seek to Dream of THE Immense Ones.|
|Warning: the subjects of this inquiry stand unfathomably above your current Trueness and Provenance. Direct perception of an Immense One through Dreaming is ill advised. Attempting to force direct perception would exhaust your entire Provenance and may draw the attention of the perceived.|
|Your Provenance negotiates.|
|The cemented past is open to you. The Records hold countless moments connected to THE Immense Ones. A connected Dream may be granted: a thread from the past bearing upon the subjects of your inquiry.|
|Cost: 20 Provenance Essence.|
...!
Twenty!
Noah’s eyes remained closed, but his mind whistled at the number!
Twenty Essence, nearly a third of his capacity, drained for a single Dream he could not even steer.
He thought of many things. And then...
"Done," Noah said. "Take it."
|20 Provenance Essence has been drained.|
|A moment connected to THE Immense Ones has been selected from the cemented past.|
|A random Dream emerges: its time, its place, and its witnesses are chosen by weight alone.|
HUUM!
Within the scorching golden waters of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring, the body of Noah began to shine!
It was not the shine of the spring’s essence, and it was not the shine of his body! Light poured out of him from beneath his skin, stellar and blue-gold and impossibly dense, his entire figure condensing into radiance until he blazed within the steam like an unfathomable singularity given the shape of a man, and the faded golden skeletons in the depths below seemed to turn their ancient hollow faces up toward the brilliance!
His Provenance blared, brilliant!
Singularities spun! Two hundred Decillion quarks aligned! The surface of the golden waters flattened outward in a perfect ring around his shining frame, and the doorway of THE Human Dreamer swung wide upon its hinges of identity, opening onto the one landscape where even Immense Ones had left footprints they could never take back!
And Noah began to dream!
...!
---
A dream bloomed.
One moment there was the scorching gold of the spring, and the next moment there was ground beneath his feet and a sky above his head, and Noah stood manifested inside a Dimension that existence had folded shut like a pressed flower!
He looked out, and the place was grand.
Terraced fields rolled away from him in every direction, vast stepped plains of soft luminous soil stacked into the distance like the gardens of a sleeping titan, and the distances themselves were wrong in a beautiful, unhurried way, folding gently so that a far-off ridge might sit behind a near one and above it at the same time without apology!
The air was thick and breathed slow ambient exhalations rolling across the fields in visible ripples of shimmer!
And the sky!
The sky was layered, stratum upon stratum of radiance stacked toward an unseeable ceiling, bands of pale gold and deep amber and drowsy rose all glowing at once, like seven different evenings had been shelved on top of each other and left burning!
No sun hung anywhere. The light came from the layers themselves, and it fell across the terraced land heavy and warm and eternal, the light of a place where time had been asked to sit down and had agreed!
A Dimension locked in the past. Even before any prompt confirmed it, his instincts read it in everything. Nothing here was waiting for tomorrow. Tomorrow had been amputated!
Noah looked down at himself.
His body was his own, stellar and familiar, but it had been dressed! White robes wrapped him in long clean folds, draped over one shoulder and belted at the waist, the fabric faintly luminous and utterly weightless. And upon his face sat a mask!
He raised his fingers and traced it. Smooth gold, warm as skin, covering him brow to chin. Two simple dots for eyes.
And below them, carved into the gold, an eerie, permanent smile!
And...
There were others!
He lifted his gaze, and across the vast terraced fields he saw them, dozens upon dozens of figures scattered through the folded distances, each one seated alone upon the luminous soil, each one draped in the same white robes, each one wearing the same golden mask with its two dots and its eerie smile.
And every single one of them pulsed with an aura his existence now knew intimately!
Provenance Lifeforms!
Dozens of self-generating existences, seated in ordered solitude across a farm-realm outside of time, and before each seated figure... burned a lake!
The lakes were the most interesting things in the whole folded Dimension.
Each one was a slow whirlpool of stellar obsidian-gold, vibrant and deep, and they did not burn with light so much as with WEIGHT, because swirling within every lake were Causes!
Heavy, oppressive, authentic Causes, the critical structure of existence itself, dozens of them per lake, turning in the obsidian-gold like drowned suns, and their combined pressure rolled off the water and pressed against his body even from afar.
And the masked sovereigns were harvesting them!
Noah watched, fascinated, as the seated figures worked with slow eternal patience, their hands weaving above their lakes, drawing the burning Causes together strand by strand, pulling them into clusters, and the clusters into tighter clusters, condensing the harvested structure of existence toward singularities that formed so gradually that the work must have been measured in eras.
A farm. A farm where the crop was Causes, and the farmers were sovereigns of self-generation wearing smiling golden masks!
Noah thought, his mind racing behind the eerie smile.
’Here sit dozens of sovereigns condensing causes by the lakeful. For whom? Sovereigns do not farm for themselves in uniform. Uniforms mean an employer, and employers at this scale mean...’
His existence BUZZED!
HUUM!
It came from nowhere and everywhere, a deep resonant vibration through all two hundred Decillion of his quarks, his Dream Body thrumming like a struck instrument, and prompts bloomed urgently across his vision!
|Your Provenance Dream Body is reacting.|
|An item held by your true body has pierced the boundary of the Dream. The crystal left behind by Vakochev pulses across existence and time. The weavings of the current Dream are made clear by its light.|
|It has found something.|
And in his fingers, the crystal appeared!
It was illusory, a manifestation of dark light rather than the shard itself, but it pulsed in his grip incessantly, urgently, joyfully, the long-silent treasure of a retreated titan vibrating like a compass needle that had finally, after all this time, found its north!
Information bloomed from it in waves, flowing directly into his existence, and his Provenance Essence caught every thread and pulled it taut and made everything clearer!
|The Records speak, unlocked by the resonance of the crystal.|
|When defeated by THE Immense Ones, Vakochev paid a heavy cost to retreat. The retreat was not clean. Critical parts of his existence were sundered from him and locked away across existence and time, sealed into pockets of existence where only the forces of THE Immense Ones tread.|
|You are near one of his Sundered Weavings of Existence.|
|Your Dream has deposited you within a Dimension locked in the past, isolated from all others.|
|Should you be successful in unsealing the chains binding him, the favor will not go unpaid.|
...!
Noah stood very still upon the luminous soil, and behind the golden mask, his endlessly blue eyes blazed!
And the shape of the larger truth assembled itself in his mind with terrible elegance!
Vakochev had not simply retreated. The being who laid his Scales across all of existence had been defeated, and his retreat had been paid for in pieces of himself, carved off and buried in pockets like this one, and the "random" Dream had brought him here!
’The favor will not go unpaid.’
A favor. From VAKOCHEV. The word rolled through him, and the strategic greed at the center of his existence woke up all at once and began, quietly, to salivate!
But first, the venue. He looked around slowly, a masked farmer among masked farmers, and he followed the work to its destination!
In one direction, down across the folding terraces, he saw it.
A procession! A few of the white-robed Provenance Lifeforms had risen from their lakes, and they moved in a slow, solemn line across the fields, carrying their finished harvests, long condensed strings of heavy Causes coiled in their arms like luminous chains of obsidian gold, each string dense enough to make the air around it kneel.
And they carried them toward a mound.
It rose from the center of a vast cleared basin where no lakes burned, a great swollen hill of dark, packed, luminous earth, long as a fallen titan and shaped with the unmistakable, deliberate finality of one thing and one thing only!
A grave!
The masked sovereigns reached its edge one by one, and one by one they cast their harvests! The strings of condensed Causes unfurled through the air like thrown chains and fell across the grave-mound, settling over its dark bulk, sinking slightly into the luminous earth, layer upon layer upon layer!
Noah’s perception, sharpened by his Provenance, could see the accumulated depth of it, thousands of Cause-chains, tens of thousands, eras of harvests layered across that mound like a mummy’s wrappings woven from the critical structure of existence itself!
And the grave... responded!
Each time a fresh chain of Causes settled over it, the mound shone briefly from within, a deep buried pulse of light, and it hummed, a long, low, resonant note that rolled across the entire basin, the sound of something enormous turning over in its sleep beneath the weight of one more blanket!
The Provenance Lifeforms did not react to the shining or the humming at all. They simply turned, solemn and smiling their carved golden smiles, and walked back toward their lakes to begin the next harvest, as they had clearly done ten thousand times before, as normal as farmers walking back from a well!
Noah breathed behind the mask, and the elegance of it was as horrifying as it was instructive!
Existence protects whatever Causes stand behind. It registers them as critical structure and resists their alteration. So bind a prisoner in enough of them... and existence itself becomes the jailer. Existence itself will resist the unsealing. They did not build a cage as they convinced reality that the cage is part of its own skeleton!
And then, because every horror in his life had taught him to always, always check the sky, Noah raised his head!
The radiant layered heavens stretched above the terraced fields, band upon band of shelved evening light.
And set into them, vast beyond vastness, gazing down at everything!
Was a massive obsidian eye!
It filled a full stratum of the sky by itself, lidless and deep and dark as a hole cut in the heavens, its titanic iris faintly threaded with slow-turning gold, and its gaze lay across the entire Dimension at once, across every lake and every masked farmer and every thrown chain, and most of all, most heavily of all, upon the grave!
An Immense One!
The moment his perception acknowledged it, the Dimension’s own narrative unfurled for him, waves of prompt-information blooming in the style he now knew intimately.
|You now perceive the standing Narrative of this Dimension.|
|THE Narrative of Existence: The Unending Burial.|
|All those within this Dimension are tasked eternally: harvest the binding Provenance Causes cultivated across this Dimension, condense them, and layer them upon the unknown grave.|
|Those who are fastidious in this task shall receive ever greater flows of Existential Moirai. The most fastidious shall receive recognition: their names spoken once, fondly, by the watcher above, and a single keepsake drawn from the hoards of the one below.|
|THE GLOATING JAILER presides over this Narrative.|
...!
And then, at this time...
|THE GLOATING JAILER is in a magnificent mood today. It has been in a magnificent mood for the last several days.|
|It finds the contents of the grave exquisitely amusing. It stops by often, simply to look, the way one visits a trophy.|
|It reminds all diligent harvesters: he measured everything, once. Let him now lie beneath everything, measured. It considers this the finest joke it has ever told, and it has been telling it for a very, very long time.|
|THE GLOATING JAILER is smug. The Records note that this is its resting state.|
"..."
Noah stood in white robes among the terraced fields of an amputated Dimension, a golden smile carved over his real one, a pulsing key in his fingers, twenty Essence spent on a dream, and he absorbed all of it!
A titan who had laid his Scales across all of existence, dismembered and buried under chains of harvested Causes, existence itself recruited as his jailer!
Dozens of leashed sovereigns farming his bindings deeper on an eternal clock! An Immense One hanging in the sky above its favorite joke, smug and magnificent and watching everything!
And one uninvited Human Dreamer, standing in the middle of all of it, holding the key, wearing the uniform, with a promised favor from the buried titan himself waiting on the other side of the chains.
Behind the eerie golden smile of the mask, slowly, terribly, Noah began to smile for real!
