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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5690: Rage!
Chapter 5690: Rage!
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"I wanted to die," Masamuk said. "But as my friend and Master always told me... Persevere. Regardless of the difficulty, Persevere. Regardless of the pain, Persevere. So... I Persevered!"
The small obsidian body straightened upon the luminous soil.
"But even while persevering," the slime finished quietly, "we were fractured."
...!
Its crimson gaze turned towards the distant grave, towards the mound wrapped in eras of chains, humming softly under the weight of its newest layers.
"Many things could be said about... Those Who Remain."
Masamuk said the three words as if they were a heavy insult, spat slowly, each one set down with the deliberate contempt of a being who had watched what those words did when they were let loose upon existence!
"They are careful beings. They do everything to preserve what they hold, and they hold nearly everything. And as much as one can do alone in existence, and one can do a great deal..." The crimson eyes slid toward him. "...one cannot do it all alone. I could sit here and tell you of Dimensionality. Of Tongues. Of Causes and their deeper natures. None of it would truly matter. You need your own high level of power, yes. But you cannot be alone. THEY are never alone. And even here, I have been alone, and so I have not been able to do anything at all. I have laid beside this lake, and the moment I make a single move toward that grave, the eye above will also finally make its move."
Noah blinked at these words, and the shape of the problem turned over in his mind, and resolved itself with beautiful simplicity!
One watcher. One mover. One hiding thing that could act but not survive attention, and one visiting thing that could draw attention but not act. The board did not need a grander piece.
It needed a sacrifice that cost nothing!
"If I make the first move and draw its attention," Noah asked calmly, "would you succeed in unearthing whatever part of Vakochev lies within?"
Masamuk’s gaze sharpened upon him.
"Your body here would die," the slime said flatly. "Or worse. Be taken by Them."
Noah raised his hand, and turned it over slowly in the honeyed light, watching the stellar frame of it as one watches a borrowed tool.
"For me, this is only a dream. No harm comes to my existence whatsoever."
"..."
Masamuk looked at him silently, up and down, down and up.
Then an obsidian light flashed!
From within the small slime’s body, something rose and floated towards Noah, turning gently end over end. A grimoire!
It was bound in deep obsidian that drank the light of the layered sky, its cover smooth and unmarked, its edges worn round by an eternity of handling, and its pages, glimpsed as it turned, were filled with a script that seemed to rearrange itself shyly whenever his eyes came near, countless entries pressed dense as sediment!
"A journal of mine," Masamuk said simply. "Filled with my musings of existence, and what I know. Think of what you wish to hear me ramble on about while holding it, and the page should open up."
...!
Noah accepted the grimoire with both hands, and the moment his fingers closed around the obsidian cover, prompts bloomed!
|You have received THE Obsidian Journal of Masamuk.|
|Within are the musings of one of the first shapers, accumulated since before authority was differentiated from raw potential. Its contents answer to intent: hold it, and think of what you wish to know.|
|The journal has been keyed to your existence alone. To all other perceptions, it does not exist.|
|The weavings of Masamuk settle around it. Even the Records will not gossip about this gift.|
The grimoire sank into his existence and disappeared, and Noah felt the weight of it settle somewhere deep, an entire era’s worth of rambling waiting patiently for his first question!
He then looked at Masamuk, and he nodded, once.
There was nothing else that needed saying.
Noah rose to his feet and looked at the distant grave.
Then he waved his hand across the lake below, and the whirlpool answered him! Strands of obsidian gold tore free of the turning waters as he grabbed a handful of the Provenance Causes, THE Stilled Wing and THE Lowered Crown and THE Quiet Name coiling in his grip like harvested lightning, oppressive and vibrant!
And he began to walk with grand steps towards the grave!
The masked farmers did not look up as he passed. Another white robe on the burial road, another armful of chains for the eternal work, his sandals pressing soft prints into the warm soil, the incense-heavy air parting around him.
He crossed the final terrace. He reached the edge of the vast cleared basin, where ten thousand layered harvests hummed upon the titan-length mound.
And then Noah broke the season!
He dropped the Causes he was carrying, all of them, letting the harvested chains spill carelessly across the sacred ground, and he JUMPED, his white robes snapping, and landed atop the grave itself!
BOOM!
And he began tearing the Causes apart!
His hands plunged into the layered chains of eras, and his Teloi blazed through his grip, and he RIPPED, strand from strand, THE Stilled Wing shredding between his fingers, THE Lowered Crown unraveling, whole condensed harvests tearing loose from the mound with sounds like existence clearing its throat, and the grave beneath his feet shone!
HUUM!
For one full second, the entire Dimension simply stared!
And then the sky spoke!
|Oh?|
The single syllable arrived pressed into every mind.
|THE GLOATING JAILER stirs from its magnificent mood.|
|It has waited a long time for this. It knew that if it sat beside its trophy patiently enough, one of the rats of Vakochev would eventually crawl out of whatever crack had sheltered it, and come scratching at the lid.|
|It is pleased. It does so enjoy being right.|
WAA!
The pressure came barreling down!
It fell upon Noah like the sky itself deciding to sit, and his figure was yanked up forcefully off the grave, hoisted into the open air above the mound by nothing at all, his limbs spread, his white robes whipping, the golden mask burning cold against his face!
Narrative crushed down all around him, and the obsidian eye in the layered sky turned, fully, for the first time in a while, and looked at him with its whole attention!
|Now then, little rat,| the voice rolled. |Where is the rest of him? The pieces were scattered so carelessly during the retreat. We have gathered some. We are missing others. You crawled here from one of his boltholes, which means you know the smell of the rest. Tell me where the rest of Vakochev lies.|
WAA!
And...the torture began!
Pressure closed around Noah’s existence like a fist around wet clay, and SQUEEZED!
Every quark of him screamed under compression, his Frame groaning, his singularities juddering in their orbits, pain of a magnitude he had never once sampled in all his climbing, the direct attention of an Immense One applied with the precision of a being that had unmade sovereigns for boredom!
|Huh, quiet a weak one you are...|
Noah endured without screaming!
His jaw locked behind the golden smile. His mind held. And in the crushing dark behind his eyes, words rose up to meet him, words from a message of the last will of the being whose grave he was currently bleeding on!
Rage. Rage!
Rage against the dying light! Do not go gentle! Rage! Rage! Rage!
HUUM!
’Rage,’ Noah told his own buckling existence, and his teeth ground behind the mask. ’Rage!’
And atop the wave of agony, with the audacity of the truly shameless, he worked!
The third cycle of THE Infinite Provenance Baryogenesis ignited across his quarks! The crushing force of an Immense One pressed down on every particle of him, and Noah seized that pressure and ROUTED it, weight flowing cell to quark to quark, bear, seat, stabilize, move, using the torture itself as the tempering hammer, converting an architect’s cruelty into his own foundation one particle at a time!
And then, hoisted and crushed and quietly forging, he looked down!
Below, across the terraces, dozens of masked Provenance Lifeforms had risen from their lakes and were staring up at the spectacle, white robes still, golden smiles upturned, and Noah gazed at them through the pain, and spoke.
"When did THE First Lifeforms fall so low?" he called down. "When did we become faces behind masks, following the orders of failures of existence?!"
BOOM!
The Dimension itself flinched!
|THE GLOATING JAILER’S mood is no longer magnificent.|
|It was going to be leisurely about this. It has decided otherwise.|
|Let us see the shape of you, rat. Let us see what you hold most dear in existence... and let us take it away!|
And the Moirai crashed into him!
It came as a flood of gold turned wrong, Existential Moirai weaponized, pouring into his existence with a single surgical purpose, to dig, to find, to ALTER, to reach into his Records and rewrite what it found there, to carve out his loves the way loves had been carved out of a small slime!
Trillions of needles drove into him at once, threading between his quarks, seeking his mother, his daughter, his wife, his people, seeking the furniture of his existence to empty the rooms!
But his existence defended itself.
Across every single one of his two hundred Decillion quarks, all at once, his Nine Teloi flared!
In every quark, nine points of light ignited and spread, shimmering into small golden shields, Quintessence and Existence and Paradox and Chaos and Adversity and Apocalypse and Mana and Harvest and Tyranny, nine seated aims standing up inside every particle of his matter simultaneously, and his entire body LIT UP, a man-shaped constellation of two hundred Decillion burning purposes, his generated Provenance blazing out of every seam of him!
And his purpose, his very Provenance... REJECTED the coming alterations of the Immense One!
The needles struck the golden shields and bent! The digging Moirai found no purchase, existence itself registering every quark of him as critical structure, as aimed and owned and not for editing, the flood of alteration breaking against nine-fold walls in every particle at once, and through the rejection, impossibly, gloriously, prompts flickered at the edge of his shredding vision!
|Your existence resists the alteration of its Records.|
|Under terrifying adversity, tempered by the pressure of an Immense One... your attributes begin to rise.|
...!
But the pain!
The pain of trillions of needles breaking against trillions of shields inside him, of an Immense One’s will grinding against his foundations, of a Baryogenesis cycle running through the middle of it all! It was so painful that he wanted to scream!
He couldn’t help but scream!
The scream tore out of him and rolled across the entire Dimension, and above him the obsidian eye drank it in with vast satisfaction, its whole attention pressed down upon its screaming prize!
Its whole attention!
—
Below, beside a quiet lake, Masamuk’s crimson eyes went cold.
The melancholy drained out of them like water from a broken bowl, and what remained was the thing from before names, the splitter of Chaos, and its small obsidian body gazed at the eye drinking in the scream, and became blurry!
And it MOVED!
A flash of obsidian light shot low across the terraces, silent as a thought, and struck the grave!
It was only a nanosecond later that the eye above blinked, and its gaze snapped down toward its trophy!
But that nanosecond was enough!
What happened upon the grave in that sliver of time was a glorious, melancholic devouring.
Every Cause upon the mound, ten thousand layered harvests, countless chains, THE Stilled Wing and THE Lowered Crown and THE Quiet Name in their uncountable thousands, disappeared, consumed in a single silent pass.
And beneath them, unearthed for the first time in an unknown time, lay a vast golden coffin, and even as the Dimension’s light touched it, the coffin itself was EATEN, cleanly, immensely, the entire titanic vessel vanishing in one bite that left nothing behind but a fading afterimage stamped with enormous teeth marks!
And underneath it all...
Underneath was a cluster of invisible obsidian brilliance, wrapped in heavy, scorching, multicolored chains!
The chains blazed with a weight that had no business existing!
Across the distant terraces, masked Provenance Lifeforms cried out and LOOKED AWAY, sovereigns of self-generation physically unable to rest their gazes upon the bindings, and Noah, hoisted and screaming and burning golden in the sky, turned his eyes toward the unearthed thing and felt his existence almost pop like a balloon, the sheer power of the multicolored chains pressing against his perception like a boot against a bubble!
And the thing inside the chains!
It could not be perceived at all! Its Dimensionality was too high, a blankness deeper than the Quiet Name, a presence his senses reported only as a wound in what was possible!
But Noah had managed a glance! And in that single, existence-buckling glance, he could barely perceive...
Invisible hands, grasping the multicolored chains!
And pulling!
CRACK!
The chains began to crack, and it did not sound like metal, and it did not sound like authority.
It felt like existence itself... cracking!
