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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5726: Existence and Time! II
Chapter 5726: Existence and Time! II
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For a second Atlas said nothing. Then his chest shook and a cracked laugh came out of him, loud enough to bounce around the fissures.
"Haha. The balls on you, Dreamer. I like you."
He wiped at nothing under his eye and settled back onto the staff, still grinning, though the grin thinned out as he went.
|Yes, I was grand. And existence is full of things that do not care how grand you are.| He shrugged. |When they came for me it was not a duel. Many of them pooled everything they had just to get through, and even that was not enough to break the foundation. They had to use IT.|
BOOOM!
The word dropped!
|IT is a strange thing,| Atlas said. |The ones in the high seats cannot even hold it. They try to weave it in and their hands blister and their weavings come apart. I could hold it. There have only ever been a handful of us who could. That was the whole problem. They turned the one thing I could carry and they could not into the thing that broke my weavings.|
He looked away, off through the wall of the cavern toward somewhere Noah could not see.
|I am not going to tell you the rest of it here. Say the wrong detail out loud in a place like this and you invite eyes you do not want. But ask yourself how I am talking to you at all. A spirit does not survive its own body being taken apart. I am still here because of what I was, and I am not sitting idle either. Me waking up has already started things moving.|
He pointed the staff at Noah’s chest.
|Which is your problem, by the way. They are already moving. Descendants and authorities of Those Who Remain, the whole lot, out across the folds sniffing for anything that smells like engineering. They were nervous before I ever stirred. A few things happened recently to make them even moreso.|
|Someone reached for IT. Vakochev. He built himself scales, tried to stand against them, and they came together and ground him into nothing. The blood from that was barely dry when my old weavings started humming as they felt it. They know there is a hammer of engineering out there again.|
His face soured.
|So they did what frightened things do. They built a taller tower and unleashed...a Ruling of Existence. All those Mantles and rulings and systems you have been running into out there, that is not existence growing up on its own. It is a watchtower. They are spreading their gazes to ensure that they easily observe...more of existence.|
HUUM!
Noah sat still.
The Ruling, THE Provenance of Existence! They were a net, and the moment anyone worked outside it, the net twitched and the hounds came!
"A net," he said.
|A net,| Atlas agreed, pleased with him. |I have my own aims in all this, and things I will keep to myself for now. I teach you because you did something with odds that should be impossible, and you might end up bending them further than I ever did. The bending and curving of Probability around your existence is key. But do not mistake that for me serving you. I am still arrogant. I still have my Elsedimensions tucked in folds you cannot picture yet, I still have my engineering, and I still have myself.|
He crossed his arms.
|Enough about me. Are you going to tell me anything about yourself, Dreamer, or do I have to go poking around your edges to find out what you are made of?|
Noah’s mouth moved.
His gaze drifted somewhere past Atlas and the coral, and when he spoke his voice was unique as if he was a man reading off something he had watched from a distance.
"In the beginning, I was always born human," he said. "No inherent authority, no noble lineage, no spark. I had nothing but my ability to think, and even that, some in my early days might have judged as lower than average. But I was stubborn. When the world pressed down I did not break, and when obstacles appeared I persevered through them. I had nothing to my name. I rose from and forged everything I hold now, propelled forward by Infinity, Quintessence, and Tyranny. And, looking back on the journey, a healthy amount of luck."
The water barely stirred in front of him.
"The one major change came the moment I stepped beyond my original Observable Existence. Once I crossed into the different dimensions, where space and time no longer obey flat geometry, I stopped living in linear time."
He turned his hand over and watched the gold pulse under the skin.
"To everyday lifeforms, a life runs in a straight line. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. From this elevation, from the moment my Provenance fully awoke, moments do not follow one another like beads on a string. They exist at once. In one fold a body of mine sits in the brass corridors of a moving train, in a dimensional cabin. In another I stand on the shattered terraces of a golden mountain, looking down at a weeping patriarch whose home was decimated. Deep in my empire an ocean of blue and gold turns quietly while two sisters weave wonders into sovereign Elsedimensions. And here, in this cold hollow of petrified coral, I sit on a slab speaking to a man who died an Age before I was born."
He was quiet a moment.
"After I attained Sonder, I started looking at the people who walk beside me with different eyes. They are not scenery, and they are not instruments in my ascent. They are the protagonists of their own weavings of existence. I find myself wondering how their stories are progressing, and how much time has passed for them. Because for all of us, and for all these higher powers that rule the folds, time does not move in a straight line. We sit in this cavern where the hours seem ordinary, and in another pocket weeks or months could already have slipped away. It is all a matter of...time..."
HUUM!
Something slowed in his eyes.
"Time. Time, time."
He said it four times, the last of them trailing, like a clock heard through a wall in an empty room. The mobius ring on his finger buzzed against the word!
Atlas watched him for several seconds, and the cynical smile went out of his face.
|Yes,| he said, softer than usual. |Time is a terrifying and pivotal weaving of existence. Even I spent cycles trying to harness it for myself. Because with enough time, theoretically, anything is possible. A common stone can be pressed into a diamond. A mortal can build a bridge to the sky. An empire can learn how to bleed an architect.|
His staff caught a pale white light.
|I was going to teach you time much later as it has its drawbacks. Among the grand inscriptions that harness the different pillars of existence, the one tied to the flow of hours is among the most volatile. Too many possibilities. We could sit on this rock all day trading philosophies. But as you so eloquently pointed out, there is no... time.|
He paused, then broke into a loud, self-amused cackle.
|Haha. You see what I did there? Ah, being dead this long may have made me completely crazy.|
He shook his head, and his tone sharpened back into the focus of a craftsman adjusting his drawings on the fly.
|But your little speech shifted my plans, Dreamer. If your perception is already drifting off the line, we should not fight the current. Your next inscription will not be a shield.|
|We will make it about... time.|
