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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5728: One Punch!
Chapter 5728: One Punch!
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
She struck the center of her chest with a flat palm.
The scar across her sternum tore open in white light! A dense net of silver thread, superheated by the fire of THE Primordial Source, erupted from her ribs and fanned across the trench, miles wide in a fraction of a second, slicing through the coral.
Where the threads passed the rock went to grey powder, and the water behind the advance collapsed into vacuum.
The net hit Noah.
Red prompts flared across his sight.
|DECONSTRUCTIVE SENTENCE DETECTED: UNRAVEL DEPTH.|
|TARGET RECORD: You.|
|SUBTRACTION ATTEMPT: -50 VERITAS, -50 PROVENANCE.|
Then, his hand pulsed.
|BEDROCK ACTIVATED.|
|What was made cannot be unmade by what was merely given.|
|ATTRIBUTES LOCKED.|
A sound like spikes grinding on stone tore through the canyon. The argent threads caught on his skin, pulled taut, and stopped. White sparks fizzled off into the dark, and not one strand bit in. His numbers did not move!
Inside the band on his finger, Atlas let out a long breath.
|Look at that mess.| His tone was almost mournful. |They took my engineering and tried to build with it, and this is what they made. Primordial fire and argent thread forced together with nothing between them. Look at the seams leak. She is burning her own Existence just to keep the stitch from splitting...what a fucking mess!|
At the prow, Kaelen-Tor’s skin had gone see-through, her veins running violet as the graft ate her own vitality to hold the output!
Noah looked up at the three hundred hulls crowding the water above him.
"You have no Provenance of your own," he said.
His voice did not travel through the water as it landed in the mind of every Descendant in the trench at once.
He parted his lips and spoke one Word of THE Osmontian Tongue.
"THE MORTAL COIL."
HUUM!
The cavern shuddered as he imposed...a change of standing. It came out of his chest like a ring of cold blue gold brilliance and washed over the three hundred vessels, the hounds, and Kaelen-Tor.
Wherever it passed, the borrowed ground went out from under them.
THE DOMAIN OF THE MORTAL COIL did not touch flesh. It took the scaffold away. Every thread inherited from Those Who Remain, every law granted by the Ruling of Existence, simply stopped applying, and left each of them with only what they were on their own.
They held zero Provenance. They owned nothing they had made. So the fall was catastrophic!
The silver light of the three hundred vessels went out like blown candles. On the decks the Descendants gasped and staggered, limbs gone heavy, eyes wide, the plain fact of a body with limits pressing down on their chests.
Kaelen-Tor grabbed the railing with both hands as only her...only her dimensionality resisted!
The inscription on her chest, cut off from the Loom that fed it, sputtered, and the stolen weight she wore like a mantle thrashed under the grey and could not get out.
"Haha, what... what did you do, ugly fucker?" Her voice had gone thin!
Noah did not answer.
He raised his left arm. The skin went clear, and the gold under the bone caught the dark water as a heavy Narrative Inscription activated!
I AM THE PROTAGONIST.
The Common Dream Gu in the lattice stirred, and its small dream of warmth was drawn into the script and spent. Two hundred decillion quarks locked. Nine Teloi held one aim!
He stepped forward on the coral and drove his left fist up into the trench.
THE UNANIMOUS BLOW.
No beam and no blast as the whole undivided weight of a foundation of one mind moved, carried forward through mass. The fist met the dead, sputtering web of argent thread, and the space holding them parted!
The water split with a sound like a gate slamming, a corridor tearing open through the sea, and the blow crossed the airless gap and struck the lead vessel!
BOOM!
The hull split down the middle.
The shock went through the deck and hit Kaelen-Tor square in the ribs. Cut off from most of her power by the Coil, the grafted Narrative Inscription had nothing to soften the blow, and the mismatched forces inside it turned on each other!
CRACK!
"Agh!"
She dropped to the splitting deck, dark blood spraying from her lips, her sternum tearing open from the inside as the silver wires snapped. The seven hounds gave dry, muffled whines as their threads dissolved to ash.
She stared down at her own chest.
One blow. Even stripped of her Father’s mantle she still held over two hundred in Veritas and Pondus, and yet she had broken like a clay cup!
Noah was on the deck before the debris settled. On the vessels around them the Descendants were still down, gasping under the Coil as the Mantles and Narratives sought to stand up. He crossed the splintered timber and stopped in front of her.
She coughed a clot of silver-streaked blood over her chin and looked up at his pupils.
"You... are truly connected to Atlas?" she wheezed. "You think you are building something?"
She laughed with one hand clutching the ruin of her chest.
"I will tell you now. Whatever you think you are doing will not end in success. My Father, and all the others around him, are far too powerful. They decimated Atlas. They decimated Vakochev. They will decimate every tiny ant that tries to climb the ladder. Why don’t you all just stop?"
Her fingers dug into the wood, shaking.
"Existence is great. It is a paradise for those of us with power. We can have anything we want. You have the power too. You could have had everything. Why put yourself on a path of destruction?"
Noah looked down at her.
"A paradise where you crawl under someone else’s ceiling is a cage with a soft floor," he said. "And I don’t like cages."
He drove his right hand down and closed his fingers on her throat. Infinite Sanguine Mana poured into her like hot iron!
Her eyes went wide, the last breath going out of her as her records came apart under the heat as he took everything!
|SEDIMENT-SHED INTEGRATION ACTIVATED.|
The corrupted Argent Loom threads and the bloodline of THE Spindle hit his foundation and separated off it like grease off water, pushed out through his pores to drop to the seabed as black grit. What was left, the clean weight and the bare frame of the Tier 2 inscription, ran into his Existence.
Kaelen-Tor went limp and turned to pale dust between his fingers.
On the vessels around him, panic ensued!
Noah did not wait for them to do anything. He raised his hands and struck out into the water rapidly. Again. Again!
Phantom fists of red-gold mana bloomed through the trench, each one carrying the blunt weight of his foundation, each one hitting a vessel like a dropped boulder.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Descendants were flattened before they could draw breath, and the hounds were pounded to ash.
Inside half a second the fleet was gone. No screams left in the water, only ash!
Only ash!
Noah lowered his arms.
He swept a wave of Sanguine Mana across the canyon wall to wall. It ate every drop of blood, dissolved every scrap of bone, and scrubbed the stone of any lingering resonance. When he dropped the inverted Elsedimension, the trench looked the way it had an hour ago. Cold, dark, empty.
To anything watching, three hundred vessels had sailed into the Tide and vanished.
He looked at his left arm as out of and over abundance of caution, even though he had done everything inside an Elsedimension, his figure turned dreamy and illusory, as he began taking steps that covered countless Gigaparsecs as he moved once more!
Noah moved, dreamy and illusory, and while he moved the prompts caught up with him.
|SEDIMENT-SHED INTEGRATION: COMPLETE.|
|The immensity of KAELEN-TOR has been stripped, cleaned, and seated.|
|+24 VERITAS. +22 PROVENANCE. +26 PONDUS. +21 OSMONTIAN MOIRAI.|
He felt the weight of it settle in as he crossed the dark. She had carried the mass of an architect’s bloodline and generated none of it herself, and none of that had helped her once the scaffold was gone. Now the raw part of it, the clean weight under all the borrowed thread, was his, and it sank into his foundation without a tremor!
Then the second prompt arose, and this one made him slow.
|SALVAGED: architect-grade blueprint recovered from the grafted inscription.|
|THE SCARWEFT OF THE STOLEN LOOM (Tier 2 Narrative Inscription).|
|Fuses THE Primordial Source and THE Argent Loom into a single expressed authority. Unstable. Corrodes its bearer. Powerful regardless.|
He did not try to inscribe it. He lifted the blueprint out of his own foundation, a lattice of grey and silver light no larger than a coin, and sent it up into the band on his finger, into the keeping of the ring where Atlas could look at it.
Atlas looked at it for a long moment and said nothing at all.
|So this is what they did with it,| Atlas said finally.
|They took what I designed for pairing two authorities and they forced the two worst ones through it. It eats the Descendant who wears it as she was burning her own existence just to keep it lit.|
The blueprint turned slowly in the light of the ring.
|Well, even broken like this, even chewing its own bearer to the bone, it harnesses a tremendous amount of power. If they had not run into someone like you, someone who could strip the power out from under them, that woman would have been deadly..|
Atlas was quiet again.
|And this is only a Descendant’s version. A hand-me-down. They took a great deal of my work, and if they kept at it, kept changing it, kept advancing it the way I would have... they did not stop at what they hung on their children. They will have applied the grander pieces to their own existences. Which means the ones sitting in the high seats are a good deal more than they were when they broke me on the mountain.|
The blueprint folded shut and sank into the ring’s keeping.
|Alright.| He exhaled. |Alright. No matter. We got interrupted. We were talking about time.|
Noah kept moving through the dark water, waiting.
|When it comes to that,| Atlas said, |you have multiple bodies wandering around, yes? Keep this one here. Search for more Gu, you will need many as ingredients. But I need one of your other bodies to go somewhere. One of my closed-off Elsedimensions.|
Noah’s steps slowed.
|Provenance Lifeforms may already be crawling through it. With a Descendant you always know whose hand is on the leash. With a Provenance Lifeform, you will not know whether they came for themselves, or whether they came because Those Who Remain told them to so...go carefully as you are still young and brittle, and there are many much more powerful than you!|
---
<THE Infiniverse >
Noah floated in a slow storm of sandy gold light.
It was a Dream Elsedimension, one of his own, and it turned around him in quiet drifts of light. He hung in the middle of it with his eyes half-closed, his human body bare and unmarked, the blue-gold brilliance of dreams pouring off his skin and folding back into the storm. There was nothing to do here but be still, and for a while he was.
Dreams had been with him for a long time. When his Provenance had woken it had come up wearing the qualities of Infinity and Dreams as it was only natural.
His Provenance had grown fast. Faster since Atlas!
Atlas was grand, and there were pieces of the old engineer that Noah could not see the bottom of. But Atlas was still just another person. A teacher, a voice in a ring, a set of blueprints and grievances.
Noah had come up out of Apocalypses leaning on no one, and he was not about to start leaning now. What Atlas gave him he took and made his own. The rest he did himself!
His Provenance had crossed a hundred a while ago, into the range he had decided to call the Ineffable Verse, and what he could do as THE Human Dreamer now was a great deal more than what he could do before. He could feel it when he was still like this, the reach of it was....enormous.
His other bodies were out in Existence watching everything turn. There was the reemergence of Atlas and also of Vakochev.
But Noah had his own emergence to think about!
Sonder had changed the shape of his Provenance. It did not only grow when he fought or built. It grew when he touched the dreams of others, when he watched them, helped them, moved through them. So a thought had been sitting with him for a while, outlandish and entirely his: he could dream the dreams of the people he knew!
He could watch them unfold the way the Immense Ones watched the narratives they had draped across existence, an eye in the sky over their own little stories.
"I dream of being an eye in the sky that mimics the gazes of Those Who Remain. I am grand, and I am immense. But I am not alone in existence." His voice was quiet.
"Let me see the dreams of the people who got me here. I can be grander while I watch them, or help them, or move them. Let me start an infinite dream. And for now..."
He drew a slow breath.
"Let my narrative track down Eckert. THE Great Usurper. Let me dream."
HUUM!
Light rose off his body in incandescent waves and took him apart and put him back together as something else.
His human shape thinned into brilliance and spread, and where a man had floated there was now an eye. It was enormous, blue and gold, its lid opening across a span that had no edge Noah could find!
Its pupil was not round. It was a mobius strip, a single band folded through itself, turning slowly. And out from the eye in every direction ran an ocean, blue and endless, going on past where light could reach.
Prompts bloomed across the surface of it.
|THE Human Dreamer initiates an Infinite Dream: THE EYE THAT DREAMS OTHERS.|
|You will observe, and where you choose, touch the unfolding dreams and narratives of another.|
|Cost: 75 PROVENANCE ESSENCE, to shape your gaze in the likeness of Those Who Remain and to render you as difficult to perceive as your craft allows.|
|Your narrative will read, to a passing gaze, as one more watcher come to observe a narrative already in progress. A weak one. Beneath notice.|
|Warning: a gaze far stronger than your mask may see through it. Do not linger where the strong are looking closely.|
The eye blinked once, slow, and was gone.
And Noah began to dream.
—
<THE Dimensional Provenance Train>
Far above a certain Cabin, a blue-gold eye opened in the sky.
Below it a Dimension churned, dark and violent and mid-story, a narrative still unspooling across the ground far beneath. Noah looked down through the eye and found that he saw everything at once and from above as it was...distant.
Prompts settled over his sight.
|You have entered an Infinite Dream over an active NARRATIVE OF EXISTENCE.|
|A powerful narrative already observes this place. Its gaze presses on everything below.|
|Your own gaze is masked. To the watcher, you read as a lesser observer, weak, drawn in to watch a story already being told. Your narrative is not making itself known.|
|The observing gaze will most likely ignore you, taking you for something far beneath it that wandered in to spectate.|
...!
Noah let his gaze fall.
Below him spread thousands of Descendants, and threaded through all of them he felt one aura sitting idle and enormous, a single mind wearing a crowd. Eckert. THE Great Usurper!
But the Usurper was not alone down there.
At the front of it stood a man raising a bow, an ordinary-looking man with nine gems burning across his chest, drawing on an army shrouded in darkness and power. Alexander, THE Peacemaker!
And behind THE Peacemaker stood three more.
Descartes. THE Primordial Paradox. THE Living Paradox!
Noah’s eye blinked.
They were all together?
The prompts finished settling.
|NARRATIVE OF EXISTENCE: THE TRAGIC HEROES, is unfolding.|
|Observing authority: THE OVERSEEING ONE.|
...!
