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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5760: Existence Is Not Empty!
Chapter 5760: Existence Is Not Empty!
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Noah stepped out of the record and back into the present.
He arrived where the Dimensional Provenance Train had been cut open, where Vakochev had cleaved it in two and an architect had died and a frost-visage had planted its forest. Hours had passed here while he had been figuring out the Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin.
The frost-forest had grown thicker, its rimed boughs heavier with frozen Dimensions, and the region for gigaparsecs around had emptied out, the hunters gone, the watchers gone, the snow still falling silent over the ruin. It looked, at a glance, like an abandoned place. A dead one.
Then Noah looked at it with the eyes he had now, and he saw that it was nothing of the kind.
...!
Existence was not empty. It had never been empty! He simply had never been able to see.
Above him, through the foamy void that he had always taken for a formless dark, there rose pillars. Vast ones. They climbed up out of the deep of existence and stretched away in every direction, structures so enormous that a single one dwarfed whole clusters of Dimensions themselvs, and they were everywhere, a forest of them far grander than the frozen one below, reaching endlessly across the void. And they coursed with authority!
Some shone blue from root to unseen peak, boundless Infinity pouring up their length. Others ran obsidian with THE Primordial Source, dark and dense and old.
Others gleamed white with the woven light of THE Argent Loom. And others still burned in colors Noah had no names for, flowing endlessly upward, downward, and outward through the structures.
They were strange to look at, because they were solid and they were not. He could see the shape of each pillar clearly, and yet he could see through it too, as though it were both a thing and the absence of a thing, hollow and present at once. He reached out and laid his hand against the nearest, a great blue column of pure Infinity, and the moment he touched it, prompts bloomed across his sight.
|You are perceiving an EXISTENTIAL CONDUIT.|
|The Conduits are the channels through which the authorities of existence flow, threaded through the whole of the void the way rivers and seas are threaded through a world. Infinity, THE Primordial Source, THE Argent Loom, and authorities beyond your knowing move along them without end.|
|They are the veins of existence itself.|
Noah drew his hand back slowly.
Existence was not a formless dark scattered with worlds. It was this. It was an endless architecture of flowing authority, seas and rivers of power moving through the deep in structures grander than anything he had ever built, and it had always been here, all around him, in every place he had ever stood!
And it now stood surrounded by whites of snow.
He had walked through it his whole existence and never once seen it, because to see it, one had to stand where he now stood. The cruelest part of that beauty was that almost nothing alive could perceive it. Only the very greatest existences could look at the deep of things and see how unfathomably lovely it truly was.
And it was not only the Conduits!
Something moved along them.
Across the void, across miles and light years and gigaparsecs, drifting between the great pillars and perched upon them, were living things. Small ones.
They were the equivalent of the flies and critters and birds a person might see drifting through any forest on any world, and they were everywhere, thousands of them turning lazily through the space of a single nearby light year alone.
Each one was incandescent, a small bright shape of pure light, delicate and strange, with wings or fins or trailing streamers of radiance that caught the colors of the Conduits they drifted near. Many were perched upon the great pillars, still and peaceful, and Noah understood, watching them, that they were drinking.
They sipped at the flowing authorities like how insects sip at nectar, feeding quietly on the rivvers of Infinity and Primordial Source and THE Argent Loom, minding their own small business in the veins of existence.
Prompts settled across his sight as he watched them.
|You are perceiving CONDUIT LIFEFORMS.|
|They dwell in the flow of the Existential Conduits and feed upon the authorities that move there, and the authority feeds on them. They are imperceptible to beings of insufficient Dimensionality and standing. Dimensionality alone is not enough. One must also hold the standing to perceive them, and only once perceived can they perceive you in turn, and interact.|
And their measures opened to him.
|CONDUIT LIFEFORM|
|VERITAS: ~150. POTENTIA: ~150. PONDUS: ~150. PROVENANCE: 0.|
Noah went still with the wonder of it. These small drifting critters, these flies of the deep that no lesser being could ever even see, carried attributes at a hundred and fifty across the board. Every one of them!
They were, by the raw numbers, mightier than most of the beings he had fought his whole climb, mightier than kingdoms and lineages and armies, and they did nothing with it at all! They only drifted, and drank, and buzzed peacefully through the veins of existence, because they held not a single point of Provenance between them. They had never generated a thing. They simply were, at that height, the way a fish simply is at the bottom of a sea, born to a depth that would crush anything not made for it.
One of them, wrapped in trailing rivers of light, came drifting curiously toward him.
It floated close as its wings flapped, turning about his radiant form as though it had never seen a thing quite like him, and Noah, moved by something he could not name, raised his hand. The little creature came and perched upon his outstretched finger, light as nothing, incandescent, and it made a single melodious sound, a small clear note that rang through the void like struck crystal!
Then it lifted from his finger and drifted away, back to its Conduit, back to its peaceful drinking, indifferent and lovely.
Noah watched it go.
Existence was abundant! It was vast! It was so much more, and so much more beautiful, than the empty dark he had always believed it to be. Everywhere he had ever looked and seen nothing, there had been this, oceans of authority and small bright living things drifting through them, a whole existence beneath the Existence, waiting for eyes grand enough to find it.
And at such a thought... his gaze hardened!
He rolled his neck slowly, and the wonder in him cooled into something colder and more familiar, because a thing this beautiful was a thing that had to be protected. His own existence was beautiful. His empire, sealed now in the space that was only his. His people, dreaming their centuries. His mother, his children, all of it.
And there were things in existence that threatened what was his, that had always threatened it, and Noah found himself wondering, standing here newly-born among the veins of existence, whether he could do something about them now.
THE Sealed One. THE SLEEPLESS FIEND. THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, who had sworn to rip Thalia in half at any moment he held her.
He was not an Immense One. He knew that. He had only just forged his Root, only just begun. He was not so foolish as to think a single step of becoming had made him the equal of the beings whose war he could not even perceive. But he wanted to know where he stood now!
He wanted to know if he could mount an offensive against even the weakest of the things that hunted him, against THE Sealed One at the least. It was one of many things he meant to test as he grew into what he had become.
And that raised the simplest question of all.
Where did his attributes even stand, now that his Root had emerged?!
He closed his eyes. He breathed in, drawing the cold and the light and the flowing authority of the deep into his newborn existence. And he turned his gaze inward, upon himself, to see exactly what he had become.
And he could not help it.
He smiled!
