Published at 25th of September 2026 7:34 am

Chapter 5771: Pain! III

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Noah had let it go on long enough.

His eyes opened wide, and from them poured beams of incandescent light, cutting through the frozen dark as he spoke a single word!

"Enough!"

WAA!

And he imposed THE MORTAL COIL.

The Word settled over the two shapes the lifeform had just rendered, the yellow that pulled and the violet that pushed, and it did to them what it did to all borrowed things. It named their authority as a mortal, ending thing, and the authority answered. The shapes dimmed. Their edges softened!

The terrible force bound inside them dropped by half in an instant, the pull weakening, the push guttering, and Noah reached out and closed his hand and crushed both of them as they burst into nothing.

Then he brought his hand down!

It fell like a hammer! The whole weight of his Provenance came down with it, more than five hundred, an existence that had generated itself from nothing and refused to be told what it was, and it smashed into the frost-wreathed beast with a force the frozen thing could not hold.

BOOM!

The lifeform exploded!

It came apart all at once, its lion’s body and its wrong unnameable head and the terrible cold that had wreathed it shattering outward into countless drifting pieces. And then the pieces turned.

They did not scatter and fade. Every shard of the shattered beast, every wisp of its frost and every fragment of its weavings, turned in the frozen air and streamed toward Noah, drawn to him like the winter itself was drawn to him, pouring into his existence and his Root.

And with them came the pain!

Noah’s whole existence seized as the fragments sank into him. They came full of a suffering so vast and so old that it rolled through him in waves and nearly took him to his knees. It was not his pain!

It was the Yali’s, and it was worse than any wound, a deep and grinding agony threaded through with every dark thing an existence could feel, terror and despair and a bottomless, exhausted hopelessness, the emotional sediment of a thing that had been made to hurt for so long it had forgoten there was anything else.

It poured into him with the frost and the knowledge, and for a moment Noah, who did not show pain had to fight simply to keep standing under the weight of a stranger’s misery.

And prompts bloomed across his sight.

|You have collapsed the weavings of a YALI NIGHT LIFEFORM.|

|You have absorbed wisps of its knowledge of THE LONG NIGHT.|

|You have experienced the pain of a lifeform that was among thousands experimented upon for millions of years by an unknown existence, across a small region of existence.|

|What you feel is merely a sliver of that pain.|

A sliver.

Everything crashing through him now, the terror and the despair...all of it was a fraction, a single drop wrung from an ocean.

|You are perceiving a system of existence: THE RENDERING.|

|A wielder conjures a closed figure, a Shape, and everything inside its bounds is manipulated. The COLOR of the Shape decides what it does. The COMPLEXITY of the Shape decides how strong it is. A simple figure of few faces is weak. An intricate figure of many faces is devastating.|

|The YALI wields the Rendering through NEGATIVE PROVENANCE PSEUDO-IMMENSITY. It generates nothing of its own. It renders using the borrowed, hollowed authority of the Long Night that pours through it, an imitaton of true Immensity, a power that mimics the real thing without the living Root beneath it.|

|THE YELLOW SHAPE: a figure of Pull. Everything within its bounds is drawn toward its center. At the strength this Yali rendered it, it could crush an existence inward with a force a trillion collapsing Dimensions could only dream of.|

|THE VIOLET SHAPE: a figure of Push. Everything within its bounds is thrust outward. At the strength this Yali rendered it, it could push an existence apart until its very quarks split and disintegrated.|

...!

Noah stood among the falling snow with the last of the Yali flowing into him, the pain slowly ebbing as his existence swallowed it.

He understood now what had nearly killed him. Not a beast as much as...a victim. A hollowed, tortured thing rendering shapes of pull and push out of borrowed cold, wielding a power that pulled hard enough to crush trillions of dimensions and pushed hard enough to scatter his atoms!

And then, above him at this time, the wasteland stirred.

Noah lifted his incandescent gaze, and from the endless ranks of blank-eyed seated things, ten of them rose at once!

Every one of them emanated waves of light grander than the thing he had just dissipated, deeper, stronger, further along whatever terrible road had made them.

Ten hollow figures, rising from the frozen rivers, ten pillars of cold swelling around them, and all ten turned their empty gazes up toward the one risen thing in all that frozen dark.

They spoke, at the same instant, in one flat cognizance-less voice that carried no anger and no life at all.

"You do not understand anything about pain."

...!

Then they turned into streaks of light and surged toward him!

And Noah continued to drink the rivers of the Long Night as he watched on coldly!

The ten came at him as streaks of light, and Noah met them the way he had learned to meet everything.

He took what had tried to kill him and made it his!

He had watched the Yali render its shapes of pull and push, and then learned all about it when he devoured its weavings.

The methodology seemed...lethal!

So!

As the first streak resolved into a hollow-eyed thing lunging for his throat, Noah raised a hand and his Provenance answered, and a shape bloomed in the frozen air before him. His own. A figure of pull, yellow-bright, rendered not out of borrowed cold but out of his own boundless self-made authority.

He caught the lunging thing inside it!

The shape pulled, and it did not pull cleanly. Noah made it worse than that. He tightened the figure as it drew the hollow lifeform in, wrenching the body toward a center that kept shrinking, and the thing came apart inside the pull the way meat comes apart in a grinder, crushed and wrung and torn all at once!

Its existence shattered, and streamed toward him, and poured in!

And the pain came with it!

He saw it die. Not this death, the true one, the old one. He saw a creature of scaled hide and too many eyes, a thing that had once been proud, held down while an Immense One peeled the authorty out of it strip by strip, made it into a hollow engine for the cold, and left it seated in the dark for an age with just enough awareness to know what it had lost. The memory sank into Noah with the frost!

The second came, and the third.

He rendered a shape of push for them, violet and hard, and when they surged toward him he detonated it and smashed them away, hurling the hollow things back across the frozen underworld, buying the half-second he needed!

When a hollow lifeform came close, too close, thinking to grapple him, Noah conjured a shape of push directly against its body, an inch from its frame, and let it fire. The thing did not fly away. It could not!

The push had nowhere to send it but apart, and its whole existence was pulled in every direction at once, torn into streams of light that flowed, all of them, into him.

They fought him, and they wept as they fought.

Every one of the hollow things looked at him with the same accusatory gaze, empty of cognizance and full of something worse than cognizance, and from the blank eyes of several of them ran tears, bloody tears sliding down frost-rimed faces while they threw their borrowed shapes at him and died on his own.

They did not know why they hated him. There was not enough left in them to know anything. But something below knowing had turned its grief on him, and it said, over and over, in the flat chorus of the dying, the same thing.

You do not understand pain.

The fourth died, and the fifth, and Noah absorbed each one, and each one gave him a death. A city of them, frozen. A lineage, harvested. A mother-thing that had been made to watch. He took it all in, every unjust ending, every strip of authority torn from a living thing by an Immense One’s patient hands, and his existence buzzed and swelled and grieved with the inflow of it, and still he did not stop!

He was ruthless. He had to be. He rendered pull and crush, push and scatter, moving through the ten hollow things with cold efficency.

The sixth he crushed into a pulling shape until it was a point. The seventh he pushed apart at the seams. The eighth and the ninth came together, and he caught them both in a single yellow figure and drew them into each other until there was nothing left to draw!

And then there was one.

The tenth rose before him, and it was a woman.

She had white hair, long and drifting in the frozen air, and her existence was already crumpling, already coming apart under the weight of everything Noah had done to her kind and the weight of whatever had been done to her long before.

Bloody tears ran from her hollow eyes. She did not render a shape. She did not lunge. She only looked at him as her existence failed, and she spoke, and unlike the others, her voice was not entirely flat.

Something had surfaced in her at the very end, some last drowned ember of the self she had been before an Immense One hollowed her out.

"Do you," she said, "understand our pain?"

Noah stood still.

"Why did you never do anything about our pain?" Her existence guttered, streaming apart into motes of white light that drifted toward him even as she spoke. "Will you do anything now, now that you take all that we have left?"

...!

And then she was gone, dissolving into light, and her existence flowed into Noah like all the others, and her pain flowed with it.

Hers was clear. The others had been hollowed past memory, their agony a formless roar. But something in the woman had held onto herself to the very end, and so what poured into Noah was not just pain but a life.

He felt her taken. He felt the Immense One’s hands.

His existence buzzed and shook with the memory of it, and the prompts bloomed through the grief.

|You have collapsed the weavings of ten YALI NIGHT LIFEFORMS.|

|You have absorbed their pain, their memories, and the manner of their unjust deaths. Each was hollowed by an unknown Immense One and made an engine of THE LONG NIGHT eventually. |

|What you carry now is no longer a sliver.|

And with the last of the white-haired woman came understanding of a shape he had not seen before.

|THE RENDERING: a third Shape analyzed and absorbed.|

|THE GREEN SHAPE: a figure of Grow. Everything within its bounds is made to expand. At the strength these lifeforms render it, it can force an existence to grow beyond what it can hold, swelling its weavings past their own bounds until the existence bursts apart from the inside.|

|You now perceive three of multiple Shapes: Pull, Push, Grow.|

Noah stood alone in the frozen dark, ten deaths heavier, an entire chorus of stolen lives buzzing and grieving inside a Root that would not stop drinking the winter, and the woman’s last words would not leave him.

Will you do anything now, now that you take all that we have left?

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