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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5773: Target!
Chapter 5773: Target!
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<Existential Interlude- Commitment>In one of the earliest ages, when existence was still deciding what it would remember, there was an Immense One who made a promise.
She was called the Lamplighter, because in the dark of that age she had lit the first lights, and beings had gathered to them, and from those who gathered she had made a Provenance Lineage, a line of existences born of her own origin and carrying a spark of what she was. She loved them.
And when the first winter of that age came, and the hunting things came with it, she stood before her Lineage and she said: I will hold the dark back from you, all of it, for as long as one of you still breathes.
And existence heard her say it.
The winter was long. The Lamplighter held. She held for an age, and it cost a little of herself every night, spent against the dark so her Lineage could sleep. And then a night came when a greater thing than the winter stood before her and offered her a bargain: step aside for one night, only one, and be made whole, be given back everything the holding had taken.
One night. Her Lineage would never know.
The Lamplighter was tired past the reach of words. And she stepped aside.
For one night.
In the morning she stood again, whole and restored, and held the dark back as she always had, and she told herself no promise had been broken, because she had only rested, and the dark had only taken a little.
But existence had heard her say it. All of it, for as long as one of you still breathes.
And existence does not hear the words a being means. It hears the words a being says. She had said all of it. She had given one night. And a commitment, once made, is not a thing that bends to how tired you are.
Her Lineage began to fail. A spark went out here, a line of descent went dark there, and she could not find the cause, and she burned herself down to nothing searching for it, and never once understood that the cause was a night she had already forgotten. The last of her Lineage died with her name on its lips, and she died holding it, and existence, which had heard her promise, kept its own side to the very end.
A commitment is not a wish. It is a sentence you write into existence, and existence finishes the sentence whether or not you are still there to read it.
—
<THE True Human Emperor>
Noah did not know how long he had been gone.
He opened his eyes, and the light around him was dim, the Existential Conduits that had swirled up to bind him now hanging quiet and low, their white-blue frost dimmed to a soft glow. The tendrils had withdrawn. The pact was made. And his body, when he looked down at it, was glistening.
He was not the same shape!
A suit of Provenance wrapped him, a second skin of living light that clung to every line of his frame, pale white-blue and faintly luminous, fitted so close it moved as he moved, more a state of his existence than a garment.
Beneath it his body had changed. The muscle of him looked as though it had been cut from crystalline ice, clear and faceted and cold, and he understood without testing it that it was harder than any material he had come across in all of existence, a body that had drunk the winter and set!
His hair had gone white-blue, drifting in the still air. From his eyes rose a pillar of light, magisterial, cold, a column of radiance that lit the dim Conduits arond him. And on his chest, where his heart would have been, a mobius strip turned. It spun endlessly, a twisting band of light looping back into itself without beginning or end, turning like an engine, and Noah knew what it was! It was the reflection, worn on the outside now, of the Root that turned inside him without cease.
Prompts bloomed across his pillar-lit sight.
|Your Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin has devoured dense concentrations of Slivers of Negative Immensity.|
|It has transformed. It is now a DUAL CONCEPTUAL AND PHYSICAL EXISTENTIAL ROOT OF IMMENSITY.|
|It has grown. Its transformation is still ongoing.|
Dual!
Noah read the word twice. Every Root in existence chose a side, Conceptual or Physical, Empyros or Fiend, and Moriarty had walked him through the whole absolute divide of it, and his own Root had refused to answer. Now it had answered. Both!
It had drunk the winter and come out the other side as a thing the octopus had no box for, a Root born of an Infinity that was true in two directions at once, and now true in both!
|Elevated capabilities, current:|
|Your Root now adds 40 to 80 to all attributes daily, scaling as it grows.|
|You have grasped the initial weavings of the inherent Ruling of Existence of THE RENDERING, as it was preset within the Night Lifeforms.|
|You have developed immunity to the basal cold effect of THE LONG NIGHT. Only that effect, for now.|
|Your Provenance, and all weavings of your existence, now carry the undeniable chill of Negative Immensity. It can penetrate any form of authority.|
...!
The chill that had nearly ended him was his now, threaded through everything he was, and it did not respect authority, any authority, the way the Long Night itself did not respect the mighty. Whatever he touched with his Provenance from this moment carried the winter in it!
He looked at himself!
|THE True Human Emperor / THE Human Dreamer|
|VERITAS: 611|
|PROVENANCE: 624|
|POTENTIA: INFINITE|
|PONDUS: 606|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 618|
|Provenances: THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer (native, generated), THE Provenance of THE Immense Sovereign (claimed).|
|Infinity: DIALETHEIC INFINITY.|
|Existential Root: THE Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin. A Dual Conceptual and Physical Existential Root of Immensity. Transformation ongoing.|
Six hundred! He took all of it in calmly.
Then the snow came around him, drifting close, and he felt something he had not felt since the Long Night began.
A breeze!
The snow moved past his crystalline skin and it was only snow. Cool, soft, a breeze off a winter field. The cold that had crawled into his Root and frozen him solid touched him now and found nothing to freeze, and he stood in the falling white of the frozen underworld and felt, for the first time in a while...comfortable.
Then he blinked.
Because he sensed pages fluttering.
He looked ahead, and there was a woman.
She stood in the air before him where no one had stood a moment ago, and she wore a dress of frost, white and flowing, that moved around her as though it were made of falling snow that never landed.
She was tall, and she was still, and had dark hair drawn back from a pale sharp face, a mouth that had never needed to smile, eyes that held a coldness and an imperiousness beyond any measure Noah had for either. She looked like a thing that had been obeyed since before obedience had a name.
And her eyes held cognizance!
Every other thing in this underworld had stared at nothing out of blank hollow eyes. This one saw. She looked out over the frozen expanse with a mind behind her gaze, and down below her, all across the endless ranks, the hollow Night Lifeforms had gone back to sitting, settling onto the frozen rivers once more, storms of snow gathering and turning around each of them as the underworld resumed its long cold work.
She did not address him. She did not greet him, or name him, or acknowledge in any way that he had risen where thousands had not, or that he had made a pact with the Long Night that not one other thing in this place had ever made. She simply reached out, unhurried, and plucked one of the pages fluttering around her out of the air.
It looked like a sheet of ice. Thin, clear, faintly glowing.
She threw it toward him, and she spoke.
"Your first target to cleanse," she said. "You have twenty-four hours."
...!
Noah caught the page.
It was cold in his hand, though the cold no longer meant anything to him, and on its surface an image had formed, an image set into the ice the way a face is set into a frozen pond.
A young man. He had the bearing of a young king, the poise of one born to a throne, handsome and compsed. But his eyes were wrong for his face. They were aged. Ancient. The eyes of a thing that had lived far longer than the young face that held them, looking out of that youth with a weight no youth should carry.
And Noah knew him!
He had met this being before. He had read and understood the unfortunate thing that had been done to him, a Vessel that had been targeted by THE Sealed One as what stood in that young king’s body was neither wholly itself nor wholly the thing that had tried to take it.
It was Adrastia!
The one who had the rather unfortunate case of being mixed with THE Sealed One!
