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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5775: Assimilation! I
Chapter 5775: Assimilation! I
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<THE True Human Emperor>
Drifting back from the cold place was surprisingly easy.
Noah felt the visage of The Caretaker fade, her pages and her frost dress and her cognizant eyes dissolving out of his awareness the way a dream dissolves in the first breath of waking, and then there was only the pull of his own body, far away and frozen, calling him home.
CRACK!
He opened his eyes in the Domain where an Immense One in the shape of an octopus was looking at him.
BOOM!
The frost shattered around his figure. It burst outward in a ring, the ice that had sealed him shearing off in sheets and spining away into the drifting snow, and the rivers of cold that had been pouring into him without pause for however long he had been gone simply stopped.
They hung in the air, arrested, as though the winter had reached the end of what it had to give him and found the vessel already full. And yet he still looked like a block of ice. His body glistened crystalline and white-blue where the frost had fallen away, and when he lifted his hands, they were the hands of a thing carved out of dreaming ice, clear and cold and faintly luminous, and they moved.
Moriarty’s eyes went unfathomably bright behind the small neat spectacles.
"You," the octopus said, "are not dead."
...!
He was not dead!
The words were ridiculous ones, and Noah felt exactly how ridiculous as he sat there in the falling snow and took stock of what had come back with him. His Provenance of THE Human Dreamer had passed six hundred, and it no longer sat quietly inside him the way it had at two hundred, or even at five.
Paired with its seat in his Unique Existential Root of Immensity, it felt like a blinding sun! The very idea of his Provenance swirled around him, a slow gravitational pull that he could feel affecting everything in reach, the snow, the light, the dim Conduits, the attention of the ancient thing watching him.
And he understood, sitting there, why.
Existence leaned toward what was self-made.
That was not a rule he had been taught. It was a thing he could feel now.
Everything borrowed in existence had to be held up by something else, propped and fueled and fed, and the moment the fuel ran out it fell. But a thing that had generated itself from nothing needed no prop, and so existence, which was tired of holding things up, leaned toward it the way water leans toward the lowest ground.
The grander he became, the harder existence leaned. He was no longer a thing that stood in existence. He was a thing existence had started to lean toward!
And now that he had harnessed The Long Night itself, all of it, his Provenance Essence and his Osmontian Tongue and every instrument he had ever used to reach his aims, had been sharpened with an extremely cold edge.
"No," Noah said, and his voice came out steady and a little strange, carrying frost in it. "I am not dead. How could I be, when my Dream is only just getting started?"
He let that sit a moment, and then he asked the thing he actually wanted to know, before anything else.
"But I am curious about something. If I am to be outside, wandering across existence, not in here and not in my Existential Root Domain, just how long would it take before an Immense One could sense me and come for me?"
The question was clearly not the one the octopus had expected. Moriarty had the look of a being with a great many questions of his own stacked up and waiting, and this one had cut in ahead of all of them.
But he answered anyway as his shining eyes rested on Noah.
"A newly born Root is like a signal," Moriarty said. "It broadcasts. Some of the greedy ones search for that signal automatically, the way a predator’s ear turns toward a sound before the predator has decided to listen. Once a fresh Root is out in external existence, it might take only a few minutes before something senses it and locks it down. If one of them is already in proximity, seconds."
"You do not need to take that risk. So long as you remain here. And you really should remain here, because..."
His tentacles stilled.
"How is it that you survived taking in rivers of the cold of the Long Night?"
...!
How?
Noah rose from where he had sat.
Ice fell from him as he stood, the last of the frost sloughing off his shoulders and his arms and scattering across the snow, and he clenched his hands, and the crystalline makeup of his body moved with it, slowly gaining more life, more warmth of motion.
"My Dream would not allow me to die. My Root...it simply decided to dream bigger than the death the cold offered."
He rolled his shoulders once, and ice cracked and fell.
"Ah. Anyway. Thank you for the Inscription. I need to acclimate to what has changed in me. Is there a mountain here, or an abode of some kind, that I can call my own while I do?"
He asked it casually. He knew the Immense One before him wanted to ask a great many more questions than that. He was not feeling especially sharing.
Because even this one had secrets.
Noah had not been entirely gone, in his state of freezing death. Some part of him had still been here, and it had caught a few words of a conversation, spoken over his frozen body between Sir Moriarty and something else, something with a voice like a verdant weight.
The conversation had been about him. About what he was. And a being that discussed a frozen guest with an unseen third party, in words the guest was not meant to hear, was a being that was not revealing everything, however warm its spectacles.
So Noah looked at him calmly, and gave him nothing, and Moriarty looked back.
And then the terrifying lifeform smiled, brilliantly and he clapped his tentacles together.
HUUM.
A figure stepped into being beside the octopus.
It was humanoid, tall and lean. Its skin held the deep blue-green of a sea seen from beneath, and faint ridges ran along its temples and down the sides of its throat, closed now, like the memory of gills.
Its eyes were large and dark and wet-bright, and a fine webbing showed between the fingers of its hands. It was dressed, incongruously, in a black butler’s suit, immaculate and severe, and over the suit, Noah noticed, it wore a heavy fur-lined cloak pulled close, and beneath the cloak it was shivering. It bowed to Sir Moriarty with the ease of long practise.
"This is a Legacy Keeper," Moriarty said. "Someone who may be considered a servant of this Legacy. There are many like him. Verys." The Keeper straightened.
"Take our young friend here to THE Glacial Elsedimension Mountain and get him settled. The cold does not seem to bother him. After you are settled, Poona or I may call for you soon enough."
...!
Noah looked at the being called Verys, who turned and bowed to him as well, and then waved one webbed hand. A rift tore open in the air before them, a clean seam of light, and the Keeper stepped aside and gestured toward it, politely, the way a good servant gestures a guest through a door.
Noah looked at him, and his sight opened the Keeper up without asking.
|VERYS, LEGACY KEEPER|
|VERITAS: 250. POTENTIA: 250. PONDUS: 250. PROVENANCE: 0.|
Two hundred and fifty across the board, and not a single point of Provenance!
Two hundred and fifty of strength, and it could not keep him warm.
Noah felt no contempt for the Keeper, who had bowed to him correctly and would open a door for him without complaint.
It was only the ground sloping, the way it sloped for everything. Existence leaned toward what was made. It did not lean toward what was given, however much was given.
He nodded once to Sir Moriarty.
Then he stepped through the rift.
And at the same time, as his crystalline body passed into the seam of light, he did another thing.
He began extending his existence outward.
It was slightly dangerous. He knew exactly how dangerous, because the octopus had just told him, minutes, seconds if something was close. But his Provenance was a grand one, grand enough that it had very nearly hidden from the eyes of Immense Ones even before he formed his Root, and he sent it out now, carefully, quietly, out of the Legacy and across external existence, toward a small sealed Elsedimension hung off the edge of a dying Dimension.
Toward the place where Adrastia was!
He would dream his Infinite Dream again. He would never let himself be in any one place for more than a few minutes. He would move, and move again, so that even if some greedy thing out in the dark caught the signal of his Root, there would be nothing left where it looked for anything to lock onto.
The rift closed behind him, and the Glacial Mountain rose ahead, and he began to dream an endless dream!
