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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5779: Time! I
Chapter 5779: Time! I
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In the age before ages were counted, there was a Lineage that did not know what an hour was.
They were a Provenance Lineage. The First one among them had generated her own origin out of the dark.
They lived in a valley at the bottom of existence where nothing had yet been measured. They did not count their days, because no one had told them days could be counted. They only lived them, one after another.
And through that valley, though none of them could see it, there ran a river.
Time ran through the valley. It ran through everything, in that age as in every age, and it was the one thing in all of existence that every being received in exactly equal measure and no being ever kept.
The Lineage stood in it up to their necks and did not know it was there. They aged in it. They loved in it. They died in it, and were carried off downstream, and the ones left standing wept and did not know what had carried their dead away.
Of that Lineage there was a daughter who noticed the river.
She was not the strongest of them, nor the wisest. But she was the one who stood at the bank one evening and watched her mother be carried off, and asked the question none of the others had thought to ask.
What is this thing that takes us? And where does it go?
So she went looking for it!
She walked out of the valley, which no one of her Lineage had done, and she walked a very long way, and at the end of the walking she found The Provenance of Time.
The Provenance of Time was sitting on a stone. Time was not old, and Time was not young. Time had the face of everything that had ever happened and the eyes of everything that had not happened yet, and it was not doing anything at all, because Time does not do things. Time only...passes.
The daughter said to it, You take my people. I have watched you carry them off. I have come to ask you to stop.
The Provenance of Time said, I do not take. I do not give. I am the only thing in existence that every one of you receives equally and none of you keeps. Your people are not carried off by me. They are carried off in me.
The daughter did not accept this. She was of a Lineage that came from nothing, and such beings do not accept.
She said, My First mother generated her own origin. She owed nothing to any framework. Why then must I stand in your river like a fish? Why must I receive you as everyone receives you? I will make my own. I will generate a Time that is mine, the way she generated an origin that was hers, and then you will not carry me anywhere I do not choose to go.
And Time, who had heard this before, and would hear it again, said only, You may. It has been done. But understand what it costs, for I will not tell you twice.
The daughter did not ask what it cost. She did not ask!
She went back to her valley, and she sat down at the bank of the river she could now see, and she began to generate. It took her an age, though she did not count it, because she still did not count. She reached into the self-made fire her Lineage carried and she made, out of nothing, a Time that was hers.
Her own Provenance of Time. Not the common river that ran through everything, but a private current, originatng in her and answering to no one, which she could slow, and hasten, and stand outside of, and which would never carry her anywhere she did not choose to be carried.
And the day it was finished, she became Immense!
She stepped out of the river. That is all it took, in the end, once the current of her own was made. She stepped up onto the bank, out of the common Time that ran through everything, and stood in her own, and looked back down at the valley of her Lineage from a place where no hour could reach her.
She saw her people aging. She had not aged. She saw her sisters grow old and be carried off downstream, and she stood on the bank and could not reach them, because her hand was in one Time and theirs were in another, and a hand cannot cross that.
She saw her children, and her children’s children, live whole lives between one of her breaths and the next. She called to them, and her voice arrived in the valley a generation late, or a generation early, so that they heard a stranger shouting from a bank they could not see.
And in time, which was still running for them though it had stopped for her, her Lineage forgot her. Just like how a river forgets a stone it no longer touches.
They told stories about a daughter who had gone looking for the thing that took their dead and had never come back, and the stories were true, and she stood twenty paces from the storytellers and could not make them hear her.
That is the Provenance of Time. It is one of the grandest Provenances there is, because it is the only one that lets a being stand outside the river every other being drowns in. And it is the grimmest, because the river is where everyone you love is standing, and to leave it is to leave them, and a being with its own Time is the loneliest thing in all of existence!
Time had told her. It had said, understand what it costs. She had not asked.
Some say she still stands on the bank above a valley that no longer exists, watching a river with no one in it. Some say she learned to step back down into the common current for a moment at a time, to hold a hand that would slip from hers a heartbeat later, and that this was worse.
And some say that every Immense One who has ever stood outside an hour is that same daughter, learning the same lesson, in a different valley, and that Those Who Remain are only the ones who never once stepped back down!
Time was always a dangerous thing to play with.
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
Noah stood in three places at once, and none of them was safe.
The first was the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, where his body sat under Verys’s care on the Glacial Mountain. The second was THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering, where a part of him hunted Rare Gu and never stopped moving. The third was here, at the peak of a violet tree that stretched away for light years, in a Dimension that had come apart from time.
The gazes of the Immense Ones did not reach well into these last two. Their Ruling of Existence still let them watch a great many things. But it did not let them watch everything.
At this time.
The air tore beside him!
Achilles and Rose stepped out of it onto a branch.
The ring on Noah’s finger buzzed.
Atlas rose out of it, an old man made of light, and the billowing snow of the Long Night passed straight through his illusory chest without slowing. He looked at the two newcomers, and then at Noah.
"We were close," Atlas said. "We were this close to sniffing out where my old Workshop is. Why bring newcomers now?"
He nodded at them. "Who are they?"
"Somewhat unique lifeforms," Noah said. "They were connected to THE Sealed One. I severed that connection seconds ago. And that old one, it turns out, is connected to a great many Immense Ones. Some of them are likely among those who killed you all those years ago."
...!
Atlas blinked.
He looked Achilles up and down, slowly, like a craftsman looking at a tool he did not make and cannot yet place.
"Connected how?" he said.
"I don’t know yet. The memories are half-ruined. But there were Immense Ones in them. And a Legacy."
Achilles rose from where he had crouched. His eyes were shining!
"I am Adrastia," he said. "I am thankful for what Osmont did to help me. And it seems he is not done doing so."
He looked at the old man of light as he asked Noah. "You mentioned... a Root of Immensity?"
...!
Atlas glanced at Noah. Noah inclined his head as he nodded.
"I want to try inducing the formation of a Root of Immensity in others. I am doing it now. Here, with him, and at my home. Different subjects, the same work, at the same time."
Atlas tilted his illusory head.
"A Root is generated," he said. "It is not given. That is the whole meaning of the word. So how would you induce anything?"
Noah looked out over the light years of violet branches, and when he answered, his voice had the flat calm of a man describing something he could see from a great height.
"I am a space the house of existence was built in," he said. " When I stand near an existence, that existence begins to remember what it dreams. I do not hand anything my Root. I show their existence the shape of beginning, and whether it begins is their own weaving. Well, in theory. I could act to induce something made from his own signal of becoming. His own Chorionic Gonadotropin."
Atlas was silent for a while. The snow went through him. Noah turned to Achilles.
"Your Assimilation Factor. The thing THE Sealed One wanted from you. He wanted it because it is the only one of its kind. You do not devour what you take. You become it. And a Root grows from the signal of a being’s own becoming. So I intend to build something out of that. A signal that tells existence to keep growing you into everything you assimilate, without end."
Achilles’s crystalline eyes did not leave him as he grasped all these possibilities!
"That has no precedent, I believe." Atlas said.
"Nothing I have done these past days has precedent," Noah said.
...!
He looked at the three of them, the old man of light and the chameleon of a king and the silent woman, and he spoke more of his existence.
"Existence is not static for me anymore. It is dynamic. I can see the equation of it turning, and I can see that most of the walls in it are only places no one has pushed. A great many things are possible now that were not possible a week ago. Just because a thing seems impossible does not mean it will remain so."
He looked at Atlas. "My Provenance is that of a Dreamer. I dream a thing, and existence adjusts to agree. So I will ask you the only question that matters. Why can I not dream impossibilities into existence?"
...!
Atlas did not answer at once.
He looked at Noah for a long moment! He crossed his illusory arms.
"You want to dream impossibilities. Then dream this fairly simple one. Dream that we have already found my Workshop. Here. Now. We’ve been looking for some time now while avoiding the gazes of others."
WAA!
Noah was already looking at the sky as his Provenance came off him in a flood of blue gold! The violet tree bent away from it! The snow turned to gold in the air! He did not search for the Workshop. He did not reach for it. He simply dreamed, plainly and completely, that the four of them were standing before the hidden Workshop of Atlas, in this Elsedimension, now.
|25 Provenance Essence expended.|
|You have dreamed an arrival. Existence is adjusting to agree.|
Existence shuddered!
The branch was gone! The tree was gone! For one instant there was nothing under them at all, and Rose’s grip closed hard on Achilles’s arm, and neither of them made a sound.
Then there was ground!
They stood on stone, and around them raged storms of time!
Hours blew past like weather! Whole seasons went by in a gust and came back the other way! The sky was a sheet of purple turning in slow spirals, and through it fell the snow of the Long Night, which alone in that place seemed to fall at the ordinary speed, one flake after another, indifferent to what the hours were doing.
And ahead of them rose a massive statue!
It was a serpent. It stretched away for Gigaparsecs, a coil of stone so vast that its far end was lost in the purple, and its head had come round to meet its tail, and its jaws were closed on it. It was eating itself! It had been eating itself, by the look of the stone, for a very long time, and it was no nearer to finishing.
"Time," Atlas said quietly. "Eating its own tail. I was young when I carved it. But it seems your Provenance is truly grand..."
Then he stopped, because they all felt it now.
Auras! Many of them, and every one of them the aura of a Provenance Lifeform, a being that had generated its own origin, dense and self-made and unmistakable as they circled the vastness of this statue.
And near the base of the statue, where a purple barrier of time hung shimmering across the way like a curtain of years, a dozen figures stood pressed against it, working at it, trying to get through.
The dozen turned around!
Twelve pairs of eyes found the four of them at once!
They were foreign Provenance Lifeforms, all twelve.
Rose’s flames lit green at her fingertips and stayed there, low. Achilles moved half a step in front of her without seeming to decide to.
The old man of light was not looking at the twelve. He was looking past them, past the purple curtain, at what lay behind it, and his voice, when it came, came only inside Noah’s mind, so quiet the storms of time could not have heard it.
"Well," Atlas said. "This is my Workshop. We can finally get going on the matter of time. "
...!
