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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5789: The Death of Time! I
Chapter 5789: The Death of Time! I
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Noah did not have an answer good enough to give, so he did not give one.What would he do differently? He meant to climb. To gather power, all of it he could reach, and become an Immense One.
But the Collector had done exactly that, and it had not given him a grand life. It had given him a long one, and then a cold end in a Dimension of snow at the hand of a thing that did not even speak. Bug or one of Those Who Remain, a being lived, and then it died. Becoming Immense only made the second part take longer.
So he looked at the Caretaker a moment longer, standing in snow so thick now it was nearly a wall, and he left.
The hours after that passed slower than any hours had passed for him in a long time.
But they passed.
—
THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering was never still, and this corner of it least of all!
In this place, Noah floated in a region where time itself had gone murky, as if the weavings here had been left out in the rain for a few billion years and started to rot.
Old currents of it hung in the air like smoke that had forgotten how to rise, grey-violet and heavy, and through them drifted things he could only half-perceive: the outline of an ocean that had dried long ago, the echo of a Dimension that had not been born yet, stretches where a single moment had been worn so thin by repetition that he could see straight through it.
It felt ancient in a way nothing else in the Chrysalis did.
On either side of him floated the two who had been with him longest, and they had come out of their acclimation changed!
Ruination’s crimson eyes no longer simply glowed. Beams of crimson light shot from them in steady lines, reading everything they touched, and she wore a long coat of crimson and gold, cut clean and severe, with the unchangeable script of her new Root showing faintly at her collar and wrists.
THE Infiniverse wore a thick fur coat of many colors, heavy and trailing, and her face held an expression Noah had rarely seen on it before. Imperious. Unbound
The look of a being who had just discovered exactly how much reality she could hold in one hand.
He had brought them here to test those new Roots, and for a second reason as well. He needed a Rare Gu for the Time Inscription. More than that, if he could manage it, he wanted a Rare Time Gu.
He had been ranging across the endless stretches of the Chrysalis for hours with this body, until at last he found this domain, soaked through with the old weavings of time.
"Master, if you can bear with me a little bit, I will explain my vision at this moment in time..." Ruination said.
Her crimson beams swept slowly across the murky currents as she spoke.
"A lifeform looks at the dirt beneath its feet and believes that is all there is to see. Ask it what happened a moment ago, and it must remember. Ask it what happens next, and it must guess. It spends its whole existence peering through a crack in a wall, watching existence slide past one second at a time."
The beams paused. "I...no longer look through the crack."
Noah waited. She was clearly not finished!
"When I open my senses now, distance stops being a road that must be walked. In THE Infiniverse, a million Dimensions from here, a woman drops a clay pot. I do not simply see it fall. I see her fingers letting go. I see the pot hanging in the air. I see the five different ways it may break against the floor, all in the same breath. The past is not a memory. Tomorrow is not a mystery. They are only... different corners of the same table."
She turned her head, and the beams turned with it, into the deeper murk.
"Across this domain, I have already located the information of two Rare Time Gu. Where they are, where they have been, and where probability says they will be one minute from now. I can take you to where they will be, Master, and we can simply wait for them to arrive."
...!
Noah smiled.
She was showing off a little. He did not mind in the least!
"Lead," he said.
They followed her. Each step they took crossed gigaparsecs, the murky currents blurring past, and at the place Ruination chose they stopped, and waited, and the Chrysalis came to them.
It was a place of purple clouds, slow and towering, and between them spun disks of raw time! Great flat wheels of it, violet-edged and whirling, and anything they touched was severed from billions of years in an instant, cut clean out of its own history. One sliced through a drifting rock ahead of them and the rock simply was not there anymore, had never been there, left no trace!
None of the disks came near the three of them. Around Noah and his companions, rivers of dream flowed slow and serene, blue and gold, and the disks of time curved away from them like wind parting around a standing stone.
And far ahead, through the clouds, they saw the Gu!
There were two of them, and they were titanic!
Each one looked something like a butterfly, if a butterfly had been dragged up from the deepest trench of a lightless sea. Their bodies were long and transluscent, lit from within by cold bioluminescent lures that dangled from their heads on thin stalks.
Their mouths were rimmed with glassy needle teeth, and trailing tendrils drifted beneath them for miles. But their wings were glorious. Vast and violet, burning with time, every scale a small flame of shifting hours!
And the two of them were holding a chain!
It ran between them, purple and gold, each end clasped in a set of long pale claws, and along its length flowed a current Noah recognized at once, because he had drunk its like from a river of time only days ago. Provenance. The Provenance of Time itself, coursing back and forth between the two great Gu without pause.
|RARE GU: THE ANCHORED HOUR (bound to the Past).|
|VERITAS: 471. POTENTIA: 468. PONDUS: 476. PROVENANCE: 489.|
|RARE GU: THE UNARRIVED HOUR (bound to the Future).|
|VERITAS: 474. POTENTIA: 470. PONDUS: 472. PROVENANCE: 491.|
|A mated pair, joined by a chain of their own Provenance of Time. One lives entirely in the Past. The other lives entirely in the Future. Neither exists in the present at all.|
|A blow struck at one may be undone by the other before it lands, or will already have been avoided in a moment that has not yet come.|
|Their attributes are not extreme. Their paradox is.|
...!
Noah’s eyes narrowed. High four hundreds. Beneath him, on paper, by a fair margin. And none of that mattered in the least, because how exactly did you hit something that was not here? One of them lived before the blow and the other lived after it, and between them they held the only moment where a blow could land.
The two Gu turned their great heads toward the three intruders.
|THE ANCHORED HOUR and THE UNARRIVED HOUR speak as one.|
|"You are strong. We see it. We have always seen it, and we will see it again."|
|"But strength is a thing of the present, and we do not live there. Many greater than you have come. None of them could pass the paradox of what was and what will be. We have mastered it. Leave, or be left behind."|
Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly!
He was already moving to answer when THE Infiniverse stepped forward.
There was no asking, and no glance back at him. She simply took one step past his shoulder into the purple clouds, and her multicolored coat swung heavy behind her, and the whole domain felt her arrive!
The disks of time turned toward her at once, a dozen of them, a hundred, whirling in to cut her away from her own history. They struck her, and they broke! Instead of cutting, they shattered against her like thrown plates against a cliff, because there was too much of her.
A disk like that could sever a rock from billions of years. It could not sever her, because she was not a thing that had happened. She was simply there, heavier than anything in the domain, too vast to be cut out of anything!
The Gu reacted. THE Unarrived Hour wrenched its burning wings, and in the future THE Infiniverse had not yet reached, it had already moved. THE Anchored Hour pulled on the chain, and the moment she had just stepped through began, quietly, to unhappen behind her.
In answer, THE Infiniverse raised one hand.
Domains grew from it!
Dimensions and Observable Existences budded off her fingers, as they had budded along her branches in his Root Domain, but these did not stay small. They swelled as they fell, heavy, whole, each one crowded with seas and continents and weight, and she let them drop into the domain of purple clouds one after another after another. Ten. A hundred. Thousands! More!
The Gu’s paradox needed a gap. A narrow space between what was and what would be, where the two of them could live apart and pass a blow back and forth between them. THE Infiniverse did not argue with that paradox, or try to reason her way past it, or rewrite its rules.
She filled the gap with existence, pouring new Dimensions into the space between past and future until there was no space left, until the Past and the Future were packed so tight with sheer grown reality that they had nowhere to hide from each other, and nowhere to hide from her!
The chain between the two Gu went taut!
THE Infiniverse walked forward through her own falling domains, and took hold of it.
Noah watched her do it, and he saw a snowbound Elsedimension, and a frost-visage taking a single step, and a hand closing on an Immense One who had written existence into a debt.
The Collector had been a writer, and Lucy had been the page. These Gu had written a paradox, and THE Infiniverse was the page too. She did not out-think them. She simply had more existence than their idea could hold. That was what a Physical Root meant!
That was what it would grow into, one day: a Fiend. A thing that was stronger than the rules!
She pulled!
The Anchored Hour came out of the Past, dragged by its own chain. The Unarrived Hour came out of the Future. Both of them, wrenched screaming into the one moment they had never stood in, the present, and there, at last, they could be touched!
Chains bloomed from THE Infiniverse’s hands, bright and many-colored, the same brilliance as her coat, and wound around both Gu, wings and tendrils and lures, binding the burning violet down. The great creatures thrashed, and the chains did not care!
She turned, and walked back through the purple clouds toward Noah, dragging the two bound titans behind her like a hunter bringing home the season’s catch. The falling domains settled around her into slow orbits, and the disks of time kept their distance now, and the Provenance of Time still ran up and down the golden chain between her prisoners, though neither of them could escape into it anymore.
She stopped before her Master, and let them drop at his feet!
"Master," THE Infiniverse said. Her voice was calm. Her face was imperious and utterly unbothered. "Your Rare Gu."
