Published at 1st of October 2026 6:53 am

Chapter 5796: The Convocation of Roots! I

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

In THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.

The Existential Conduit beneath Noah’s feet was warm, and it was moving rapidly.

It did not look like a road. It looked like what it was, a vast pillar of flowing authority bent over on its side, pale gold and faintly humming, a river of existence’s own veins laid out through the snowy air of the Legacy.

But it was as firm underfoot as any paved street, and it carried whoever stood on it along its length like a current carrying a leaf, smooth and quiet and sure. Those who knew the Legacy called them the Keepers’ Roads.

Every mountain was joined to every other by them, a web of glowing pathways running through the falling snow between the peaks, and all of them, today, seemed to be running in the same direction.

Verys stood a pace ahead of him on the Conduit, hands clasped behind his back, cloak pulled close against the cold.

Noah looked around.

He was not the only one being carried. Far off across the snowy gulfs, on other Conduits, other small figures stood in pairs. A Legacy Keeper at the front of each, dressed in black and fur the same as Verys, and behind each Keeper, a being.

Some of them were small at this distance. Some of them were not small at all. A great winged shape rode one Conduit in the far east, its wings drawn tight against the snow. A figure made of what looked like slow-burning coal stood on another. Every one of them was fairly powerful, and every one of them was heading the same way.

Ahead of them all rose a mountain!

It was larger than any Elsedimension Mountain Noah had seen in the Legacy, by a long way. It dwarfed the peaks around it as a grown man dwarfs children, broad at its base and climbing, climbing, into the grey of the snowing sky until its summit was lost in cloud.

Snow blanketed it from root to peak, the same as everything else. But even beneath the snow, it seemed to glow faintly, as though something inside it had never quite finished being bright.

"The Elsedimension Mountain everyone is gathering on," Verys said without turning, "is called THE Firmament Mountain."

"Mmm," Noah nodddd.

"It is the oldest mountain in the Legacy, Sir. The first one THE Acharya ever raised." The Keeper’s voice took on the careful tone of a man reciting something he had been taught young.

"Legend says that on this mountain, THE Acharya of Immensity was ambushed by ten other Immense Ones at once. And legend says that she pressed down a single finger, only one, and crushed the whole of their collective Immensity beneath it, and painted the mountain in their blood."

HUUM!

Noah looked at the distant snowy peak.

"Legend says," Verys went on, mildly. "But who knows what really happened, Sir."

...!

Ten Immense Ones. One finger!

Noah had watched a single frost-visage of Lucy break THE UNPAID COLLECTOR with one blow. He was not inclined to call the legend an exaggeration.

The Conduit carried them on through the snow, and as the Firmament drew nearer, Noah began to count. A few more pairs converging from the north. A cluster from the west, three Keepers leading three beings in a line.

Others from below, rising up out of the purple-gold rivers on Conduits that climbed like stairways. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Dozens of them, all beings with Roots of Immensity, all converging on the one great mountain from every direction at once!

He kept himself very reserved.

That had been decided before they left the Glacial Mountain. His Provenance he drew in tight, close against his crystalline skin, and held it there. His Infinity he pulled down into the packed depths of himself where nothing outside could feel it. And he stilled his dreams, so that the snow around him fell only as snow and the Conduit beneath him stayed only a Conduit, and nothing near him, not one flake, began to dream.

He wanted to look first. To see how deep this Legacy really ran before anyone looked back at him.

—

THE Firmament Mountain did had a plain flat surface for a peak.

The Conduits carried everyone up its sides in long glowing spirals, past slopes of blue-white snow and old carved stone half buried beneath it, past great weathered statues of figures Noah did not recognise, standing with their hands raised as though they were holding up the sky.

And at the very top, the mountain simply stopped climbing and opened out, flat and broad and perfectly level, a vast white plain as wide as a small country, open to the snowing sky on every side.

Verys called it THE Plain of Accord.

Everyone who arrived stepped off their Conduits onto the edge of it, and Noah stepped off with them, and looked around.

He did it carefully, the thinnest touch of his Dreamer’s sight, reading only what was offered on the surface. It was enough.

A woman made of what looked like deep water stood a little way off, her whole body clear and blue and faintly rippling, small fish of light swimming slowly through her chest. She read at around six hundred in most attributes.

A tall thin man beside her wore a robe that was not cloth but written text, lines of shifting script running down from his shoulders to his feet, and he read nearer seven hundred.

Further along, a being with the head of a stag and a crown of antlers hung with small bells stood very still, and every bell rang softly whenever he breathed, and Noah read him at nearly eight hundred in attributes!

Five hundred. Six hundred. Seven. The very strongest near eight hundred!

And almost every one of them had their own Provenance! Most of them were self-made, or Progeny with Provenance of their own grown on top of what they had inherited. Ethereal things. Otherworldly things, every one of them looking as though they had stepped out of some older and stranger Chapter of existence to stand here in the snow.

And yet...

Noah looked at the stag-headed one again, the one at nearly eight hundred Provenance Essence, and waited to feel it. The pressure. The weight a being that far above him on paper should have pushed against his existence just by standing nearby.

It did not come!

His existence felt nothing. No oppression at all. The stag-headed being stood there shining with eight hundred Provenance Essence, and Noah, at a number lower than that, simply looked at him and felt entirely at ease.

Was that the compression? Was his foundation really so dense now, every point of him packed so tight by the Lived Hour and the death of time, that a being with more on paper simply could not press on him? He did not know. Nothing could be assumed yet!

Everyone flowed toward the center of the plain, and Noah flowed with them.

Above the center, the thrones hunng.

They floated in the snowing sky in a great ring, dozens of them, high above the plain, each one carved from something different. There was one of black glass, and one that was a single colossal bone, and one made of living wood still in leaf, and one that seemed to be a hollowed star. Every one of them was empty.

Except one!

Poona sat on hers grandly, a throne of pale gold like the curve of a great eye, her legs crossed, her chin on her hand. Her eyes were bright. And when Noah looked up, those bright eyes found him at once and lit up, and she waved at him, openly and cheerfully, from her throne above the gathering of Roots.

Noah waved back.

Several of the beings around him looked from Poona to Noah with open curiosity. He paid them no mind.

Verys led him on across the snow, to where a ring of golden clouds hung a little above the plain, drifting slow and soft and bright. There were dozens of them, arranged in a wide circle beneath the thrones, and each one had a name written across its side in flowing golden script. Verys stopped before one.

It said Osmont!

"If Sir will take your position," the Keeper said, "things will begin soon."

He bowed.

"I wish you luck, Sir."

Noah rose and sat on the golden cloud. It was softer than it looked and warmer than the snow, and it held him easily. He looked to either side.

Dozens of other golden clouds stretched away around the ring, each with its own name, most still empty. And nearest to him, close enough to speak without raising his voice, was one that read Adrastia.

It was empty!

Noah looked at the name for a moment. He wondered how far that monster of assimilation had come in a single day, with his brand-new Root and his river of time and the woman who lifted him by the scruff of his neck.

He waited.

And while he waited, something locked onto him!

It came from far across the plain, a stifling pressure that closed around his existence and held, heavy, focused, aimed entirely at him.

For one moment he thought an Immense One had turned its eyes his way. But it was not that. It was not quite that heavy. Close, very close, closer than anything he had felt from a being that was not Immense. But not quite.

Noah turned his head to the right.

A figure had just arrived at the edge of the plain, stepping off the last Conduit, and her eyes were already on him. Piercing eyes, green and burning, and around her, existence itself seemed to be suffocating, the ground shimmering at her feet as though it were not sure it wanted to stay solid under her.

She wore a long green robe, heavy and fine, trailing through the snow behind her. On her head sat a crown of verdant leaves and thorns, and it hung there lazily, tipped a little to one side, as if she had put it on in a hurry and never bothered to straighten it.

Noah’s sight opened her.

|MINERVA.|

|VERITAS: 999. PROVENANCE: 999. POTENTIA: 999. PONDUS: 999.|

|ROOT OF IMMENSITY: ??????|

...!

The snow falling all around the plain whipped suddenly heavier!

Noah raised his brows.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine in everything. And a Root he could not read at all. He had not done anything yet. So why did it feel as though he had already been marked as a target?

Minerva looked at him a moment longer, her green eyes steady and unreadable.

Then she turned away, as though he were no longer interesting, and walked to her own golden cloud on the far side of the ring, and sat.

—

The golden clouds filled!

One after another, Legacy Keepers led their charges across the snow and bowed them onto their places, and the ring of clouds under the empty thrones began to fill with terrifying figures. The water-woman. The man robed in text. The stag with the ringing bells. A towering figure in forge-dark armor who sat heavily on a cloud marked Dravos.

A pale smiling youth with a restless mouth on one marked Batiatus, already talking to his neighbor. Dozens more, each stranger than the last, each with a Keeper standing a pace behind their cloud.

And as they filled, Noah sensed that Minerva was not alone at her height.

There were others. A few of them, scattered around the ring. One sat so still in a cloak of grey mist that the mist did not move even in the wind.

Another hummed a low tune that made the snow around her fall in slow spirals. They were close to Minerva’s level, some of them. Perhaps one or two were at it.

Existence was vast, truly. Every single being on this plain carried a Root of Immensity, and every one of them had a Keeper of their own, and there were still more of them arriving!

Many of them talked freely, clearly old acquaintances, laughing and arguing across the gaps between their clouds. Others, like Noah, sat silently and watched.

Then, on the cloud beside him, someone sat down.

Noah turned his head. Achilles Adrastia had arrived, his young king’s face calm, his ancient eyes solemn and new at the same time. He sat on the cloud marked Adrastia and looked over at Noah, and nodded once, gravely.

Behind his cloud, two women stood side by side. Tatiana, red-haired and gorgeous in her Keeper’s black, smiling very grandly at nothing in particular. And Rose, standing exactly one pace closer to Achilles than Tatiana was, with her arms crossed and her face perfectly pleasant.

Achilles looked away from Noah and around at the whole gathering, at the thrones and the clouds and the terrifying figures and the Keepers, and his eyes widened slightly.

There was a great deal to see. The entire plain seemed packed with power, with existences, with Roots.

The last golden cloud filled at this time.

And the sky cried out!

It happened seconds later. Above the ring of thrones, the grey snowing sky split open, not in one place but in many, one after another all around the great circle, and through every opening an aura bloomed!

Auras of Immense Ones!

They came down onto the floating thrones one by one, and their very existence announced each of them as they came!

|THE DIMENSIONAL DEVOURER, POONA, already seated, raises a hand in greeting to the others.|

|THE ASHEN CANTOR descends upon the throne of black glass. Embers drift from its shoulders and sing as they fall.|

|THE HOLLOW CHOIR takes the throne of bone.|

|THE DISSECTING SCHOLAR settles onto a throne of polished instruments, adjusts his spectacles, and looks over the Roots below with open academic delight.|

|THE VERDANT REGARD takes the living throne in leaf. A green gaze, soft as early spring, settles upon one golden cloud below and stays there.|

|THE SALT-CROWNED MATRON takes the hollowed star. The snow around her throne turns to brine and falls as rain.|

|THE LANTERN OF THE LAST SHORE descends. Its light is warm. Its throne is empty of anything but that light.|

|THE KEEPER OF THE UNBROKEN VOW arrives, and says nothing, and has never needed to.|

And more still, throne after throne filling, until dozens of the floating seats were occupied!

Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly!

Some of the Immense Ones he could see clearly, vast and terrible and perfectly visible on their thrones. A titan of ember and ash!

A great soft shape of green light. Moriarty with his tentacles and his spectacles, beaming!

But others were only haze. Their Dimensionality was simply too deep, and they let it express itself freely, so that when Noah looked at their thrones he saw only a blur of light and weight and presence, a shape his sight could not hold together no matter how hard it tried.

Power!

This was power! His whole existence buzzed with it. A few dozen Immense Ones, gathered in one ring above one mountain, each one of them a blinding sun. Was this all of them? Or was this only a glimpse of how deep the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity truly ran?

Below the thrones, all around the ring, the beings on the golden clouds began to rise.

They did it together, without anyone telling them to. The stag stood with his bells ringing softly. The water-woman rose. Minerva stood, unhurried, crown still tilted. Even Achilles rose from his cloud, straight-backed, eyes lifted to the ring of suns above.

Noah was the last!

He stood, slowly, and looked up at the thrones. Every one of them seemed to blaze like a sun in the snowing sky.

Standing was no issue. He could respect their power! They had come very, very far to sit where they sat, further than he had come yet.

But he looked up at those floating thrones, at the beings on them shining through the snow, and he could not help wondering.

How long would he stand down here on a cloud, instead of sitting up there on a throne?

Only time would tell!

Share