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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5802: Difficult! II
Chapter 5802: Difficult! II
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Noah watched the Immense One on the prayer mat, and in the next moment, it spoke!
|THE THINKER AT THE END OF EXISTENCE welcomes you.|
...!
The voice rose out of the stone and the purple torches and the thin mist lingering in the corners, deep enough to rumble in Noah’s ribs like a great drum struck softly. There was no cruelty in it. There was courtesy, and patience, and underneath both a distance so vast that every word seemed to fall from very far above.
The beads around its forearms shifted, click by heavy click, though its hands never moved.
|"Existence will only grow harder from here. The winter will be colder, and a great many will die in it. That is simply what existence is now, as we walk into an age that very few are ready for."|
|"In time, even the Immense will be fighting over warmth."|
The beads clicked again.
|"But set all of that aside. Tell me something. In all of existence, at this very hour, who would you say carries the hardest adversity?"|
...!
Noah listened with everything he had!
Every word from this being was heavy. Heavy, like a word carried for a very long time before it was finally set down. And the manner of it was old, older than any voice he had heard, measured and unhurried.
But the question itself was simple.
"Those who have formed their Roots," Noah said calmly.
|"Yes."|
The tears kept running from those pale, pupil-less eyes, hissing where they met the violet fire at its jaw.
|"You cannot advance. And now you may be hunted besides, your Roots cut away so the cold sits a little lighter on everyone else. And yet it was in this very cold that the newly risen Immense were meant to open the door. They were to be the Key to THE Great Becoming. And now not one of them can become Immense at all."|
A long, rumbling sigh moved through the cavern.
|"A conundrum, isn’t it?"|
The purple flames around its shoulders rose, slow, and settled.
|"The air is growing thinner. With the coming of THE Long Night, existence will grow colder and colder from here. The frost is not going to thaw, and it is not going to take pity on anyone. Those who became Immense before this fell upon us do not hold the key. Even I do not hold it, as I..."|
It stopped.
Then, slowly, the Immense One turned on its prayer mat!
The beads dragged across the stone. The great kneeling shape shifted, vast as a mountain range turning in its sleep, until THE THINKER AT THE END OF EXISTENCE had its back to them. And Noah saw.
A gash ran down it!
It began at the crown of its head and ran the whole length of its back, a single enormous wound, deep and ragged and wide enough to lose a Dimension in. The edges were torn. Its purple fire could not close over it; the flames reached for the edges and sputtered and fell back. And the wound was full of frost!
Thick white rime packed into it and spiling over its lips, cold so dense it steamed against the heat of the flames, and through the frost, faintly, a light was leaking. Immensity. The Thinker’s own Immensity, seeping out of it in thin pale threads, drifting up into the cavern air and fading.
Gory, and heavy, and wrong. It looked like something that should have killed whatever carried it a long time ago!
Beside Noah, Ling was on her feet.
She had risen so suddenly that her mat skidded on the stone, and her face had gone the color of old ash. The cheer was gone from it entirely. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the wound, and her hands had come up in front of her as though she could reach across the cavern and hold it shut.
"Father..." Her voice cracked. "What is this?! When did this happen?! What the fucking fuck?!"
...!
Father.
Slowly, the Thinker turned back around to face them. The fierce almost-smile had not changed. The tears had not stopped.
It looked at Ling. Then at Noah.
|"I am dying."|
BOOM!
...!
An Immense One was dying!
Noah sat very still on his mat. An Immense One, one of the beings at the top of all existence, was dying in front of him, and its wound was made of cold.
His eyes flickered. He thought of a frost-visage wearing Lucy’s face, rising out of the snow of the Vasiliou Elsedimension to strike down THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, and of how he had held his wife in the snow and called that Immense One a bum until it came down to die.
He thought of the Overseeing One above the frozen forest. And now here was a third, kneeling on a prayer mat with the winter packed into its back.
Beside him, Ling sat down.
She did not so much sit as collapse, all at once, as though whatever had been holding her up had simply let go. She sat on her mat with her powerful legs tucked beneath her and her hands limp in her lap, and her eyes were ashen and empty, staring at nothing. It was as though the bright cheerful soul Noah had watched laugh through a bloody bout had simply gone out of her.
The Thinker looked at Noah.
|"The winter is brutal on us all. I tried to find answers by going into the winter itself. And this was the result."|
The faint threads of Immensity kept rising from behind it, fading into the dark.
|"My Immensity was too bright. It drew in things that were brighter still, and far more terrible."|
Noah raised his head.
"Where exactly did you go?"
He had to ask. He had an inkling, and he did not like it.
The fierce line of the Thinker’s mouth widened, very slightly, into something that was almost a smile.
|"I went where you have gone. That is why I brought you here."|
...!
|"Any Immense One who goes there meets a certain death. A few of us, the more reckless ones, studied the cold as soon as it came. We took it into our own bodies. We learned where it leads. And yet when we went into that place, the answer that came back at us was so very heavy."|
The pale eyes held him.
|"Why do you suppose that is?"|
The Cold Place!
Noah’s eyes were bright. He did not answer.
There was no need. He knew the frozen seas and the seated dead and the rivers of cold that poured out of the dark and away across existence. He had knelt in them, and drunk them, and walked back out again, every time.
|"Wherever the opposition is greatest,"| the Thinker went on, mild as ever, |"that is where the answers are. The answers to this winter lie past that place. Past that doorway of endless cold."|
...!
"A doorway?" Noah said. "The Cold Place is a doorway?"
|"Is that what you call it?"| A small, dry sound, very nearly a laugh. |"Its true name is THE Undersnow. And the first place you arrive when you go down is only its doorway."|
The beads clicked, slowly.
|"The Long Night was meant to be hard. It was never meant to be obscene, or impossible. When I began to die, even my Teacher was surprised, and she reached out to me. The Long Night has been tainted, she said. The adversity of it, the turning of the great cycles of existence, has been interfered with. And not even an Immense One should have the power to do such a thing."|
The flames sank low around its shoulders.
|"As things stand, it will only grow colder. Even the common masses, even the lifeforms that hold no authority at all and were never meant to freeze in this Night, even they will become blocks of ice. And the conditions laid upon the Immense are heavy. They were made so that we cannot even come close to the answer."|
The pale, weeping gaze settled on Noah and stayed there.
|"But others can come close. Others can enter THE Undersnow and come back alive."|
|"Others like you."|
BOOM!
...!
Noah’s gaze flickered, and his eyes grew heavy!
The Thinker watched him a moment longer. Then, slowly, tenderly, it rose.
It leaned forward from its prayer mat, vast and burning, the frost-packed wound shifting on its back, and reached out its enormous hands, the great beads swinging and clicking from its forearms, and gathered Ling up off her mat as gently as someone lifting a sleeping child, and drew her into its lap, and held her there.
Ling did not resist. She curled against it, small against the great burning chest, her ashen eyes wet.
The Thinker stroked her hed. Its enormous hand moved over her spiraled buns and her loose white ribbons, slow and careful, the purple fire parting around her so it would not touch her.
|"I have lived a very long time. I do not care much about dying."|
Its hand kept moving over her hair.
|"But I want my Progeny to live fruitful lives. I do not want them to freeze into nothing."|
It looked up at Noah over the top of Ling’s head.
|"There is a prophecy going around. It speaks of THE Long Night, and of three key figures who might be its answer. Moriarty and a few others believe you may be one of them, since yours was the first Root formed after the Night began."|
|"I think it is a smoke screen. A trick. There are no chosen ones in existence. Much less some tidy, neat set of instructions for surviving the Long Night."|
The beads clicked.
|"I think a bill that went unpaid for a very long time has finally come due. Things were done in the past. My Teacher, THE ACHARYA OF IMMENSITY, did things in the past. Good things. Bad things. The First Sundering was one of them, and a great deal of what came after is connected to it."|
|"There are no chosen ones who will come to save everyone. But there is cause and effect. Every deed calls back its answer, measure for measure. And sometimes the answer that comes back is far larger than the deed, and far more terrible. That is THE Long Night."|
Its hand paused on Ling’s hair.
|"But its coming also leaves ways for existence to adapt. Something, for example, that can take the cold of that Night into itself and not come apart. Something that can enter its gateway and walk into whatever secrets lie beneath it. Or, for example, a whole lifeform whose entire existence is a Root."|
It looked down at the girl in its lap, and back up.
|"Existence finds a way. So no. You are not chosen. You were favored by probability, lucky enough to have access, and strong enough to survive it. That is all. It is also a great deal."|
The pale eyes did not leave him.
|"Tell me. Do you have family? Attachments?"|
...!
The question boomed out through the cavern.
Noah raised his head, somber, and looked at this vast dying being with its daughter in its lap. The Thinker did not wait for his answer.
|"THE Long Night will strip a great many families of every scrap of warmth and love they have. We need to find out what happened. And we need to change the course of things."|
The flames rose, slow and steady.
|"I am sure I am not the only one. You may not be the only one either. A great many lives across existence will move, each trying to find their own answer. Legacies will believe they have found the chosen beings who will save them, and perhaps they have. Who knows? But none of us can sit back and wait, and hope that someone else finds the answer first."|
It looked down at its wound, then back at Noah.
|"So I am here, though I am dying. I have thought through a great many probabilities, and I am THE THINKER AT THE END OF EXISTENCE. My distinction has made me grand even in the face of all this."|
The beads went still.
|"Dreamer. It is going to be brutal. But may I back you, as you seek answers in the places the Immense cannot reach?"|
The fierce almost-smile widened.
|"I am dying. But I can die for a long time. After all, I am THE THINKER AT THE END OF EXISTENCE."|
HUUM!
