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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5835: Keystone!
Chapter 5835: Keystone!
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
Noah set the letter down on the table, beside the empty cup, exactly where he had found it.Then he went outside.
The breeze was still blowing. The wheat still swayed. Somewhere in the hedges, the same bird was still singing, as though beings breaking the path above existence and leaving countless to freeze were a story about somewhere else. This little farm had kept on being a farm through all of it.
He stood on the doorstep for a while and looked at the garden.
The row at the end had gone wild. Weeds had crept in among the greens, tall and tangled, as weeds always do when a garden is left alone. The beans had climbed past the tops of their poles and were waving loose in the air. A few apples had fallen in the orchard and lay in the grass, going soft.
Noah walked down the path to the fence, picked up the old hoe leaning against it, and turned it over in his hands.
Smooth wood. Dark where hands had held it. Heavier than it looked.
He smiled a little.
It was a silly thing to want, for a being like him. He had evolved. He had eaten a dead Immense One and an Ergosphere full of Roots and two suns made of civilizations. And for all of that, one of the grandest dreams he had ever carried was this: a farm. A small one. Somewhere quiet, when everything was over and done, with a garden to tend and a family to feed and nothing more urgent anywhere than whether the beans needed tying.
He rolled up imaginary sleeves, and went to work!
He started with the weeds, kneeling in the wild row and pulling them one by one, roots and all, shaking the dirt off and tossing them in a pile at the end of the path. The soil was cool and dark and smelled of rian. Next, he tied the beans back to their poles with lengths of twine he found hanging on a nail by the hut door.
He gathered the fallen apples into the wooden bukcet and set them by the well. Last, he drew water and carried it down the rows and poured it at the roots of every plant, slowly, watching the soil drink.
His stellar dark gold hands got dirty.
Then he took the hoe to the last row.
It was hard ground, packed down from Ages without a turning, and he worked it. Lift, drop, pull. Lift, drop, pull. The blade bit into the earth and turned it over, dark and crumbling, and the smell of it rose up around him.
It was cathartic.
On the seventh stroke, the blade caught on something.
Paper!
A little scrap of it, crumpled into a ball, half buried in the soil where the hoe had turned it up. Gold, like the letter. Old, and creased, and very small.
Noah crouched and picked it up.
It was heavy. Far too heavy for a scrap of paper. His hand dipped under the weight of it, as though he had picked up a stone pretending to be a leaf. He stared at it for a moment.
Then he smoothed it open on his palm!
BOOM!
Something sat in the creases of the paper. A shard. Tiny, no larger than a grain of sand, obsidian and gold, catching the mild farm light and throwing it back as a deep, impossible gleam. And the moment the paper opened and the shard touched open air, its weight came down.
All of it!
Noah’s arm dropped. His knees drove into the soft dirt of the garden row. The grain of obsidian and gold sat on his open palm and pressed down on him with a heaviness beyond anything in his life. Heavier than the stone he had carried on his back in the obsidian sands. Heavier than the Warden’s gaze. Heavier than the Hound’s closing hand, or the Fiend’s finger, or any Judgment existence had ever dropped on him. It was so heavy that the farm itself seemed to lean toward it, the wheat bowing, the apple trees creaking, the single cloud overhead drifting slowly down.
On the inside of the paper, in small slanting obsidian ink, there were words.
|It seems you are a decent being. You did not destroy everything in rage, and you even began taking care of my farm. So here is a little fragment I managed to hold, and keep down here. I doubt it will help much, or change much. But it is something.|
BOOM!
The prompts came, and they were short.
|Obtained: an Infinitesimally Small Shard of IT.|
|Details: ?????|
|Details: ?????|
|Details: ?????|
...!
Noah stared at the shard in his palm.
A piece of IT!
A grain of the thing that had once held the whole path of existence together, before beings leaned their weight on it and broke it apart. Lucy had kept this. Hidden it in the dirt of her own garden, under her own scarecrow, where only someone willing to kneel in the soil and pull weeds would ever find it.
His existence pulsed!
It pulsed hard, once, all the way through, as though every part of him had just heard its own name called. The Tree in his chest flared. And his eyes, his pure gold pupil-less eyes, burned. Bright. Brighter!
Blazing with something between hunger and defiance, both at once, a gold fire so fierce it lit the garden row around him.
He could barely hold the shard up. His arm shook under it. His fingers trembled.
And something in him said: eat it.
Fucking it eat bro!
It skipped every step of thought. His existence wanted it, completely and instinctively, as a starving thing wants bread. So he lifted his trembling hand to his mouth.
And brought his jaws down.
It went into him like a mountain falling into a well.
The weight that had driven him to his knees was suddenly inside him, and his whole existence buckled around it. He felt it drop through him, past his tongue, past his throat, down into the heart of everything he was, and land at the base of his Tree like an anvil dropped from the sky.
BOOM!
His body shook!
His skin stretched. All over, at once, the night-dark surface of him bulged outward in a hundred places, as though spears were trying to push their way out of him from the inside. His constellations blazed and scattered. His horns of radiance flickered wildly.
The halo of time behind his shoulders spun so fast it shrieked. He could feel cracks running through his existence, fine and many, the whole of him straining to hold something far beyond what it had been built to hold.
He sat down!
Right there in the garden, in the dirt between the bean rows, cross-legged, hands on his knees. He closed his gold eyes and turned everything he had inward. His Dream. The Tree where his Root had been. The Human and the Dreamer and the Sovereign in him, all at once.
Then the Dreaming Human Origin went to work on what he had swallowed.
Instead of fighting it, he dreamed around it. He wrapped it in Dream, layer upon layer, and began, slowly, to break it down, as he had broken down the corpse of an Immense One and an Ergosphere full of Roots.
But this was different. This held. This was the oldest, densest, most fundamental thing he had ever touched, and his Dream could only wear at it, grain by grain, as a river wears at a mountain.
So he let time pass.
He let a great deal of it pass!
And as it passed, he saw himself.
He saw himself young. A boy, thin and quick, holding a hoe too big for him in the school garden and laughing at something just out of sight.
He saw himself as he was when everything first broke, frightened and furious, throwing fire with shaking hands. He saw himself crushed under a stone in the obsidian sands. Kneeling over a corpse on a frozen plain. Standing on a cloud while a door slammed in a young woman’s face.
He saw himself now, sitting in the dirt.
And he saw himself old.
Old, as he had always refused to imagine being. Grey at the temples. Lined at the eyes. Sitting on a porch very much like the one behind him, watching a garden grow, with children’s voices somewhere out in the wheat, and a cup of tea going cold in his hand. Content!
And then he saw more. Lives still unlived, that he might yet live. A thousand Noahs, a million, branching away in every direction through the long dream, each one living out a whole existence in the space of a breath.
One who ruled. One who wandered. One who farmed. One who died young and one who lived forever. He lived them all. Every year of them. Every season. It felt like a very long time, and also no time at all, as a whole life feels at the end of it.
All of it, every life and every year, went into the shard, and wore at it, and wore at it.
And the shard, very slowly, gave.
—
His body settled!
The spears beneath his skin sank back. The cracks in his existence sealed, one after another, and where each one closed, something new and dense and gold remained behind. His constellations drifted back into place under his skin. The halo behind his shoulders slowed, and steadied, and when it settled, there were two rings turning there, one inside the other.
Noah opened his eyes!
In the gold of them, very faint, a fleck of obsidian now drifted.
|Devoured: an Infinitesimally Small Shard of IT.|
|What you devoured cannot be fully understood. Your existence has taken from it only what it can hold.|
|Your Tree has drunk deeply.|
|Sap risen: 100%. Your Tree has grown its First Bough.|
|A great limb spreads from your trunk, and your existence spreads with it.|
|Second Ring lit. Ring by ring, your trunk will burn brighter, until one day it blazes from root to crown.|
|Sap risen toward the Second Bough: 90%.|
...!
|Attributes, measured anew.|
|VERITAS: Order I.8 to Order II.6.|
|PROVENANCE: Order I.9 to Order II.7.|
|PONDUS: Order I.8 to Order II.3.|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: Order I.5 to Order II.0.|
|POTENTIA: Infinite.|
|Every attribute has entered the second Order. Your Dream now reaches across the whole domain of a Legacy.|
...!
|Predation: from the Shard of IT, your Tree has drawn a capability.|
|Formed: THE Keystone Dream.|
|Every structure has a stone that holds it: a being, a power, a Domain, a seal, a curse, a Legacy. You see that stone. You may dream it loose, and let all it held come apart. Or you may dream it held, and let nothing break it.|
|Your reach follows your Order. Keystones set deeper than your Profundity lie below your sight.|
|IT was a keystone once. You now carry a grain of it, and you will never look at anything the same way again.|
...!
|Auto-Fusion: THE Keystone Dream + THE First Unsealing: THE Door of Immensity.|
|THE First Unsealing has deepened. It is now THE Unsealing of Doors. Every door has a keystone. What is closed against those you lift, you may find the stone of, and open; what is sealed against yourself, you may find the stone of, and seek a way through.|
...!
|Kin: your Tree has risen. Those bound to it rise with it.|
|Ling, Poona, and Bob have deepened. The cocoons of your Kin brighten.|
...!
|Your Gold Without Pupils has been refined. You may now perceive the weavings of IT.|
|Sensed, faintly: Shards of IT, resonating with the one you devoured.|
|Several lie within THE Undersnow.|
|Others are stretched across existence, beyond your present reach. Some may rest in the hands of Legacies.|
...!
|This Domain lies beyond the sight of existence. No Judgment reaches here.|
|For now.|
...!
Noah sat in the dirt between the bean rows for a long time after the prompts stopped.
He could feel them. The Shards! Faint, very faint, like the warmth of distant fires felt through a closed door. Several of them below, deep in THE Undersnow, down past the Basal Floor, past the rift, somewhere in the frozen dark of the Evergrave and beyond. Others farther. Much farther. Scattered across existence, some of them humming in places beyond his sight, some of them, he was almost sure, held tight in the grip of someone very old.
Lucy’s letter said it was beyond fixing. Lucy’s letter said there was no path, and no sky, and no hope for Those Who Remain. Lucy had been there. Lucy knew more than anyone alive about what had broken, and how badly.
Noah looked down at his dirty hands.
"Nothing is impossible," he said quietly, to himself, to the farm, to the scarecrow in the wheat.
The breeze moved through the beans.
"Whether the path is fully closed or not," Noah said, "I will decide that. Not her. Not existence. Me."
He picked up the hoe again, and stood, and looked out over the half-tended garden and the gold wheat and the six apple trees, and felt the faint warmth of the Shards far below, calling.
"IT," he said, "is a good place to start."
...!
