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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5863: Narrative! I
Chapter 5863: Narrative! I
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Noah looked at a future version of himself, and his whole existence buzzed!It ran through him from the roots of his Tree to the tips of his horns of radiance, a hum like a struck bell, ringing on and on. His constellations flickered across his bare chest. The frost along his jaw glittered and cracked and reformed. And all around him, without his asking, his Dream moved to steady it all, reaching out in slow blue-gold tides, wrapping itself around the bubble and the throne and the frozen snow, holding everything in place.
He understood, then, how fragile this was.
The connection itself was terrifying. He could feel it as a man feels a rope bridge under his feet over a bottomless gorge, every board creaking. This was a thread run across time, from now to some distant then, and existence was built to carry nothing of the kind. His Dream was grand. But what he was doing right now went against the very nature of existence. Against its flow. Against the order in which things were meant to happen.
If he pushed too hard, it would snap.
If he asked for too much, if he reached for knowledge he had no right to yet, the whole thing would come apart in his hands.
He had to be careful!
So he looked at the blazing figure in the bubble, at himself, somewhere far ahead, and he thought about what to ask.
He could ask only a little. Perhaps only once.
But he knew himself better than anyone. And if he asked the right question, the one in the bubble would know exactly how to answer it.
His hand moved through Emotive’s hair, slowly, as she slept on against his chest.
"What advice," Noah said quietly, "would my future self give me?"
The figure in the bubble was silent.
It stood there in its blazing blue-gold, its outline wavering in its own light, and for one long moment, it stayed silent. Noah felt it considering. Weighing. Choosing, out of everything it knew, the one thing that mattered most.
Then it raised its hand.
{Everyone outside your dream has their own Narrative.}
The voice was calm and ancient.
{Trust no narrative of others. Not Lucy’s. Not Atlas’s. Not Vakochev’s. This alone will spare you a great many trials, and a great many errors.}
The blazing hand turned, plam out.
{Weave existence into what you make of it, rather than what the narratives of others have told you it is.}
HUUM!
The words were heavy!
They went into Noah like a weight dropped into deep water, and his whole existence pulsed with them, once, hard. His Tree shuddered. His Dream rang.
And the bubble began to shake!
Its edges trembled. Its light flickered. The blazing figure inside it wavered, as if the sphere of dream around it could barely hold what it had just said, as if those few sentences had been too large to fit through the thread.
Noah stared at it, his mind racing.
Trust no narrative of others?
Even Lucy’s? Lucy, who had left him a farm, and a letter, and a grain of IT buried in her garden, and a whole Legacy that called him its Son? Atlas’s? Vakochev’s?
Every story he had been given, about the path, about IT, about the First Sundering, about who had done what to whom, had come to him through someone else’s mouth. Someone else’s memory. Someone else’s narrative.
He thought about all of it, and his eyes narrowed.
He lifted his head, and opened his mouth to ask again.
The chance slipped away.
The future self’s hand filled with flaming light!
It burst out of his raised palm in a single blazing beam, gold and blue and white, and struck the inside of the trembling bubble. And instantly, the shaking stopped. The bubble went still. The thread across time went still. Everything went still, frozen in place around that single blazing hand.
{Existence is vast, and it is treacherous.}
The voice was calm. Too calm!
{I cannot, and I will not, spoil it for you.}
The blazing figure looked at him across all that distance.
{Am I you, days from now? Months? Years? Ages? It does not matter. I am a future possibility. One of many. And your present decides whether I will ever exist at all.}
{The present dream is always the most important dream.}
Its palm burned brighter.
{You have to write our story. I cannot hand you the summary. If I did, our dream would be smaller for it. And our dream has to be grand, for what is coming.}
It leaned forward, very slightly, and Noah felt the whole weight of whatever it had lived through behind that small movement.
{We are exceptional. Lifeforms have moved across existence for millions upon millions of years. Across Ages. Across Cycles. Building, climbing, reaching for the same heights, generation after generation. And we came from nothing. A boy with empty hands, in a small, quiet room.}
{In so short a time, we interrupt them. We take what they spent Ages working toward.}
{But as grand as we are, we still have to establish our own narrative. We are exceptional, yes. So are others. There are others out there, given enough time, who can achieve a great deal. Our dream has to catch up. If we are to stand on their shoulders, and their backs...}
Its voice dropped, quiet and absolute.
{...and break them.}
BOOM!
Existence began to shake!
It started behind the throne. One of the bubbles of his past, the one with the boy in the dusty yard, trembled, and burst, and was gone in a puff of golden light. Then the next, and the next: the boy with the skill book, the young man in the boss room, the man beneath the stone. One after another, the bubbles of his past popped and scattered into glittering dust, and the dark of the Descent shuddered around them, and the frozen snow began to fall again in sudden, swirling gusts.
Everything was destabilizing!
Everything except the one bubble ahead of him.
It hung there, perfectly, impossibly still, untouched by the shaking. Because the blazing hand of his future self had reached out and taken hold of it from the inside, and was holding it steady by force!
