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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5872: Pralaya! II
Chapter 5872: Pralaya! II
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Above them, the great circle began to swirl.Its markings blazed with obsidian light, and the light was Narrative. Noah could feel it, the same weight he had felt pouring from his own pen, only older, and deeper, and colder. Letters of an ancient tongue chased each other around the rim. Runes turned like the gears of an enormous clock. The whole construct turned slowly over the Ossuary, filling in, line by line, rune by rune, toward completion.
And Lifthrasir spoke, with her eyes still closed.
"Mortal eyes see time as a river that moves. They imagine that yesterday turns to vapor the moment today arrives."
A ring of runes locked into place.
"That understanding belongs entirely to lifeforms trapped inside small, fragile shells."
The circle turned.
"Across the Existential Continuum, reality rests as a single, unyielding monument. I call it THE Block Existence."
In the circle above, a new ring of script began to glow.
"Within THE Block Existence, every coordinate holds equal weight, and equal reality. The first breath drawn in an Observable Existence. The age when its suns burn brightest. The silence that settles after its stars have turned to frost. All of them are happening at this exact instant."
The letters blazed.
"Yesterday, today, and tomorrow stand together, side by side, like neighboring mountain ranges carved into the same solid continent."
Another ring locked into place.
"Consider the simple life of a Gu. A mortal watching it sees an egg buried in wet soil. Waits three centuries for it to crawl up into the branches. Hears it sing for seven days. Then watches its dried husk tumble down into the moss. And to that mortal, the song is over. The Gu belongs to the past."
Her small hands rested on her knees, perfectly still.
"But to anyone who perceives THE Block Existence, the Gu is an unbroken thread, stretching permanently through the continuum. Its sleep in the dark soil, its flight through the canopy, its quiet landing on the autumn floor, all of it is present at once. The Gu is whole across its entire path. It occupies its full length, anchored at every coordinate it ever touched."
The circle was nearly full now, its rings blazing one inside another.
"This truth changes everything. When a blow lands, when a realm breaks, when a sovereign claims a throne, that moment stays anchored in the bedrock forever. Every coordinate keeps its substance. We all live our full span inside one vast, grand carving, finished from the first breath to the last."
Her eyes opened.
"I have known all this, and more, for a very long time."
She looked up at the circle.
"So I will sacrifice all of my weavings. All of the time that was meant to stretch my existence across the continuum. All of it, to make certain I have only a hundred years of life."
Her voice was calm and clear.
"I will achieve my dream."
The last ring of the circle began to glow.
"But in doing so, I will also unleash the narrative I inherited from my mother and my father. And while I live my hundred years, I will need protecting."
She glanced at Lygara, and smiled.
"I would like to depend on Little Lygara here. But I don’t want to burden her."
Her gaze moved back up to the blazing circle.
"So I will burden existence instead."
She laughed, softly.
"Haha. Which is impossible, of course. Existence cares nothing for a little thing like me. So really..."
The last rune locked into place.
"I suppose I am only burdening all the luminous Narratives laid out across existence."
...!
HUUM!
The obsidian rivers came together.
Millions of them, from every direction, thick as mountain ranges, coiling in toward the center of the circle, twisting around each other, binding tighter and tighter until they formed a single vast storm of snaking black authority above the Ossuary.
Noah felt the pressure of it from where he stood.
It was immense. It was crushing. At the very center of that storm, he knew, even someone like Moriarty would have been ground into nothing.
And then, from the heart of it...
SAA!
Pulses of obsidian light burst outward.
Wave after wave, black and glossy, rolling out from the storm in every direction, across the Ossuary, across the Chrysalis, past every boundary Noah could feel, out into existence itself. And as each wave left, the vast obsidian tendrils thinned, and faded, and disappeared, their substance carried away on the pulses, spreading out across the continuum like ink dropped into still water.
|You are observing the unfurling of an unfathomable Narrative.|
|It is spreading across existence.|
|It does not ask permission.|
|It does not stop at any border.|
|Existing Narratives across the continuum have begun to grow murky.|
|Some of them do not yet know it.|
...!
Above the Ossuary, space tore.
It split open in two places at once, two long jagged cracks of black light ripping across the dark like lightning frozen in mid-strike. Through the cracks, something moved.
A hand came through first. Then an arm. Then a shoulder, vast and heavy, and a head, and a body.
Two Giants stepped out of the tears in space.
They were titanic. Taller than mountain ranges. Built broad-shouldered and long-limbed and perfectly proportioned, every muscle carved and heavy and defined. But they were obsidian. Every inch of them. Black and glossy and gleaming, from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, as if two temple statues had been carved from a single night and then given life.
Their faces were serene. Their eyes were closed.
They stepped down out of the tears and landed in the sea of stars, and the sea heaved under their weight.
Noah stared up at them in wonder.
Their power washed over him, and it was enormous. Grander than any common Ancient Immense One he had ever felt. Grander than anything that had any right to be newly born.
His Dream reached out to classify them.
|Classified: THE Kirtimukha.|
|THE Faces That Devour Glory.|
|They are the first two of their kind to emerge.|
|They will not be the last.|
|THE Kirtimukha are lifeforms born of a grand Narrative. Wherever that Narrative spreads, they will emerge.|
|They have already begun to emerge in other regions across existence. Not only here.|
|Their core capability: they devour Narratives.|
|Legends, titles, prophecies, the weight a story gains by being believed: THE Kirtimukha consume it, and grow stronger for every Narrative they eat.|
|A being whose Narrative is devoured loses the weight it gave them.|
|Their existence carries the natures of two grand Narratives already unfolding across existence:|
|The Narrative of Calamity.|
|And the Narrative of ?????|
...!
|Their sole purpose: to strengthen themselves, so that THE Child of Calamity, Lifthrasir, may live her hundred years in peace, until her death.|
...!
The two obsidian Giants tunred.
They looked down at the small figure meditating in the snowless dark below them, and they knelt.
Slowly. Both of them. Their vast obsidian knees struck the sea of stars, and the swells rolled outward and broke against the citadel walls. They bowed their serene heads to her. Then they rose again, and stepped behind her, one on either side, and stood there, silent and immense, like two great temple guardians flanking a door.
Noah looked back down at Lifthrasir.
She looked different now.
Smaller. Paler. Her grey-green skin had gone thin, almost translucent at the edges. The chitin on her cheekbones had lost its pearly shine. Her wings hung limp behind herr. She sat in the snow with her hands on her knees and her eyes half-closed, breathing slowly, and she looked very frail. Very tired. Like someone who had just poured out everything she had, and was content.
Now that she was weak, Noah’s Dream could read her.
All of her.
|Name: Lifthrasir.|
|Title: THE Child of Calamity Who Chose an Ending.|
|Life remaining: 99 years.|
|When they are spent, her dream and her existence will dissipate.|
|Her existence is extremely weak. It is now bound to the Narrative she has unleashed.|
|So long as that Narrative continues to unfold, and so long as THE Kirtimukha are not all destroyed, she will not die before her 99 years are spent.|
|Her lineage, now readable:|
|Daughter of THE First Gu of Calamity.|
|Daughter of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|
...!
Noah stared at the words.
What?
THE Dissolved Progenitor?
He read it again. And again. Surely, a name like that could not belong to the first thing he thought of when he read it, paired with the information she said earlier.
Right?!
