Published at 22nd of October 2026 7:04 am

Chapter 5888: Testing I

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Noah stood very still in the blue-gold glass after the first dream ended, and went over what he had seen.

The hand had come within hours. One light had erased every Dimension and Observable Existence inside his Dream, along with THE Legacy of THE Acharya and countless lives, and he had died with them. That part he had expected.

The part that stayed with him was the last prompt!

He had thought the King’s warning was a kind of favor, a great power sparing a promising junior who had done something remarkable. It was something else entirely. The King had spared the countless living in those Dimensions who had chosen none of this and had nothing to do with kings or claims. Even a being that grand, who could erase a region of existence with one light, had something he would rather avoid doing, and it was killing them.

The innocent were the only reason the hand had stayed open.

He looked down the endless halls of glass and chose his second road!

|Quantum Dream 2 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 0.2%. Route: caution.|

|You will replace only empty regions. Every Dimension and Observable Existence will be left untouched.|

The glass around him began to move!

The windows shifted in real time, showing the dream as it played out. In the nearest panes, his blue-gold Dream crept outward through the dark Gaps, and wherever it met a Dimension or an Observable Existence, it flowed around it and left it shining clear and untouched inside, like bubbles held in ice.

|Hour 1: You expand across the Undefined Gaps, going around every Dimension and Observable Existence in your path.|

|Hour 3: Nine hundred Gigaparsecs of empty Gaps become your Dream. The inhabited regions inside it stay exactly as they were.|

|Hour 6: No hand appears.|

|Hour 9: The Narratives nearby stay calm.|

The panes brightened and dimmed as the dream’s hours passed, and Noah watched his Dream grow quietly across them, wide and careful, a net of blue-gold with clear bright holes left in it wherever people lived.

It was slower this way. It was also alive at the end of every hour so far!

|Hour 14: You reach the bounds of THE Keepers of Existence.|

|Their Legacy is sealed and snowless. Plum blossoms fall inside it in an endless spring in some regions, other wondeous phenomena in other regions.|

|You go around it. Not one particle of it is replaced.|

|Hour 15: No hand appears.|

In the glass, the Keepers’ Legacy glowed pink and white in the middle of a dark winter sea, and Noah’s Dream curled around its edges and moved on, giving it a wide berth.

Then he noticed something odd about the snow!

|Past THE Keepers of Existence, you notice something.|

|THE Narrative of THE Long Night lies over every region you have passed. Around THE Keepers of Existence, it holds back. It does not press on them.|

|Their Epitropos is THE Curator.|

|THE Curator has likely made a deal with the Immense Ones within.|

|You are unsure whether it is a deal like the one you had with THE Caretaker.|

Noah looked at the pane closely. The snow of the Long Night fell everywhere in that window, heavy and endless, except in a wide ring around the Keepers’ Legacy, where it thinned to nothing and simply stopped, as if it had been asked politely to stay outside.

He looked at it, and moved on.

|Hour 20: Something vast drifts along a Conduit ahead of you.|

|It is a Conduit Lifeform, as large as a Dimension.|

|It feeds on the Undefined Gaps. Where it has grazed, the empty space is thin and quiet.|

|It has not noticed you.|

|You leave it alone.|

In the glass, the creature drifted past like a whale made of riverbeds, its huge mouth opening and closing on nothing at all as it grazed along the Conduit. Noah’s Dream parted around it and let it pass, and the creature went on eating emptiness, unaware it had ever been seen.

|Day 2: Your Dream now covers more empty existence than ever before. No hand has appeared.|

|Day 3: Far away, in THE Chrysalis, three lifeforms you know reach a region where a Shard of IT might lie.|

|Poona, Ling, and THE Thinker.|

|The region is guarded by THE First Gu of Emotions.|

The glass shifted!

The panes around him turned from the dark Gaps to the driftng silk of THE Chrysalis, and in the nearest window he saw them: Poona, Ling, and the great gentel shape of the Thinker, floating together at the edge of a region that looked like a storm made of feelings.

Colors churned inside it, red and blue and grey and gold, always shifting. The silk that drifted into it turned bright with joy, then dark with grief, then trembled with fear, all within a single breath. Faint sounds carried out of it, laughter and sobbing and shouting, sometimes all three at once, and in the center of it all hung a vast shape of shifting colored light, like a jellyfish the size of a sky, its trailing threads stretching away for light years.

|THE First Gu of Emotions.|

|Profundity: ?????|

|Every thread it trails is a feeling.|

|Poona, Ling, and THE Thinker cannot pass the edge of its region.|

|Day 4: They call for reinforcements.|

|Immense Ones and Progeny arrive and gather into a small army. Among them are Moriarty and Achilles Adrastia.|

In the glass, the army gathered at the edge of the storm. Moriarty stood at its front, grim and steady. Among the others, Noah found Achilles, with Rose nearby.

|Day 4, Hour 3: The army crosses the edge.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions does not move.|

|Its weavings reach out, unseen.|

|They coil around emotions first. Then around Immensities.|

…!

|Moriarty’s Immensity is wrapped in grief. He stops fighting and weeps for things he has not lost yet.|

|THE Thinker’s Immensity is wrapped in longing. He turns and begins to walk home, very slowly, without knowing why.|

|An Established Immense One is wrapped in rage. It tears into the one beside it.|

|Three Progeny are wrapped in joy. They laugh until their bodies come apart.|

|Ling and Poona are wrapped tightly. Resistance: failing. Your Dream protects them|

|Resistance across the army: almost none. Few can fight an attack they cannot see.|

Noah watched it happen in the glass, and he made himself keep watching.

It was quiet, which made it worse. The army simply came apart from the inside, every body still whole, each lifeform turned against itself by its own heart, weeping and raging and laughing in the middle of a storm of colors, while the great shape of light at the center floated where it was and did nothing that could be seen at all.

Then one small figure kept walking!

|One lifeform resists more than any other: Achilles Adrastia.|

|The weavings of Emotions coil around him to change him.|

|He is assimilating them.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions notices.|

In the glass, the vast creature of colored light turned, slowly, for the first time, toward the one small figure that was eating its threads!

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