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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5921: Expansion! I
Chapter 5921: Expansion! I
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
The new region kept growing.
Noah hung in front of the broken opening and watched it spread beneath him. Light years of fresh space unrolling in every direction. Little Dimensions condensing out of grey roads and broken Elsedimensions.
The torn Totems drifting apart like the pieces of a snapped fence. The Undefined Gaps, which had been empty and silent for Ages, now thick with tangled forests of everything no one had ever chosen.
Messy. Unplanned. Far larger than any of them had wanted.
He had done all of it!
And in the opening, rising up out of the Fallow toward everything he had done, came THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened.
It extended rather than climbed.
It came up through the broken door as a frost spreads across a pond, slowly and all at once, and what it spread was stillness. Grey glass, tinged crimson at its edges, rising out of the grey forest in a vast slow sheet. And inside the glass, held, were moments.
A man falling from a great height, stopped a hand’s breadth above the stones. A blade halted a finger’s width from a throat.
A child’s hand sinking beneath black water, stopped just as its fingertips went under. An arrow hanging in the air, its point already touching cloth. A fever-bright face on a pillow, eyes half-closed, the last breath caught halfway out.
Thousands of them, then trillions. Every one of them a death that had almost happened, and then had passed by, frozen in the single instant before it would have.
They were not still because they were dead. They were still because they had been caught at the very edge of it, and held there, forever.
A collector of the worst kind!
The glass stretched across light years, then hundreds of light years. Its center was a shape Noah could barely hold in his sight: a tall, faint, headless figure made of nothing but held breaths, stacked on each other like frost on frost, and across its body, scattered like stars across a night sky, the crimson-obsidian eyes. Hundreds of them. All open. All turning slowly.
Hm!
Ugly, as very old things often are. Patient, too!
|THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened.|
|It holds every death that came within a breath of happening, and did not.|
|It has kept them since before most Legacies were young.|
|It is amused at this moment.|
...!
Behind Noah, two presences arrived.
Moriarty came out of the air with his Immensity still ragged, blood dried dark at the corner of his mouth. THE Thinker came with him, vast and slow and quiet, its great mind turning heavily, both of them hanging in the cold breath of the Fallow behind the small burned figure with the cracked crown.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
They looked past Noah, at the grey glass rising out of the opening, at the frozen moments inside it, at the hundreds of crimson eyes.
"Legacy’s Son," Moriarty said at last, very quietly. "Did you really do this?"
"What even is this?" said THE Thinker.
Noah did not look back!
Did they want an apology? They would wait a long time.
"Did you all not choose me?" he said. "Did you not elect me to lead you toward a grander future? Did you not circle me in the sky and call me the one who would open doors for you, the doors your Founder left closed, the doors you have been staring at for Ages, waiting for someone else to push?"
The Fallow’s cold breath moved his burned robe.
"I have begun to open such doors. Some of them you will like. Some of them you will not. Some of them open onto gardens, and some of them open onto that."
There was no need to gesture at the Stillness. "That is what doors are. That is what you asked for, whether you knew it or not. But maybe, at the end of all this, you will have what you seek. Not all at once. A step at a time. A door at a time."
His voice burned with Tyranny!
"Every great thing begins as a ruin before it becomes anything else. Look at it, and remember it. Do not worry. I do not tend to forget those who lent me a hand. And as for those who become my enemies... well. You can now see a glimpse of the lengths I will go."
...!
Behind him, Moriarty and THE Thinker looked at each other.
Both stayed silent. The look said enough. Moriarty’s eyes went past Noah’s back, down through the growing region, to the Legacy below. The Elsedimensions split down their middles. The gardens burned flat. The halls with their roofs gone. Old Immense Ones lying in the snow. Parts of their home being stretched and remade and mixed with grey roads that had belonged to no one, carried off into a new region that had been nothing an hour ago.
The tattered Legacy lay beneath them like a map someone had torn in half and was still pulling.
Larger now. Somewhat more broken, too. Both of those were his.
As for Noah, his gaze stayed on the opening.
Because the Stillness had begun to use its authority.
He felt it before he saw it. It came out of the glass like a pressure, vast and quiet and absolute, that reached into everything nearby and touched the place in it where it had once nearly died.
Every being has such places. Every life has its near misses. The fall that stopped short. The fever that broke at dawn. The blade that turned. The Stillness reached for all of them at once.
It was barely trying.
Noah could see that clearly. Whatever the Stillness was at full strength, this was a sliver of it. A fucking sliver. A sleeper stretching in its bed. A single slow breath let out in passing.
|THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened has unleashed a Nightmare.|
|THE Held Breath.|
|All caught within it relive the instant before every death they ever escaped.|
|This time, they are held there.|
|Those who cannot pass through the instant will remain in it forever.|
|Condition to clear: ?????|
|This is not a serious attack. It is a passing breath. It remains amused at waking in a relatively new place it has not been to in a long, long time.|
...!
Oh?
A passing breath!
The Nightmare swept out across the new region.
It reached the Iron Psalm first.
The nine met it. They had to. Brunhild’s gates slammed shut across the sky in a great wall, thousands of them, white and iron, and the Held Breath struck the wall and pressed against it, and the gates groaned.
Beautiful work, those gates. Entirely the wrong tool.
The bell-faced Unfathomable rang, and rang again, and again, a deep steady peal like a heartbeat being forced to keep going, and every place the sound reached, the frozen moments trembled and tried to move. The white-stone woman sang louder. The chain wound itself around the Ancients behind them and pulled them close.
And Aethon’s flame rose into a wall of clean pale fire in front of the ranks, and where the Held Breath touched it, the stillness melted. Fire is always moving. Fire is the opposite of a held breath. For a long moment, the pale flame and the crimson glass pushed against each other across the sky, and neither gave.
Now that was the right tool.
Behind that wall, the Ancients of the Iron Psalm braced themselves and held. A few of the Established Ones went rigid, eyes wide, caught for an instant in the formation of Immensity that had almost killed them countless years ago, and then shuddered and came back.
But the weaker ones were already gone.
The Root Bearers of the Iron Psalm stood at the rear of the ranks, a thousand of them, and behind them the Newly Risen who had held on through Noah’s Nightmare, and the Held Breath passed over all of them like a shadow over grass.
They stopped.
Every one of them. All at once. A Root Bearer mid-step, one foot lifted, alongside many others.
A Newly Risen woman with her hands thrown up, frozen in the moment a Dimension had come down on her long ago and missed. Two young Newly Risen pressed back to back, caught in the night they had held a pass together and both almost died.
Grey glass crept over them, crimson at its edges. It sealed them in.
Then the glass rose, carrying them, up into the sky, until they hung there over the broken Legacy like a field of statues in a frozen wind, a thousand moments of almost-dying, held forever at their edges, every face turned up toward the hundreds of crimson eyes.
Some of them were weeping, and the tears had frozen on their cheeks.
Some of them were reaching for someone long gone.
Their King had sent them here to hold a Legacy. Now they were holding a breath. Forever.
Was that his doing, or the Stillness’s? Both. Neither? He found the answer unnecessary!
|One thousand Root Bearers of THE Iron Psalm have fallen to THE Held Breath.|
|The remaining Newly Risen and Established Immense Ones of THE Iron Psalm have fallen to THE Held Breath.|
|They are held at the instant before death.|
|They will remain there.|
...!
Then the Held Breath reached Noah.
He felt it reach into him, searching, as a hand searches a pocket, for the places where he had nearly died.
It found them easily. There were so many.
A small boy in a hospital bed, too thin, too sick. A young man on the first day of the apocalypse, a monster’s jaw closing around the space where his head had just been during one of the first Dungeon Breaks. The Devilish Time Unveiler. Celestials. Oppenheimer. Little Bobby. Living Existences. The Earliest Folds. Erwin... The Curator’s single written line. Brunhild’s gates. Aethon’s fire.
Every one of them rose up around him in crimson glass, every instant before a death he had escaped, and the Held Breath pressed down on him and tried to keep him there.
It failed.
Because those deaths were already his.
Every road he had left unwalked, every Noah who had died in his glass, every death that had almost happened to him and every one that had happened in a branch he had let go, all of it had returned to his Dream when he answered the Butterfly That Wakes. The instants the Stillness was trying to freeze him in were not edges he had escaped. They were roads he already carried!
Did it truly think it could hold him at the edge of a road he already owned?
He was the dreaming. The dreaming held every road, the ones where he died and the ones where he lived, and it had no need to stop at any of them.
His Shinjitsu pulsed!
The crimson glass around him cracked.
Cracked, rather than broken, a thin bright line running through each frozen moment. It was too little to free anyone else. It was barely enough to free him. His robe was smoking again. His cracked crown had cracked further. But he was moving.
Barely was still moving.
|THE Held Breath has reached you.|
|Your deaths that almost happened are already yours.|
|You carry them as roads, not as edges.|
|You are passing through the instant.|
|Barely.|
...!
Across the frozen sky, the Stillness turned.
Hundreds of crimson-obsidian eyes moved across the new region, slowly, almost lazily. They passed over the field of frozen Root Bearers. Over the nine behind their wall of gates and fire. Over Moriarty and THE Thinker, who went very still under that gaze. Over the broken Legacy. Over the tangled grey forests spreading through the Gaps.
It was looking around with something like interest.
Like someone who has woken in a new house and is trying to remember how they got there.
Like a boss from one of his old games, waking up early and wandering off before anyone had finished the dungeon.
Then every one of those eyes turned toward Noah, and stopped.
Oh?
The weight of that gaze was older than Brunhild’s Immensity or Aethon’s fire. It was the weight of every last breath that had ever almost been taken and held back. It pressed on him from every direction at once, and his Shinjitsu bent under it like a branch under snow.
Enormous. As a mountain is enormous to an ant.
He was, for the moment, the ant!
The Stillness spoke.
Its voice was quiet. It came from the held breaths that made up its body, thousands of them released all at once, a single long exhale that formed words as it passed.
"You opened the door," it said.
The frozen moments in its body trembled faintly as it spoke.
"I will go easy on you this time, for that. A sleeper owes something to the one who lets in the draft that wakes it." The crimson eyes stayed open, unblinking. "I may not be so gentle next time."
Then it moved.
Instead of coming at him, it turned away and began to spread out across the Undefined Gaps.
Its grey glass rolled outward through the tangled forests of the Fallow and the empty dark where Noah’s Dream had been quietly growing for days, and everywhere it went, it left things behind. Frozen moments, hanging in the dark like lanterns.
Crimson eyes, opening in the grey trees and staying open. Small Nightmares, born from the edges of deaths no one had died, crawling out of the glass and into the Gaps, looking for something to hold. A trail of terrors stretching out behind it across light years, then hundreds, then thousands, as the Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened wandered off into the new existence Noah had made, looking around with interest at everything it touched.
Through his Dream. Through his Gaps. Leaving its little terrors on his floor.
|THE Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened is moving across the Undefined Gaps.|
|Your Dream covers much of the Undefined Gaps.|
|Its passage is leaving Nightmares in your dominion.|
|THE Held Breath remains active.|
...!
