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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5922: Expansion! II
Chapter 5922: Expansion! II
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Noah looked over what was left.
Below him, the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity lay stretched across the new region in pieces. Elsedimensions split down their middles. Gardens burned flat. Halls open to a sky that was now half grey forest. Moriarty and THE Thinker hung behind him in silence, and below them, scattered across the snowfields and the drifting rubble, more than a hundred old Immense Ones of the Legacy sat or stood or simply lay where they had fallen, staring at nothing.
Defeated. Every one of them.
On the other side of the sky, the Iron Psalm looked no better.
Their gates were still up, their fire still burning, their nine still standing. But behind that wall, their ranks were gone. A thousand Root Bearers hung frozen in crimson glass. Their Newly Risen and Established Ones had fallen to one Nightmare or another. The Ancients who remained huddled together like men who had come to rob a house and found it already burning.
Somber. Every one of them, too.
So who had won here?
The Legacy had lost. So had the Psalm. The Stillness, perhaps, if a thing that old could be said to win anything by yawning.
And him.
Possibly.
He set the question aside. There were more useful ones.
The Legacy, for instance.
It sat now at the very center of the new region, at the exact place where the Undefined Gaps and THE Fallow of Existence had been stitched together. A crossroads. And crossroads were where things passed through. Every Nightmare that crawled up out of the Fallow from now on, every old thing that woke and wandered, would walk straight through what was left of Lucy’s home on its way somewhere else.
Its time there would be short. A week, maybe. A month, if it was lucky. Then one day something would pass through it as the Stillness had, and there would be nothing left to argue over.
It needed to move.
The first place anyone would expect him to put it was THE Infiniverse. His own existence. Safe, familiar, full of his people.
That was exactly why he chose otherwise.
Because the first place he actually thought of was Ruination.
Her Ruined Quantum Existence. A whole existence built inside her out of records and probabilities, growing every moment, full of possibility after possibility after possibility.
Oh!
Yes.
He turned the thought over and examined it properly.
When he had run his Infinite Quantum Dreams, every branch he left untaken had fallen. Down past the possible, into the Fallow, to feed the Grey Mother who had picked them up. Every discarded road had been a lantern lit in her forest. That was how the Butterfly That Wakes had found him in the first place.
Ruination ran probabilities too. Far more than he ever had. Countless Decillions of them. She extrapolated and simulated and branched endlessly, all day, every day.
And none of hers had ever fallen into the Fallow.
The reason was simple. Ruination discarded nothing. Every possibility she extrapolated became part of her Ruined Quantum Existence. Every branch she ran, she kept. The unchosen roads stayed with her. They simply became more of her.
She had been doing, from the very beginning, what he had only learned to do when he answered the moth.
Some of his Kin were a step ahead of him in strange directions!
He reached for her through their bond.
|THE Ruined Quantum Existence is now roughly ten times the size of THE Infiniverse.|
|It continues to expand. Every possibility I extrapolate is added. I am extrapolating more every moment.|
|It is becoming increasingly complex. New kinds of existence continue to form within it.|
|THE First Gu of Emotions, a Half-Unfathomable Immense Lifeform, is ready and stable.|
|It is under Emotive’s control. It keeps its own sense of identity within THE Ruined Quantum Existence.|
...!
Ten times.
Ten times THE Infiniverse, built in a matter of...a day, by a being that had once been a small Ruination core he had barely understood.
Noah nodded lightly.
He sent a single thought back down the bond.
How easy would it be for her to take in something real? An actual piece of existence, rather than a record or a simulation. The Legacy of THE Acharya, for example.
Her answer came almost instantly.
|Ruination: Here is the Assessment.|
|Pros:|
|THE Legacy of THE Acharya is real, and carries a deep history. From something real and old, I can extrapolate far more possibilities than from records alone. My existence will grow faster and richer.|
|Its people will be safe from the Nightmares now passing through the Fallow’s crossing.|
|THE Totems of Dominion are torn. No King’s grid can follow it inside me.|
|If there are hidden dangers within the Legacy that we cannot yet see, THE Ruined Quantum Existence is far safer to hold them than THE Infiniverse, which holds all your people.|
|Cons:|
|The Legacy’s people.|
|A real existence inside a quantum one will change both. The extent: ?????|
|Assessment: the pros heavily outweigh the cons.|
...!
Reasonable, thorough, and a little eager!
Noah nodded.
"Alright," he said grandly. "Get started."
HUUUM!
Deep inside him, through the bond, he felt Ruination begin. A great crimson attention turning toward the Legacy, slow and careful and enormous, like a hand cupping water.
He turned his head.
Across the sky, the nine Unfathomables of the Iron Psalm had their hands full. The Stillness was leaving, but it was leaving slowly, and its Nightmare was still rolling out behind it across the new region, and the nine were fighting it with everything they had. Gates opened and slammed. Bells rang. Fire burned. The chain dragged frozen statues back toward the wall one by one, as if the Unfathomables might still pull a few of their people out of the glass if they worked fast enough.
They had no glance to spare for him.
Good. Now seemed as good a time as any to bring all this to a close.
Oh?
His Dream pulsed. His Nightmare pulsed with it.
Something, far away, had moved.
That was one of the stranger gifts of what he had done. When the Fallow broke through and existence expanded, everything in the region stretched with it. Including his Dream. Every place his Dream had already replaced, the Gaps and the empty dark he had been quietly taking for days, had been pulled wide in the same breath as everything else. What he covered now was nearly five times what it had been an hour ago.
Too wide to hold cleanly, for now. There were holes in it everywhere, stretched-thin places where the new space had grown faster than his Dream could follow, and he was filling them even now, his Dreams and Nightmares replacing existence as fast as they could.
Ul’moreth was working alongside him. So was Emotive, and THE Infiniverse, and Ruination even as she began on the Legacy. All of them, filling the gaps at once.
But even with the holes, what he covered was vast.
And countless Gigaparsecs away, in a stretch of the Undefined Gaps his Dream had replaced long before any of this began, something had just displaced it.
Two somethings.
They had arrived quietly, out of nowhere, and the space around them had bent under their weight. Unfathomable Immensities. Two of them. Robed in white and gold, standing on the dark as if it were a balcony, looking out across light years toward the distant grey glow of the Fallow and the Legacy at its heart.
Noah glanced at them with his Shinjitsu.
|You see beneath their robes.|
|Ilarion Vey, THE Watcher of Old Fields.|
|Unfathomable Immense One.|
|Nysa Aurelle, THE Falling Lantern.|
|Unfathomable Immense One. Shinjitsu: 2.2%.|
|Both serve THE Shepherd of Falling Stars.|
|THE Narrative of Kings: Rank 25. Above THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate.|
...!
Twenty-fifth!
He listened.
His Dream was all around them, and they had no idea. Their words passed through it as voices pass through a wall in a cheap apartment, every word clear.
"We were only watching old Legacies," Ilarion said. He was tall and grey-bearded and very calm, his white and gold robes stirring faintly. "Looking for one ripe enough for conquest. We caught the Iron Psalm moving, so we followed. I expected a siege. Perhaps a quick surrender."
He looked at the grey glow on the horizon. "I did not expect that."
"No," said Nysa. "Nobody did."
"Something like that... would its existence not hold a great deal of individual Kingship? Enough to move a name on the banner by itself." He paused. "I have already sent everything I saw here to the master. Do you want to hold its attention until he answers?"
Nysa turned and looked at him.
She was smaller than he was, golden-haired and graceful, with a face like a carved saint and eyes like two cold coins.
"Are you fucking nuts?" she said pleasantly. "How can we hold that? I’ve heard the master speak of THE Fallow of Existence. That place has more oddities in it than THE Chrysalis, and you have seen what crawls out of THE Chrysalis. I don’t want to die so soon, not just as the Kings are starting to fight over the Narratives. So I’ll wait. Thank you. And..." She stopped. "Oh."
...!
They looked at each other.
Both of them went very still, as people do when the same voice speaks in both their heads at once.
Then Nysa turned toward the distant grey glow of the Fallow, toward the Nightmare still rolling away from it across the Gaps, and her cold coin eyes began to shine.
"It seems the master is very interested in this Old Monster," she said softly. "For him to want to come personally, with our Seniors..."
She clapped her hands together once. "Okay! Let’s get the path ready!"
She tilted her head, already turning to go. "Hmm. This will be the first time an army of a King truly moves. I wonder how many Unfathomables the master will bring?"
...!
Noah listened to all of this, and found himself, for a moment, entirely incredulous.
What the fuck?
Another King. A higher one. Personally coming, with an army, to hunt the thing he had just let out of the Fallow!
It felt like the moment the Long Night began, the whole of existence had taken a breath, and now, Narrative by Narrative, it was letting that breath out. Everything powerful that had been sitting quietly in the dark for Ages was finally standing up.
And so often, it stood up because of something that started with him.
The Long Night had begun with the death of an Immense One by Vakochev’s hand, on the day he and THE Writer of Mythos called Vakochev down. THE Narrative of Kings had unfurled after he swallowed Shards and took a seat, after Ruination began doing something grand, after he began replacing existence...well, maybe he was stretching things out and that had nothing to do with his actions.
The Fallow had broken open because he tore a door apart with his own hands. The Shepherd of Falling Stars was marching now because of a monster Noah had woken.
Again and again, he had been the nexus. The place where the threads crossed and pulled taut and set everything else moving.
THE One the Threads Bend Toward.
Was his own Narrative truly this strong?
Noah stretched, slowly, arms over his head, burned robe sliding down his wrists.
Things were getting more and more interesting.
Sadly, he was still on the low rungs. However fast he was climbing, the beings now moving across existence stood far above him, and a King who outranked the Iron Psalm was about to come walking through his Gaps. Racing them was pointless.
He would take things at his own pace.
HUUM!
His Nightmare visage healed.
It happened all at once. The burned hem of his robe rewove itself, gold thread and black thread running back through each other until the cloth was whole and longer than before, sweeping down past his feet into the empty air. The cracks in his crown sealed with a thin line of light, and then the crown itself grew, its obsidian points lengthening, a faint gold light now burning in its center like an ember inside black glass. The sandy obsidian-gold light around him thickened and settled, heavier than it had been, rolling off him in slow tides.
He was larger than he had been a breath ago. Grander.
He could feel why.
|Your Shinjitsu has fully digested the Newly Risen and Established Immense Ones who fell into your Nightmare.|
|What was borrowed in them has been set down.|
|What could be true has become yours.|
|Your Nightmare has been restored.|
|Your Nightmare visage has grown.|
...!
Every one of them, drawn into the eye and dreamed to nothing, and now part of the ground he stood on.
He looked at that line for a moment. Then he looked away from it.
|Ruination: Master. I am ready to begin pulling in THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.|
...!
Noah nodded.
He turned, at last, and looked back at Moriarty and THE Thinker, and past them at the hundred broken Immense Ones of the Legacy scattered across the snow below.
"Someone has made this place a little dangerous," he said calmly. "So I will take Lucy’s Legacy, and preserve it." He paused. "In another existence."
BOOM!
Shock rolled through the Legacy.
Moriarty stared at him. THE Thinker’s vast slow mind lurched to a halt. Below them, a hundred old faces turned upward at once.
"Another existence?" Moriarty said. "What..."
Crimson-gold light began to rise.
It came up out of the Legacy itself, out of every stone and stream and frozen garden, because every stone and stream and frozen garden had already been replaced by Noah’s Dream long before today, and Ruination was now reaching into all of it at once through him. The light was crimson and gold, the color of her, rivers of it running up through the snow, through the broken Elsedimensions, through the burned halls, through the old Immense Ones themselves.
Noah hung above it all with his robe sweeping down into the light and his crown burning gold at its heart, one eye gold and one eye obsidian.
"Merely another kind of existence," he said, and his voice rolled out over the whole Legacy, grand and kingly and cold. "Existence is vast, and full of terrors. In the epochs to come, we will see just whose existence remains supreme."
BOOM!
Crimson brilliance covered everything!
