Published at 3rd of November 2026 6:28 am

Chapter 5937: A Mighty Hoe! I

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

<Existential Interlude- THE Jar and THE Crown>

THE Emperor Who Crowned Himself came to the dusty, sunlit Legacy that fit inside a jar, and he found Diogenes sitting outside his cracked clay jar in his single ragged cloth, with his bare feet in the dust and his old lamp unlit beside him.

Napoleon had brought no army and no singers, only himself and the iron rod he had once pulled himself up on, which he still carried on his back, bent into a curve. He sat down in the dust across from Diogenes, because he had come to settle an argument the two of them had been having for a long time.

"You threw everything away," Napoleon said. "Your name, your destiny, and now you live in a jar. I took everything existence would not give me, until I stood at the top of countless things and crowned myself, because no one else had the right."

Diogenes scratched his beard and asked him why he had needed a crown at all, if no one had the right to give him one.

"Because the children in that hut laughed at me," Napoleon said, "and the Immense Ones above my Observable Existence never looked at it once, and existence told me, every single day, that a boy who could not stand would never be anything. I proved all of them wrong."

Diogenes smiled and said, "Then you are still carrying all of them. You carry their laughter on your head every day and call it a crown, and you carry that bent rod on your back so that you never forget what they said."

Napoleon was quiet for a long time, turning the iron rod over in his hands. "And you," he said at last, "carry nothing at all, and that is a cage too, because you are so afraid of being held by anything that you will not even keep your own destiny."

Diogenes laughed, because it was true.

They sat together while the sun moved across the dust, and Napoleon told him about the children from the hut. They had all grown up strong, with good legs, and every one of them had stayed in that small Observable Existence until they died, because their parents had told them that nothing outside it was meant for people like them, and they had believed it.

"They could walk," Napoleon said, "and they never once went anywhere, while I could not walk at all, and I went everywhere."

Diogenes nodded slowly, because they had finally found the thing they agreed on.

Most of what holds a lifeform in place was put there by somebody else, and the only difference between the children in the hut and the boy on the floor was that one of them had refused to believe it.

Then Napoleon stood up, slung his bent rod over his shoulder, and left, and Diogenes reached for his unlit lamp and, for the first time in Ages, began to wonder whether he should light it again.

---

Noah looked down at the hoe in his hands. It hummed quietly against his palms, a single clear note that only he could hear.

Then he looked up at the sky above his farm, at the three Half-Unfathomables and the dozen Ancients in white and gold, and at the chained prisoners hanging behind them in the snow. He noticed, with some surprise, that he was not looking at them the way he would have looked at them a few weeks ago.

With the connection to everything around him, with his Shinjitsu and THE Unstriving Current and the slow flow of existence moving under all of it, he found that he was no longer so strict about what things were. When he looked up, he did not see three Half-Unfathomable Immense Lifeforms and twelve Ancients who had come to ruin his farm on its very first day. He saw lifeforms moving across existence the same as he was, each one carrying small hopes and dreams of its own.

He could see some of those dreams, faintly, now that he was looking. Corvin Astrael dreamed of standing at the Shepherd’s right hand one day, close enough to be called by name. The woman beside him dreamed of a home she could barely remember, and the third dreamed of a wall that nothing could ever break through, and the Ancients behind them each dreamed smaller dreams of rank and safety and being thought well of. Noah smiled, because there was nothing strange about any of that.

They all had their hopes and dreams, but they had turned those dreams against his, and he was not a saint. The longer he spent understanding existence, the more clearly he understood nature, and in nature many things lived and many things died.

These beings had come to buzz around his farm on its first day and threaten what he was trying to grow, so to him they were pests, and pests had to go.

He did not think of them as Half-Unfathomable Immense Lifeforms or as Ancients at all, because he was slowly beginning to understand that power did not matter in the way he had always believed it did. What mattered was how unique a being was in existence, and how truly it stood in its own place.

A little while ago he had survived against nine Unfathomables without being able to touch or injure a single one of them, and now, looking up at three beings almost that strong, he did not even ask himself whether he could touch them.

He smiled, because he would simply act. They were pests, so he would use the one weapon his farm had to clear them away, and the true nature of his hoe was still hidden, but he could feel that it was mighty.

Noah rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms until his back cracked, ran his thumb along the handle of the hoe, and spoke to it quietly. "Let’s take care of these pests, shall we?"

...!

---

<Octavius Infinitum>

Octavius watched THE Farmer rise, slowly and without hurry, with the hoe resting on his shoulder and his straw hat still on his head, and as he rose, everything around him rose with him. The black-gold soil lifted under his boots, the three rivers bent upward, and the half-empty sea climbed into the sky in great walls of blue, while every current of infinity that Octavius could feel tilted upward to follow him. By the time he stopped, level with the Half-Unfathomables, he was standing on top of a wave of existence that reached from the seabed to the clouds.

The three Half-Unfathomables did not wait, because they had felt what the farmer did to Corvin’s first blow. Corvin Astrael lifted his palm, and his Narrative, THE Star That Never Misses, poured out of him and shook the snow out of the sky, and a whole real Dimension formed in his palm, pressed tight around a single burning star, while behind him rose a white archer made of starlight as large as a Dimension.

The woman beside him, whom the others called Saelith Vane, raised her pale lantern as her Narrative, THE Lantern That Leads the Lost Home, flared to life, and an entire Observable Existence of roads and lit windows opened out of its flame, with a lantern crane as large as a Dimension spreading its wings behind her.

The third, a broad and silent man named Orren Mourncrest, said nothing at all, and simply spread his arms. An Observable Existence packed full of falling stars rose behind him as THE Wall of Falling Stars, held in place by the shadow of a stone titan as large as a Dimension, and the dozen Ancients around them drew their own Immensity until the snowing sky shook. Octavius had seen Ancients end under less than this!

HUUM!

Then THE Farmer moved, and Octavius lost sight of him!

What!

There was no flash and no light, only a man in a straw hat who was standing in one place and then was not, and as he went, the whole region went with him, the currents of infinity surging behind him and the walls of the sea leaning after him and the black-gold soil below pulsing once in time with his step.

A heartbeat later the sound of his leaving reached Octavius as a crack so loud that it split the clouds for a Dimension in every direction, and the nearest Ancient had time to turn his head before THE Farmer swung the hoe into him with both hands!

The flat of the blade hit the Ancient in the side, and every current of infinity in that stretch of the Carcosa hit him at the same moment, all of it pushing with the stroke.

The Ancient’s body bent around the impact and vanished across the sky, punching through the snow, through the clouds, and through the wall of a dead Dimension on the far horizon, which shattered outward in a ring of white fire that rolled across the Carcosa!

BOOM!

Share