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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5949: Narrative Wall II
Chapter 5949: Narrative Wall II
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Ever since Noah had established his Infinite Dream, he had believed, quietly and without ever quite putting it into words, that he could not truly be killed.
A body could break and a Dream could collapse in one corner of existence, and he would simply open his eyes in another, whole, because his Dream went on without end and he went on inside it, or at least that was what he believed. It was why he had smiled in the ruins of the Maze while the hand closed over him, and why, when he woke on his farm afterward, he had grieved for Lygara without rage and without any great sense of loss for himself.
But that belief had never been tested against anything as great as THE Primordial Gu of Provenance. He sat on the black-gold soil of his farm with the snow falling softly around him, and in front of him, coiled around the small blue-gold sapling, the Risen Dream of THE First Gu of Destiny lay with her eyes still closed. He had been drawing her back for a long while now, giving his Dream into the faint gold and silver shape of her without stopping, and she was barely more solid than when she had first come out of him.
It was taking far too long, much longer than it had ever taken to bring anything back before, and he frowned at her, because he could not understand why.
He blinked, once and then again, as a dull ache started behind his eyes and spread slowly across his forehead. He raised a hand to rub at it, and before his fingers reached his face, the ache became pain, sharp and deep and rising from somewhere far below his body, from the place where his Dreaming Human Origin lived.
A moment later it was everywhere at once, and Noah bent forward over the soil with both palms pressed flat against it and his breath unsteady, while the snow kept settling on his back.
Against the sapling, the hoe let out a low and unesy hum, because everything moving through his hands moved through it as well. At the far edge of the field, the three hundred and seventeen Nightmares drew back into the grey gaps of the Fallow, and far away on the illusory mountain, Octavius Infinitum opened his eyes and turned toward the farm without knowing why.
Then the prompts came, one after another, and every one of them landed heavier than the last.
|A hidden cost has arrived.|
|Your Dream was collapsed by a lifeform of extremely high Narrative and Immensity.|
|The power of such a lifeform permeates whatever it destroys, and its Narrative spreads across existence long after the blow has landed.|
|THE Primordial Gu of Provenance did not only collapse your Dream. It rejected it.|
|That rejection has wounded your Dreaming Human Origin itself.|
|Your Dreaming Human Origin lost a portion of the brilliance of its pillar of Quintessence.|
|The Empathy of your Human side is deteriorating.|
|In your defense, your existence is transforming these losses into Nightmares.|
|Overcome them and withstand them, or what is lost will stay lost.|
...!
Noah read every line through the pain!
He had always believed his Dream would carry him past death every time, and he understood now that there had been a price on that all along!
Then the Nightmares rose, and there was no more time to think about anything else.
The first was the hand. It came down out of the snowing sky over his farm, vast and pale and full of cold eyes, and it closed over the rivers and the rows of soil and the sapling and the faint shape of Lygara, while he stood in the middle of his field and said nothing, and kept on saying nothing. He heard his own silence go on and on, and under it the voice of the Primordial Gu telling him that this was his doing, and that everything here would end because of him.
The second was worse. He was sitting on a porch that did not exist yet, facing the rivers in the evening, with his mother and his son and his daughter beside him, and his daughter was crying about something. He looked at her and felt nothing at all, only a calm and distant interest in why she was crying and nothing behind it, as if she was far beneath him to even care.
The third was quieter than either of them. Deep inside him, the fire he had always burned with, the quintessence that had carried him... was going grey, and a cold voice made of every Provenance spoke softly over its dying embers. It told him that he had begun somewhere small and young that no one would remember, and that such a beginning could only ever burn for a little while.
Noah did not run from any of them. He reached into his own Nightmares and his own Dreams and brought them up against what was rising inside him, one Nightmare at a time, and he worked through them slowly and patiently without letting go.
When the hand closed over his farm, he took it into his own Nightmare state and made it his, a thing he had already lived through and survived, and he stood inside it until it was only a memory with an ending he knew.
When his daughter cried and he felt nothing, he gave his Dream into that porch, every small warm thing he could remember about her, and he made himself feel it again, on purpose, over and over, until the feeling came back.
When the fire went grey, he fed it his Nightmares, his hunger and his tyranny and infinity and the cruelty he had learned in so many fights, and it caught again, smaller than it had been, but burning.
It took him a whole hour. The snow piled up on his shoulders and on the brim of his straw hat while he knelt there with his hands in the soil, and the Risen Dream of Lygara flickered faintly beside him the whole time, waiting. When it was finally over, Noah lifted his head, and he looked very different from how he had looked an hour before!
His skin had gone ashen, the gold of his eye had dulled, and the thin film of Shinjitsu over him lay faint and tired, while sweat ran down his face and into his collar. His expression was heavy, heavier than it had been even in the ruins of the Maze, because nothing in existence was free, and everything had a cost, and he had just paid the price of his own death!
|The Nightmares born from your losses have been withstood.|
|They have not left you. They now dwell within your Nightmare state.|
|Pillar of Quintessence: diminished. It can be restored, but slowly.|
|Empathy of your Human side: wounded. It will recover through what you choose to care for.|
|Restoration of the Risen Dream of THE First Gu of Destiny: slowed.|
|Each time a lifeform of this level collapses your Dream, this cost will return, and it will be greater.|
...!
Noah read them slowely, and then he sat back on his heels in the snow and let out a long breath that shook a little on its way out. The collapse of any part of him, or of any part of his Dream, would never again be something that meant nothing, and from now on he would have to do everything he could to keep it from happening at all!
But what could he do differently? The beings he kept meeting grew larger every time, Kings and terrifying lifeforms and things that stood beyond the Unfathomable, and he was still one farmer with a hoe and a single mile of soil, standing in their way.
He looked at the faint shape of Lygara coiled around his sapling, and at his own ashen hands resting on his knees, and he could not stop asking himself the same question over and over, how... could he keep facing monsters so much grander than himself without dying?
