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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5978: Bloodied, and Calm!
Chapter 5978: Bloodied, and Calm!
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
Noah knelt in the broken snow with both hands in the soil and took stock.
Blood ran from his nose and both ears and the corners of his eyes, and his coat had soaked through at the chest and shoulders. His straw hat lay in the snow beside his knee. He could not remember losing it. That was the smallest of his problems.
|Narrative Walls standing: 4 of 26. Around you: 3. Over the farm: 1.|
|Broken out of existence: 7. Rebuilding: 15. Regeneration cannot reach them.|
|Farm Wall: whole.|
Four out of twenty-six. He read it once, and once was enough.
Then he looked down the possibilities ahead, as he always could, and they lay open across the snow all at once. In one, he rose and swung the Hoe, and the Shepherd’s army buried him beside his own coop before the minute was out. In another, he held his three walls and waited, and died more slowly, and the farm died after him. In a third, he did the one thing he had ever been completely sure of, and the road ran on past the edge of what he could see.
Every road where the cup of plum-petal tea inside the shell house was finished began with that third one.
So he gave.
He let go of everything that was left: the last Dreams he had been holding back for the walls, and the last warm thread of the farm’s authority he had kept for himself. All of it went into the ground. He kept nothing!
HUUM!
And at this time.
As he gave absolutely Everything!
Far out across existence, at the edges of every place he had ever given himself to, something that had been gathering for a very long time finished gathering.
It came back to him through the soil, unhurried, and rose into his palm.
It was a seed. Small and plain and brown-gold, no bigger than the nail of his smallest finger, warm and a little rough. Kings went to war for things that blazed. This was nothing that blazed. It was the most important thing he had ever held, and he knew it the instant it touched his skin.
|Quintessara of Existence received.|
|It was not carved. It was given.|
|Rarity: Common. Rare. Exalted. None of these. It is whatever existence is.|
|Shackle broken: none. Nothing ever bound you that you had not first taken.|
|Veins: 1. More will open as you give.|
|Vein 1: THE Harvest of All Things Taken.|
|Kind: Way.|
|Cost: none. It is given.|
|Powers of Existence held by this Vein: 3.|
|First Power: THE Return. Every lifeform your authority or your Bleeding Nightmare touches begins to give back to existence what it has taken to become what it is, in proportion to what it took. What it gives back passes through THE Bounty That Owes Nothing, and returns to existence and to you, multiplied.|
|Second Power: THE Doom Abominations of Existence. From any lifeform afflicted by your Nightmares, Doom Abominations of Existence rise for a moment under your command. They tear apart what was taken, purify it, and return it to existence. They fade when their target is erased, or when you tell them it is enough.|
|Third Power: DOOM.|
|Effect: ???|
|Trigger: ???|
|Ends: ???|
|Against those who took little, it is almost nothing. Against those who took everything, it is everything.|
|Essara carved from existence remember where they came from.|
|Shaped by you: born of one who gave everything and owed nothing.|
...!
The First Power he understood at once. It was giving, turned around. The Second Power he read twice, and down the roads he saw what it would look like. The Third Power he looked for down every road at once as he only saw...
Fog. Wherever DOOM waited, his roads went grey and quiet. Existence had hidden this one even from him.
He closed his hand. The seed sank into his palm and through it, into his chest, and settled near the center of him, and roots went out from it in every direction: down through his Dreaming Human Origin, along every Branch of his Tree, and out into every dark seed of the Bleeding Nightmare he had planted in every lifeform on that field. A small seed. What it had rooted into was the size of a battlefield.
"What...was that?" Lifthrasir asked, barely above a whisper. She stood a few paces off with her cracked arms at her sides.
"Something given," Noah said.
"Given by whom?"
"By everything I ever gave to."
She stared at him. Of every being on that field, she knew best that impossible things happened around him. She was walking around inside one.
He spoke the name of it quietly, and Quintessentially, and let it go down the nearest thread as he locked his gaze with those around him!
"THE Harvest...of All Things Taken."
|THE Return: reaching through every seed of THE Bleeding Nightmare on the field.|
|Status applied to every attacker: [Harvested] (Way, returning, ongoing). What was taken goes home.|
The nearest attacker was a young Half-Unfathomable of the Shepherd’s forces, very young for what he was. A faint thread left him, no more than a trickle, and went down into the soil. He looked at himself, then at the kneeling farmer, and shrugged.
On the western ridge, Thessaly laughed, bright and full of relief. "That? That is what you have been saving?"
Noah let her laugh. He had already seen how long it would last. The Immense One had served in a quiet corner of the Legion and taken almost nothing in his life, and the Return had taken almost nothing back. That was the first rule. The Return was exact. It weighed every being on the field to the last grain of what it had taken, whether Noah wished it to or not.
Thessaly’s sister was not laughing. Phaedra stood on the ridge with her eyes on the threads, the fine dark lines running out from the farm into every lifeform on the field, her own chest among them, and she had gone very still.
Noah rose. He picked his hat out of the snow, brushed it off, and set it on his head, and left the blood where it was. Elpis hummed against his palms when he settled the Hoe in his hands, warm and steady.
He looked east and west at every being that had come to take something from his farm.
"Let’s see," he said, "what all of you have taken."
Every seed he had planted since the first stroke of the war woke at once.
For the ones who had taken little, it was little. For the ones who had taken a great deal, it was everything they had.
At the front of the Shepherd’s army stood the Unfathomable whose phantom was a burning ship. He had climbed the Legion by sailing that ship through one Immense One after another and drowning each of them in fire for the Shepherd’s banner. Noah felt the thread in his chest pull taut, and the Unfathomable’s Narrative began to pour out of him into the soil.
...!
He became shocked!
"What are you doing to me?!" the Unfathomable shouted, clutching at his chest.
"Nothing you didn’t do first," Noah said.
Noah looked at the burning ship behind him, at its blackened hull and its sails of fire, every plank of it built out of someone else, and down the roads he watched it pour back into existence at this pace for a very long time. Too long. Some weeds came up with a gentle pull. Some had to be dug out by the root.
He called the Second Power.
THE Doom Abominations of Existence!
The Bleeding Nightmare seed inside the Unfathomable split open, and something climbed out of it! Something grand!
It was gold, and for half a heartbeat it looked holy: a tall figure of hammered, shining gold unfolding out of the Unfathomable’s own shadow, with wings of gold membrane spreading behind it. Then it finished unfolding. Its arms were far too long and bent in too many places.
Its hands ended in clusters of fingers and tentacles that opened and closed on their own. Where a face should have been, there was a smooth plate of gold with a single seam down the middle, and from the seam came a light so pure it hurt to look at.
Three more climbed out after it, each one unfolding into something far too large for the small dark seed it came from!
|Second Power: THE Doom Abominations of Existence.|
|Risen: 4, from the Unfathomable of the burning ship.|
|Target: everything he took.|
Glorious abominations!
The Abominations were silent as they tore into the burning hull with their long gold hands, and the fire left them untouched. They took the ship apart plank by plank and sail by sail, and every piece turned to fine gold ash in their fingers and drifted down into the soil. The Unfathomable screamed as his phantom came apart. It was everything he had ever been, and it was going home a handful at a time.
Then they turned to him.
He ran!
Two of them caught him by the arms and lifted him with their wings beating slowly, and the other two opened the seams in their faces and leaned in. Where the light touched him, he came apart!
His armor went first, peeling away in long gold curls. His Narrative went next, torn out in bright ragged strips, burned clean, and scattered as ash.
"I’ll give it back!" he screamed. "I’ll give it all back! Make them stop!"
WAA!
"No," Noah said.
He watched the rest. When it was over, gold ash lay on the black-gold soil, and four tall golden shapes stood over an empty place.
|Target erased. Everything he took has been purified and returned to existence.|
The Abominations faded at once. That was the second rule: they stopped when nothing taken was left, or when he told them to.
Behind him, through the warm curve of the Farm Wall, his family was watching his back.
The Unfathomable with a phantom of white bone moved next. She threw her whole tower of bone at him, and the serpent with stars for scales struck beside her, and a dozen others struck with them, everything they had left aimed at the farmer in the snow.
"Kill him! All at once! Before he does it again!"
Noah spoke the Third Power, very quietly at this time.
"DOOM."
....!
Nothing happened.
There was no light and no sound, and the prompt held the same three question marks. The tower of bone came on, and the serpent, and the dozen behind them, and their Narratives broke against his walls exactly as they had all morning. Across the field, Thessaly started laughing again.
"Rather anticlimactic!"
And yet...
In the next instant, the Unfathomable of white bone exploded.
The moment her Narrative touched his walls, everything inside her detonated outward in a sphere of gold and violet and green and white, a sea of light and force that swallowed her tower and her body and the snow around her and the air above her. When it cleared, a crater of smoking, glittering earth sat where she had stood!
The serpent went next. Then the one behind it. Every lifeform that had thrown Narrative or Immensity at him in that last strike went off, one after another, in a chain of many-colored detonations rolling up the eastern slope.
|DOOM.|
|Trigger: learned. Any lifeform that uses Narrative or Immensity against you.|
|Triggered: 14.|
|Effect: ???|
The fog on his roads lifted all at once, and he saw where they went. In nearly all of them, the light kept rolling.
The blasts did not stay where they landed. Wherever the light of one detonation touched someone who had not struck him, gold pustules rose on their skin, swelling and splitting, and black-gold marks crawled up their arms and across their faces in lines of writing, curses nobody had spoken.
|Status spreading: [Pustulant] (DOOM, ongoing). [Malediction] (DOOM, spreading). [Afflicted] (DOOM, stacking).|
|Every afflicted lifeform that uses Narrative or Immensity against you will detonate.|
The afflicted did what anyone would do. They raised their hands and struck out at the farmer who had done this to them, and they went off too!
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The eastern slope became a field of light. Every blast marked more beings, and every marked being that struck back became the next blast.
Noah nodded his head as he ascertained the grabd results, but it needed more testing!
"Enough," he said.
|DOOM: ended.|
|Ends: learned. When you say so.|
It stopped. The last detonation faded and no new one came. All along the eastern slope, the ones still alive lay among the steaming craters with gold sores fading on their skin, and none of them lifted a hand as they were horrified!
Noah breathed out. Now he knew where the edge of the Third Power was!
In the west, Kir One and Kir Two had been lurching toward the farm, and Lifthrasir’s voice cracked across the field, ordering them to stop and to touch him with nothing at all. The giants froze where they stood. On the ridge above, Phaedra leaned toward her sister and said something short and hard, and Thessaly’s wings drew in tight. He knew the words without hearing them.
Roxanna pressed a hand flat against her chest, where the Essara of Destruction was loosening, and for once she held her strike.
|Essara loosening: Destruction (Roxanna). Heat and Fear (Thessaly).|
|Essara held by will: Name (Phaedra).|
|Essara carved from existence remember where they came from.|
The Return reached carved things too, and reminded them where home was. Of all the rules, he liked that one best.
And as existence took back what had been taken from it, it gave, freely and more than it had been given.
The true effect of the Quintessara of Existence unfolded for him at this time as existences cycled all those dead, and an influx of brilliance entered from his feet!
First it healed its own wounds. The white holes around him closed one after another until the whole broken ring had knit shut, and THE Endless Retelling, which he was directing a lot of the boons into, shot up!
|Spaces broken out of existence: restored by existence itself.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 34 to Level 61.|
|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 10 to Level 12. Each wall is now worth 210. It much sturdier and harder to tear it down.|
|New Narrative Walls opened: 14. Filled at once.|
|Narrative Walls standing: 40 of 40. Around you: 39. Over the farm: 1.|
|Broken out of existence: 0.|
|Regeneration now exceeds what is left of the damage.|
...!
