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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5981: After I
Chapter 5981: After I
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
The first morning after the war was very quiet. Snow lay thick and clean over the whole of the farm, over the curved walls of the coop and the shell plates of the little house and the long new rows at the far edge of the field, and over the walled plot beside them where nine heads rose out of the black-gold soil, silent and very still.
The chickens murmured in the coop, the three rivers ran dark and clear, and out in the dark of the Carcosa, beyond the starlit grass, nothing moved at all.
Noah got up before anyone else, took the small iron kettle from the shelf by the door, and walked to the nearest river to fill it. Back inside, he held out his hand, and a small fire of Dreams bloomed above his palm, blue and gold, and he never tired of watching it bloom!
He set it on the floor and hung the kettle over it and waited. When the water boiled, he dropped a few dried plum petals into a cup and poured, and watched them open slowly and turn the water pink. In the second chair, Elpis was asleep, curled on her side with her bare feet tucked under her and one small blue-gold hand closed around a fold of his coat, exactly as she had slept on the first morning, the molten white rivers across her skin rising and falling with her breathing.
He drank his tea, and while he drank it, he let the prompts come. He had not looked at them since the war ended, and he read them now slowly with the quiet greed of a farmer counting a harvest as he had taken a lot of Pure Existential Essence and Narrative after the end...and he had directed a lot of it to one extreme Branch.
|Branch of Dreams: Level 9 to Level 12.|
|Branch of Nightmares: Level 10 to Level 14.|
|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 9 to Level 12.|
|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 11 to Level 15.|
|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 15 to Level 16. Each wall is now worth 250.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 90 to Level 300. Three walls restored every second.|
|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 8 to Level 13.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 5 to Level 10.|
|Narrative Walls standing: 61 of 61. Around you: 60. Over the farm: 1.|
|Narratives: 4.|
|Quintessara of Existence: 1. Veins open: 1. Powers of Existence: 3.|
|THE Narrative of Kings: no entry.|
...!
Every Branch had climbed, and THE Endless Retelling had leapt from ninety to three hundred! He...may have gone a bit overboard with his regeneration. With his Endless Retelling! He had purposefully focused on it so much that others comparatively rose lower, but he had a dream!
He had a dream that one day, as obscene enemies stood all around him and attacked him, his health bars...well, his Narrative Walls, would barely move, and even if they did, they would be restored so quickly that one would be dumbfounded!
He...had a dream!
"Three walls a second," he told his tea, and he could not quite keep the smile off his face, because three walls a second was a ridiculous number, a tyrant’s number, and it was his!
Somewhere ahead lay a day when even that would barely be enough, and he found he looked forward to it. He finished the cup.
---
After breakfast, and he now tried to live as a normal human would as he wss beginning to practice this more and more, Noah went out to the far edge of the farm, to the end of the newest row and the smallest mound. The cup he had left there the night before still sat in the snow beside it, full and cold, with the petals sunk to the bottom, and the soil of the mound was still, very faintly, warmer than the soil around it!
He sat down in the snow beside it and thought about his humanity, his choices, and Existence overall.
After a while, light footsteps came up behind him, and Lygara sat down on the other side of the mound with her gold and silver wings closed around her, and for a very long time neither of them spoke, and the snow settled on both of them, and neither brushed it away.
At last Lygara spoke, her voice very quiet and very old.
"She never once let anyone choose for her," she said. "Not her mother. Not the Primordial Gu. Not her father. Not you."
She laid one small hand flat on the snow over the mound. "Not even at the end. I think it was also the thing that killed her. She wanted to live for a hundred years, but she could not live through even one."
...!
Noah looked at the mound and nodded.
Lygara stayed a little longer, then rose, touched his shoulder once, lightly, and walked back across the field toward the shell house.
Inside the shell house, Elpis woke. She lay still a moment with her hand on the empty coat, then sat up and looked at the second cup on the floor, cold, beside the little fire, and got down from the chair and went to the door. She found him at the end of the newest row and walked out barefoot across the snow, small and blue-gold, and when she reached him she sat down beside him, close, so that her shoulder touched his arm, and put her small hand on his. How small it was, and how warm!
They stayed there together, watching the snow come down over the new rows.
The farm was a little larger than it had been! The black-gold soil had crept out past the old furrow during the war and stayed there, and the grey light of the Fallow lay further out across the starlit grass than it ever had, and the snow fell over all of it.
And somewhere down in the soil of that last row, under the snow, very faintly, something new was beginning to grow.
