Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Lifthrasir’s question hung over the Ossuary, and the crescent of Ancient Immense Ones weighed violence against Lygara’s taut threads and two Giants who had already broken two of their own.

Noah stood upright through the remnants of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND’s pressure, his gold-blue film holding steady.

Part of him calculated coldly that any of these Ancients could still unmake his body in a true exchange of raw power. The rest of him was warm and human and thrilled to the bone, because none of it could bend his knees anymore, and their borrowed weight had nothing of his to grip!

True Keystone Sight opened behind his eyes.

THE Verdant Regard, pale and bleeding stellar green in another Ancient’s arms, unfolded before him like an overgrown garden of Legacy weavings, borrowed titles, and harvested fear, with only a ring of withered roots where her keystone should have stood.

|THE Verdant Regard.|

|Assimilation Rate: 0.0%.|

She was a relatively weak fucking scrub among Ancient Immense Ones.

Well, she was still stronger than Noah!

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND read differently. Beneath millions of vigils of Causes and stolen promises, at the very bottom, sat a small, hard kernel of genuine wakefulness that was entirely his own.

|THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.|

|Assimilation Rate: ?????|

|This being conceals its true power at all times.|

|It is unknown whether even 25% of its true power has ever been expressed.|

|Its entire existence is a shroud of Causes. Something unknown lies beneath.|

…!

A chill went down Noah’s spine!

This fucker had not even been serious!

Everything that had nearly crushed him had come from behind a shroud, with the Fiend’s own Shinjitsu hidden underneath the whole time.

Last, Noah turned his sight on THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral, and it stopped dead against the coils of purple haze, as if he had tried to read a book through a mountain.

|THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral.|

|?????|

One true room was still a long way from a palace.

While the Sovereign turned to Lifthrasir to speak of the lost wager, Noah…looked around the battlefiled and… looted it!

His True Dream Without a Far Wall had soaked into every particle of the Ossuary’s floor, and that floor quietly drank everythng the spars had spilled: the Verdant Regard’s stellar blood and orchard ash, and the shattered grey light and unfinished dimensions of THE Gaoler of Unfinished Ages. The Ancients overhead stayed entirely oblivious.

His existence took the remnants in, and his Shinjitsu stripped away the stolen fear and borrowed authority like husks from grain, leaving only raw existential mass to flow into his roots.

|Predation Complete: Stellar Blood of THE Verdant Regard (Ancient Fragment) and Unfinished Dimensional Shards of THE Gaoler (Ancient Fragment).|

|Under Shinjitsu (0.1%), foreign narratives and borrowed Immensity imprints are stripped and discarded. Only raw existential mass is drawn into THE Dreaming Human Origin.|

|Sap toward the Third Bough: +4%.|

Noah kept his smile entirely internal.

Across the arena, the Sovereign honored the wager. Lygara held every destiny-thread taut, and Kir One and Kir Two stood close enough to the wounded Keepers to hand two Ancient Narratives to their open jaws if a single blow was thrown, so peace cost him the least.

Lifthrasir smiled up at him.

“No matter,” she said lightly. “This has been fruitful, so I’ll share what we know about THE Dissolved Progenitor anyway.”

…!

The crescent went very still!

“You should be searching for what THE Dissolved Progenitor tore out of himself, his trueness and his origin,” Lifthrasir said, ” But it was never hidden in any vault. It was cast into the very mechanism that weighs ungranted growth.”

She tilted her head.

“Hmm. Has something happened recently in existence that changed everything? Something big? Something heavy?”

The threads overhead trembled.

“Something… cold?”

…!

Every door on THE Mother of Closed Doors slammed tighter at once, like a fortress locking down. Inside the Gaoler’s cracked cage the frozen fragments shuddered, THE Verdant Regard lifted her pale face with wide eyes, THE SLEEPLESS FIEND’s grin slipped for the first time, and THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral’s haze darkened to the colour of a bruise.

Noah barely saw it.

The mechanism that weighs ungranted growth was Judgment, the very weight that had searched the flow for him and failed to find him, and the heavy, cold change that had come over all of existence could only be THE Long Night!

THE Dissolved Progenitor had cast his weavings into the Long Night? Noah’s thoughts raced. He sat in one of its seats, its winter lived in half his Dream, and he had already wondered whether something ancient steered it under existence’s name. If THE Long Night was a Narrative, was it the Progenitor’s?

“…”

Noah couldn’t say!

THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral inclined his head.

|”Our thanks. We may return for more information, in time.”|

Behind the crescent, the dark split into a seam of plum blossoms, warm and free of snow, and the Ancients drifted into it one by one, the Gaoler leaking grey light and the Verdant Regard carried in another’s arms.

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND went last. At the edge of the seam he turned his luminous eyes on Noah, his smile cold once more.

|”Keep polishing yourself, little one. It’s always better when you are fully grown…”|

The seam sealed shutt.

And…barely a second passed.

Then Lygara’s weavings pulsed!

The whole living structure shuddered as its compound-eye windows turned outward, its mandible gate snapped in quick, uneasy bites, and every destiny-thread above swung toward the edges of the Chrysalis.

Lygara lifted her face toward the dark, her faceted eyes going distant.

|THE First Gu of Destiny speaks.|

|”Something is coming. Ancient-level Gu, sent by THE Primordial Gu of Provenance, hunting the scent of your restoration, Lif, and the Dreamer who undid your erasure.”|

Her voice went colder.

|”I never expected it to still be locked onto you this tightly, after so many Cycles.”|

Lifthrasir floated up between the two obsidian Giants until she hung level with Lygara’s vast face, small and frail and utterly unafraid, her limp wings stirring behind her.

“Such is existence,” she said. “Nothing in it is ever fair, but what can anyone do except live to the fullest?”

She looked toward the edges of the Chrysalis, and her smile widened.

“I intend to live every one of my hundred years, regardless of THE Primordial Gu of Provenance. Let its dogs come.”

…!