Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5135: Dissection! II

Noah’s eyes were bright as he looked at the bound Primordial Architects floating before him.

Above him, THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity buzzed with the soft hum of a forge just before its next strike. He called upon the Civilizations nested within it, and three of them bloomed outward at his summons. Undifferentiated Fate first, its golden light pouring down from the Pillar in long molten ribbons.

Relativity next, its purple currents folding through the space around him in configurations that bent distance into obedience. Outerversal last, its obsidian weavings rising from the depths of the Pillar like something fished up from a sea that had no bottom.

The three Civilizations wove together in the air in front of him and became chains.

Golden, purple, and obsidian. Braided along their lengths, each link carrying the weight of all three Civilizations at once.

His Pillar of Infinity held every actualized Civilization he possessed. That had been the point of building it this way. He could call on them individually, layer them however he wanted, and each one would still carry the full weight of Infinity because the Pillar was where Infinity and Civilization met.

The chains moved.

HUUM!

They struck outward across the floating island, uncoiling through the frozen air with the steady confidence of predators that had been bred for exactly this kind of work. They wrapped Octavius first. Then Valeria. Then the other Calymmians scattered across the ruined apparatus!

Then the unconscious Rhyacian. Then the Abomination still hanging above, its jaws still arrested mid-bite. Each being was coiled into its own individual harness, lifted from wherever it had been frozen, and laid flat on its back in space.

Relative to him. He floated above them now.

Below him, they floated in a neat row beneath his position, like specimens on trays!

Shock sat in their eyes. Sombreness behind the shock. Every one of them stared up through the weight of his Haki, and every one of them understood something in that moment that they hadn’t quite believed before the chains had settled around their limbs.

The Chosen designation had limits. The limits had just introduced themselves!

Noah checked the strain inside himself.

It was akin to an invisible muscle deep in his mind held every bound Primordial Architect in place, each one a thread his attention was keeping taut. Octavius took the most force, naturally. The Greed-amplified Architect had the most foundation of the lot, and his engineering pushed back against the control of his Infinity with the most sustained resistance. But even he was manageable!

He waved his hand.

Octavius’s bound body slid through the air toward him, golden and purple and obsidian chains dragging it closer until it hovered directly beneath Noah’s floating position. The Architect’s pale gold eyes held up at him with the defiant light of a being whose Greed hadn’t yet conceded anything.

Defiance was useful. Defiance meant the Ego was still active, still humming, still demonstrating the configurations Noah wanted to study.

Beneath Octavius, Infinity surged.

It gathered from the ambient currents of THE Wyld, poured upward from the rivers of the island, and condensed into a radiant blue table of brilliance. The table materialized beneath his floating body with the quiet finality of an operating surface being delivered. Octavius’s back came to rest against its glowing surface. The chains adjusted, flattening him further, binding his arms out to his sides in the universal posture of subjects who were about to become specimens.

Noah looked down at him.

"The human body is made of countless things."

His voice carried calmly across the island, unhurried and conversational.

"Even without mana. Even without any authority or refinement at all. The human body on its own is a marvel, and most humans go their entire short lives without ever realizing what they’re actually walking around in. Ordinary flesh and bone. Ordinary blood. Ordinary everything. And yet the composition of that ordinary body, if you trace it back far enough, tells a history that stretches across the entire life of its universe."

He watched Octavius’s eyes for a flicker of interest as there was none, but he kept going.

"The body’s made mostly of oxygen. About sixty-five percent by mass. Then carbon, about eighteen percent. Hydrogen, around ten. Nitrogen, three. Then calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium. Trace amounts of iron, zinc, copper, selenium, iodine, and so on down the line. Every one of those elements has a story. Every one of them had to be made somewhere before it ended up inside a walking human being."

His fingers moved absently in the air as he spoke, conducting his own words with tendrils of infinity.

"Hydrogen and most of the helium came from the early universe itself, formed in the first three minutes after the Big Bang. Everything heavier was forged inside stars. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all cooked up in the cores of stars that lived and died across billions of years. The calcium in bones? Forged in stellar fusion. The iron in blood? Made in massive stars and then scattered across space when those stars exploded as supernovae. The iodine in the thyroid, the selenium, the heavier elements? Those came from neutron star mergers and the deaths of the largest stars."

He paused, almost amused at his own digression.

"If I could say one thing to every manaless human I ever walked past back in time in the old world, I’d tell them they were unfathomably grand. And it...is not because they achieved anything. Not even because they cultivated anything. Simply because...they were made of the stuff of stars. Every atom in their bodies had been inside a star at some point. Their calcium had been forged in stellar fire. Their iron had ridden a supernova across the cosmos. They were walking around carrying the ashes of dead suns in their bones, and most of them died without ever thinking about it."

Octavius’s eyes held steady, defiance still burning behind them.

"Every single body and existence has age. Every single body and existence has history. The body you’re lying on this table with, Octavius, tells everything it can possibly tell about you. What you went through. What modifications were written into you. How you were engineered. How you were born. What you ate across eons, what you absorbed, what passed through you and left traces. If an existence is studied closely enough, all of this can be extracted. All of it."

He leaned forward slightly, the Pillar above him blazing brighter.

"So here’s the question I’ve been turning over. What is a Primordial Architect made of? What is Octavius made of? If I break your components down to their foundational weavings, can I design a Primordial Architect? If I account for all of your ingredients, all of your authorities, all of the engineering the Gilded Ones wrote into your existential makeup, can I design and replicate you entirely from the ground up?"

His smile was mild!

"What do you think?"

...!