Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5399: Thalassarch! I

An unfathomable distance from THE Braneworld, from THE Infiniverse, from anything Noah had a name for, his body arrived inside a dying Observable Existence, and it was an ocean.

He had sent THE Loyal Reach back to another of his bodies in THE Braneworld, the one that would face the Mesozoic Scale Gilded One descending out of the gold sky. He had thought about that, before he split his attention. Facing a Fifth Scale being might genuinely be a reach for him right now. He knew little about that stage, its power, its mechanics, and the jump in strength between the Fourth Scale and the Fifth was not a small thing even within Vakochev’s careful framework. Beings did not cross it lightly.

But he was not afraid of the Ealdor in the gold sky, and the lack of fear was not bravado. He was a True Lifeform now! He had fused Infinity and THE Primordial Source into one cerulean authority. He carried an Intent that exceeded Primordial. With those three terrible factors stacked beneath him, he should at the very least be able to weather the strikes of a Mesozoic being, and learn, firsthand, exactly what such a creature was made of.

That body would handle the testing.

This body had other work.

This body stood inside a Terminal Observable Existence, and it was drowning.

Seo-yeon’s gaze had gone pained the moment they arrived. She looked around them with that pain in her big eyes, the hurt of a being who could feel the dying of Observable Existences the way others felt cold.

They stood inside a swirling ocean of storms, violet and blue, the colors bleeding into one another across a sea that had no shore and no surface and no floor. Oceans stretched out in every direction, vast beyond the eye, churning with a light that was beautiful and wrong, the beauty of a thing that had been magnificent once and was now only magnificent in its ruin.

Noah closed his eyes and spread his Intent out across the whole of it.

He saw it then, the full shape of the dying Observable Existence. It was a domain of water, mainly, an existence built around the sea, and across it failing Primordial Realms and collapsing Folds burned with oceanic brilliance, guttering toward their ends. Realms that had held cities once. Folds that had held peoples. All of them flickering out, drowning in the slow apocalypse of a foundation that had stopped holding, the whole of it lit violet and blue like the inside of a wave caught at the moment before it breaks forever.

The prompts surfaced as his Intent read the bones of the place.

|You have arrived within a Terminal Observable Existence. Designation: THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch. Status: terminal. All nine of its Prime Causes are failing. Death is advanced and accelerating.|

|Recovered records of THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch, drawn from its Terminal Infinity:|

|This was an anomalous Observable Existence, untouched across its full history by the Gilded Ones, by the Infinite Lifeforms, and by the Source Lifeforms. It grew alone, in the deep dark of the Undefined Gaps, an ocean-domain that no grasping hand had ever reached. And it produced, in its long isolation, something that should not have been possible. A Bounded Lifeform who exceeded every limitation of a Bounded Lifeform. An Emperor.|

|Designation of the Emperor: Thalassarch Nereon, THE Drowned Sovereign. He rose from the deep peoples of the oceanic Folds and climbed past every ceiling his kind was supposed to possess, until he stood at the Fifth Scale, a Mesozoic-equivalent power forged entirely within a Bounded Observable Existence that had never been told such a thing was forbidden. He carried an Akashic Civilizational Intent of the second rarity, and he ruled the whole of it as its protector across an age of peace.|

|Then the Gilded Ones found it.|

|They found the untouched Terminal Observable Existence in the dark, this pristine ocean-domain that no one had ever mined, and they wanted it, the way they wanted everything they found. And the Emperor Thalassarch Nereon, sensing the grasping hands closing toward his isolated paradise, understood that his Fifth Scale and his second-rarity Intent would not be enough to hold them off. He needed more. He needed to break past the Fifth Scale, to raise his Intent to a higher rarity, to become something that could stand between his people and the gold-armored hunger he felt approaching from beyond the deep.|

|So he reached for the only well deep enough. He reached for THE First Cause of his own Observable Existence.|

|The records preserve his obsession. He pulled at THE First Cause of Thalassarch with a crazed and deepening hunger, trying to draw its foundational power into himself, to make the bedrock of his existence into fuel for his own ascension, telling himself with every pull that he did it to protect, that the ends were holy, that a sovereign who would not bleed his own foundation to save his people was no sovereign at all. He pulled, and pulled, and the foundation gave a little, and the little was not enough, and so he pulled harder.|

|And THE First Cause of an Observable Existence is not a well to be drained by a single being, however grand. It is the load-bearing truth of countless trillions of realms and domains at once. When he wrenched at it, the nine Prime Causes beneath it began to crack, one cascading into the next, the foundation he was trying to harvest buckling under the obsession of the one being who loved it most.|

|The cascade became an extinction. The records name it THE Sundering Tide. It rose out of the failing First Cause as a wave that was not water, a drowning that reached past the body into the foundation of every existence in the ocean-domain, and it swept across THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch and wiped out every lifeform within it. The Deep Lifeforms. The Fold-dwellers. The cities in the trenches and the choirs in the currents and every soul the Emperor had climbed the Scales to protect. All of them, drowned in a tide that he had pulled down upon them himself, in the act of trying to save them.|

|Only one survived. Him. The Emperor, left alone in a dead ocean with the weight of every death and every decision resting on a foundation he had broken with his own grasping hands.|

...!

Noah read the records and did not waste any of the easy contempt a lesser observer might have reached for. The Emperor had been a fool, and the foolishness had murdered an entire Observable Existence, and that was true and would stay true. But Noah had seen this shape before. The being who loved the thing so much he destroyed it reaching to save it. It was the Chernobyl lesson again, in a different key. Power without governed emotion. A sovereign who could not bear to lose, who pulled too hard, who could not accept that protection had a ceiling, and so drowned everything in the reaching.

He filed his judgment, and got to work, because the dead did not need his judgment. They needed his Causes!

He spread his Intent across THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch and took hold of all nine of its failing Causes at once.

He thought, as he did it, of how far he had come since Chernobyl. There, he had needed nothing external, no Dreamstones like the ones in Velanthra that lesser beings used to resonate with and incorporate the natural Causes of an Observable Existence. He had already grasped all nine once, in the dying First Cause of Chernobyl, and altered them into his own. But he had grasped them in a hurry then, by necessity, to save a child and an entire Observable Existence in a single desperate act. This time he would do it properly. This time he would grasp the full meaning of all Nine Prime Causes of an Observable Existence, Desidero and Dominion and Bellum and Cognitio and Vigilia and Immutis and Consumptio and Mortis and Genesis, and he would take that understanding into THE Genesis Scale, which held all Causes within it.

He held the nine failing truths of the drowned domain, and he learned them.

|You have grasped the failing Nine Prime Causes of THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch. Records of all Nine Prime Causes of Observable Existences have been made. They will gradually be incorporated into THE Genesis Scale, deepening your understanding of the foundational architecture upon which all Observable Existences are built.|

Noah nodded brightly at that. The Emperor had drowned a paradise reaching for power and gotten only an extinction. Noah would walk through the wreckage and leave understanding the deepest architecture of existence a little better!

He breathed out, and got started.

His Intent shot out across the whole of THE Abyssal Cradle of Thalassarch, and just as he had at Chernobyl, he began to replace the dying Terminal Prime Causes with his own.

BOOM!