Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5422: Something That Lasts! I

A man had to have a great many accomplishments in his life, or he would be considered worthless in the eyes of others.

A man could also have no accomplishments at all, and even if existence counted him worthless for it, he could still be laid back and happy. It all came down to where a being drew their sense of happiness from, whether they took it from the ledger others kept of them or from somewhere the others could not reach.

For Noah, he had never much cared how many accomplishments he stacked, nor how many more came after, nor what anyone thought of any of them. He kept his mentality the same regardless, as though he were never doing anything major, as though he were only ever going through the motions of an ordinary day. So even now, while he was changing the very history and makeup of a vast Observable Existence, an event that was by any measure significant and grand, to him it also simply was not. It was a thing he was doing. Nothing more!

When he managed his own perception this way, he could keep doing seemingly unfathomable things, because to him they registered as merely normal. To everyone else, this was the part where existences gasped in shock and called him a monster and demanded to know how a being could do what he did. But he was only ever being himself. He was only ever living by his identity.

Osmontian!

So right now, with bodies scattered across THE Braneworld, and a body in THE Source Lands seated in the storm of THE Effluvium Sanctum, and a body in THE Undefined Gaps carrying his family toward another Terminal Observable Existence, he also had a body lying back in THE Infiniverse, its head pillowed on the thick thighs of Barbatos.

They rested beneath a blue tree that rose up for miles, its canopy lost somewhere in the heights, its leaves sprinkling slow drops of mana down through the air like a gentle rain that never quite ended. The light came soft and cerulean through the branches. Barbatos sat against the trunk in a loose blue robe much like Noah’s own, her petite frame relaxed, her dark hair and darker eyes glimmering with a power that her stillness did nothing to hide.

Around them, projected into the air, hung multiple illusory screens that Noah had raised for her, each one showing a different front of the great turning across THE Braneworld, the falling Ordnances and the kneeling Gilded and the rising Pantheons, a war watched from a bed of mana-rain and warm thighs.

A set of prompts surfaced quietly in Noah’s perception.

|You have completed a Dual Cultivation session with the Subject, Barbatos. THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered. A thousand times the concentration of Infinity and Primordial Source you poured into her will be refined and infused back into your existence.|

...!

Noah smiled lightly and waved the prompts away, and behind him a happy Barbatos hummed, low and pleased, and ran her fingers through the edge of his hair.

"So," she said. "Out of all these things you’re doing, all these wars on all these little screens, which one of them was pulling your focus off me a while ago? Because that, Little Fish, was not your usual. That was not one hundred percent!"

Noah’s smile widened a fraction, and he looked, through the body far away, at THE Mesozoic Scale Ealdor Gilded One unleashing its Pantheon against him in the gold sky of THE Braneworld.

"A little of it was that," he admitted. "I’ve got a body about to test itself against a genuine Mesozoic being. I’m curious how my fused Infinity and Primordial Source hold up alongside my Intent, how hard it actually is to reach that separate Dimension of Existence they fold themselves into. I wanted to feel the gap myself."

He let a drop of mana land on his palm. "But mostly, no. Mostly my mind’s been on the backbone of THE Osmontian Tongue. I keep turning it over. Again and again..."

The blue rain fell around them, beautiful and slow.

"I’ve had Ruination and THE Infiniverse running calculations alongside me for a while now," he went on. "Everything’s ready. I crossed the threshold to enact it after the Tesseract. And I still haven’t started, because I keep stalling on what kind of thing I want it to be." He raised his hand and played idly with the falling drops, letting them break across his fingers.

"So much of what I’ve built, I’ve outgrown. I get some grand ability, I use it for a little while, and then it goes null, or I simply stop needing it, so I stop using it. THE First Tongue. THE Infinite Tongue. THE Primordial Tongue. I’ve been looking back at all of them, the ones I used to lean on and don’t anymore, the ones I’m still using, the ones I picked up and set down. And I’m trying to bring all of it together into a backbone that’s mine. Something completely new. Something built from scratch."

His existence pulsed with the Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian as he said it.

"And then I think," he said, "maybe that’s the wrong instinct. Some would say a being doesn’t need to innovate from nothing. That you can pick and choose from the aspects of existence already lying around, take this from THE First Tongue and that from THE Primordial, and build something that isn’t entirely new but is uniquely yours all the same. And I can’t decide which of those I’m trying to do. Whether I’m building a new thing, or arranging old things into a new shape."

Barbatos leaned down over him.

She kissed his forehead, slow and fond, her dark eyes glimmering, and when she spoke there was a teasing warmth in it.

"I thought my Little Fish was without doubt or fear," she said. "And here he is, fretting. Is that doubt I hear?" She smiled.

"My love, nothing you build will ever be perfect. We are not perfect beings, none of us, not even you, however much you act like it. You can only do your best with it, and your best is already more than most existences manage. So build the thing, and let it be imperfect, and outgrow it later the way you outgrow everything." She paused, considering, and her smile turned thoughtful.

"But if you do want something that lasts. Something you won’t set down in an age the way you set down the others... Ah. I don’t know."

She tilted her head, and a drop of mana fell from a leaf and broke against her cheek, and she said the next part lightly, innocently, almost to herself.

"It’s only that everything you’ve ever kept," Barbatos murmured, "you kept because it was already part of you before you ever had a name for it. Your Mana. Your Cause. Your Intent. All are essentially...already yours. What you already had..."

HUUM!

She went back to playing with his hair, as if she had said nothing of consequence at all.

And Noah went very still beneath the blue rain.

He had been trying to decide many things and how to build them. But a Tongue that lasted, a foundational language that would never go null on him, would not be built and would not be assembled. It would be the one he already spoke and had simply never written down.

The language his existence had been speaking under everything since a boy fell in love with Mana. Not innovation. Not curation. Excavation. He did not need to author THE Osmontian Tongue at all!

He needed to transcribe it!