Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5442: Only Existence! II

THE Creature drifted closer, the maw yawning patiently at his chest, and he began to eat them at this time even as they roared backwards in horror.

WUU!

He did it slowly, because the lesson mattered more than the meal. The maw took Aurescine first, drawing the Ealdor in by degrees, and the Superbius screamed with a voice that had never once in his long existence been made to scream, watching pieces of his own being vanish into the dark ahead of him.

"Do you feel that?" THE Creature asked, conversational, brutal, watching the horror swim in the Ealdor’s eyes. "That is the oldest transaction there is. Before contracts, before your ledgers, before your Houses and your castes and your engineered little Egos, there was only this. One thing eating another thing. Every civilization you built was decoration laid over that truth, and you decorated so well you forgot what was underneath."

Hadrach tried to flee. It was the sensible choice, and it accomplished nothing, because there was no direction he could flee in that was not made of the being eating his colleague. The maw took him by the leg of his existence and reeled him back in with all the urgency of a farmer retrieving a wandering animal.

"Your kind never paid for anything," THE Creature went on, as the Ira thrashed and diminished. "You were given your Egos. Given your Force. Given quintillions of lives to spend, and you spent them, and you called the spending order. You devoured an Observable Existence’s worth of small things and never once imagined the bill arriving, because nothing you had ever met was large enough to present it." The obsidian flames roared soft and vast.

"Existence noticed, you understand. Existence always notices. It simply needed a mouth. I am that mouth"

WAA!

He looked into Aurescine’s eyes as the last of the Superbius went down into the dark, ages of refined pride ending in the cold silence before sound, and there was no cruelty in THE Creature’s burning gaze as it happened.

That was somehow the worst of it, Calypso thought, watching grimly from the distance. Cruelty would have been personal. This was a being settling an account!

And he was ridiculously quick in all of this.

Too fucking efficienct in dispatching Two Mesozoic Scale beings!

The maw finished, and closed, and folded back into the obsidian flames as though it had never been, and two Mesozoic Scale Ealdor Gilded Ones simply did not exist anymore. They were consumed, records and Pantheons and selves, taken into a True Lifeform along the oldest transaction there was, and below them the largest capital in THE Braneworld stood suddenly, permanently, without its pillars.

Calypso stared at the space where two Fifth Scale beings had been, and made a quiet decision never to call him tepid again where he could hear it. He was becoming too fucking monstrous far too quickly!

This, then, was a glimpse of an appendage of a True Lifeform. Not a technique to be learned or a treasure to be looted, but identity grown into anatomy, an inheritance from the era before the Age had names, and existence had just watched one eat two Pantheons the way the tide eats a sandcastle.

The bells of the capital were still ringing the hour as the obsidian flames turned, unhurried, toward everything below.

The black flames of THE Creature fell over the capital, and unlike Noah, he spared no one.

Noah had stripped the Gilded Ones of their Infinity and their Egos and left most of them alive, hollow witnesses sent home to watch the changing of an era. Even Noah, when his verdict turned harsher, had fed only a few million of the guiltiest to the Acedia Dredges and let the rest stand in the ruins of their order. There was a design to his cruelty, a curriculum. He wanted survivors, because survivors carried lessons.

THE Creature wanted nothing of the kind.

The obsidian flames rolled down across the vast capital, tier upon golden tier, over the markets still running in the lower districts and the temples still burning their incense and the tens of millions of Gilded Ones who called this place home, and the flames did not sort them. There was no test to pass, no Source Heart to present, no chance to kneel. Existence had found bacteria in itself, and existence was simply cleaning, and one does not negotiate with an infection or ask which individual microbes had good intentions.

HUUM!

The screaming lasted less time than the bells had.

Within the black flames, his appendage unleashed itself, the vast faceless maw opening everywhere the fire touched, and it devoured every single one. Superbius and Luxuria, Ealdor and young, the architects of the order and the ones merely born into it, all of them drawn down the same dark throat while THE Creature floated above and calmly watched his own fire work. He did not gloat and did not flinch. He simply observed, the way a farmer observes a field being cleared, present for the labor without being moved by it.

In seconds, the entire capital was barren.

Where the largest Gilded seat in THE Braneworld had stood, breathing and golden and ancient, there was now only scorched emptiness, tens of millions of existences gone into a True Lifeform along the oldest transaction there was. The bells had melted mid-ring. Even the incense smell was gone, burned down to a thin mineral nothing drifting over bare stone.

"..."

THE Creature regarded the barren ground for a long moment before he spoke, to Calypso or to himself or to the emptiness, it was hard to say.

"There is a weight to everything one does. Existence doing what must be done is still existence carrying the doing afterward, and I will carry today for a long time. That is actually proper. A thing that could do this and feel nothing would be a worse thing than the Gilded ever were." The obsidian flames banked low around him.

"But I have watched this garden for eons, and I have learned what gentler hands refused to learn. Some weeds cannot be pruned. You cut them back and they grow from the root, and the root goes deeper than the cutting, and while you congratulate yourself on your mercy they strangle everything green within reach. This order was root-rot all the way down. Every tier of it fed on the tier below, and the bottom tier fed on quintillions who never got a garden at all." His burning gaze swept the scoured ground once more.

"So sometimes, for the garden to prosper, every single weed must be pulled. All of them. In one pulling. And the one who pulls must be willing to stand in the empty field afterward and answer for it. I am willing. I am existentially willing!"

HUUUM!