Read Novel Full Chapter 5544: Extinction I
Chapter 5544: Extinction I
Anaximander crossed to the dead and looked down at them, and began to help.
Noah stood in the middle of a field of corpses and took one more breath of it. There was a human satisfaction in standing in the aftermath of a thing he had done with almost no effort, and he let himself have it a moment longer. Brutal as the field was, it was human too. Humans were bloody. Humans were not always pretty.
Hvitrmarr walked over to him the ordinary way, on four legs across the ruin. Without her authority she was still enormous, and she crushed corpse after corpse flat beneath her without noticing she did it. On the ridge of her spine Ryaenara held on and did everything she could not to be thrown off a moving reptile, looking down at Noah and shaking her head at the whole scene.
The grand prompts bloomed in front of him.
|Adversity resolved. THE Aura of THE Protagonist final tally for the engagement:|
|Osmontian Biomass gained: 61,400,000.|
|You faced an army as a single human at F-Rank standing. The adversity multiplier held at its peak throughout. This is the richest single harvest THE Aura of THE Protagonist has produced.|
|Total Osmontian Biomass reserves: 86,400,000.|
...!
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered.|
|You have granted death to True Lifeforms and to thousands of Infinite Lifeforms. Death, cleanly given to those who had earned an ending, is its own kind of giving, and the Tide answers giving of every kind. A boon is returned, and it has taken a shape.|
HUUM!
Something spun out of the settling gold and dropped into his open palm.
An obsidian blue necklace, a single dark stone on a fine dark cord. The stone did not hold still. Inside it Infinity turned over and over, an ocean of it folded into a jewel small enough to close a hand around, cerulean light moving in its depths the way light moves in deep water, far down and alive.
|THE Woven Return: THE Tessellated Heart of the Borrowed Flame.|
|A necklace holding a contained thread of Infinity. It arrives interlinked with the knowledge of what you just witnessed.|
|Every Infinite Lifeform you faced drew their Infinity, without knowing it, from a single distant being. A Descendant of Those Who Remain, whose entire existence is Infinity that it lends outward across multitudes who mistake the loan for a possession. Its designation, carried to you along this necklace’s own borrowed thread: THE Infinity Eater.|
|Infinity is not something it has. Infinity is something it is. It has spread thin threads of itself into every wielder who draws Infinity without a source of their own, and it feels through each one, and what it lends it owns, and what it owns it may reclaim, or wear, or drown from the inside, at any moment it chooses. Any being who wields Infinity without a well of their own is a mouth THE Infinity Eater has not yet decided to close.|
|The necklace is itself a strand of that borrowed flame, contained and yours. Through it, one who holds sufficient Infinity of their own may reach along the threads to their far end and send a message to THE Infinity Eater directly. Should you even send a message though? Why would you?|
...!
Noah went still, turning the stone over in his fingers.
His own Infinity had a source. It came from his Infinite Cause, seated inside him. It had never occurred to him that this was a defense. But it was! A power he had made himself had no thread running out of it, and a thing with no thread could not be reached down and reclaimed. There was no loan. There was no lender. He owned himself completely!
The thing at the far end of ten thousand borrowed threads was another matter. Noah frowned at the stone, and set the problem down as he let THE MORTAL COIL go.
The Word drew back into him like a tide pulling off a shore. Across the gardens the weight of the world returned. Power welled up again in everything still alive to hold it, in Ryaenara, who drew a sharp breath as her existence came back to her, in Hvitrmarr, whose reined weight settled once more against her scales, in Noah himself, his ocean widening back from a single river to the full crowned depth of THE Quintessential Osmontian.
And as it did, something buzzed.
"Oh?"
Noah paused, surprised as he felt a small insistent vibration, from something he had put away. He waved a hand and took it out.
The tiny egg. The Tide’s reward for the resuscitation of Hvitrmarr, the strange small thing he had tucked away! It sat trembling in his palm at a high frequency, and an utterly despotic and ancient aura began to rise off it!
The egg cracked.
The shell split along a seam that had not been there a moment before, and a beam of gray light shot up out of it, straight up past Hvitrmarr’s height and higher, until it stopped at a point in the sky.
HUUM!
There, the point folded inward, drawing space toward a center that felt less like a place than a wound. Gray threads thick as rivers pulled in from everywhere at once and lashed themselves around it, layer over crossing layer, until a webbed cocoon hung over the gardens of THE Ymnaros like a second sky, and the ancient weight that had leaked from the egg now poured off the cocoon in a steady tide.
Everything below went still!
Out at the edges of the ruin, the last fleeing remnants of the army simply fell, and where they fell they began to rot. Theron Adranos straightened from the grave he was digging. Anaximander turned, and his mild face went heavy. Ryaenara said a word in a language older than the Scales, low, under her breath. And Hvitrmarr, who had faced down an army of giants without moving a muscle, took one slow step back!
The cocoon opened.
The webbing unwound itself strand by strand, without hurry, as though the thing inside had waited long enough that a few moments more cost it nothing!
What came out of it was enormous, and it was old, old the way the bottom of the sea is old. It unfolded against the sky in a body built for a war by an age that had lost the war anyway.
Gray flesh like weathered stone, scarred in places where the scars had scars. Plates that had grown across it rather than been forged onto it. Too many limbs, each too long.
Hanging off it and swaying were chains and cords and rags of materials no one living could have named, the wreckage of old bindings it had broken or simply outlasted.
Across its eyes was a blindfold made of hands.
Small ones, mummified and gray, hundreds of them layered palm over palm around the titan’s head, fingers laced into fingers in a pattern nothing sane had arranged. Whether the hands were there to keep existence out of its eyes or to keep its eyes off existence was not a question the sight of it invited anyone to ask.
It matched no taxonomy. It looked foreign down to the bone, ancient and wrong!
Even Noah was shaken. He stood in his field of corpses with the cracked egg still warm in his palm and looked up at the thing, and for a moment did nothing else.
Then the titan moved. It lowered itself out of the sky with the same slow dignity, and came down before Noah with a weight the ground took in silence because the ground had no other option. And without a sound, it knelt. It folded its too-many limbs and brought the blindfolded head low, down and down, until the band of gray hands hung level with the small human standing in the ruined gold, and there it held, kneeling, silent as the deep!
...!
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has completed a Woven Return long held in reserve.|
|The reward: an extinct lifeform.|
|At the core of its existence sit 36 Causes. They are not the Causes as you know them. They are Blighted Causes and Calcified Causes.|
|It is loyal only to you. It can come whenever it is called, from wherever it is, across whatever stands between.|
|How this Return was woven: when you resuscitated Hvitrmarr, you resuscitated a Cursed Lifeform bound to Those Who Remain, and you did it through replacement, collapsing terminal Causes and seating new ones. That act altered cause and effect across existence and time. Weavings of that shape had not moved through existence since the age this lifeform died in. The Tide followed them back to the only thing they still resembled, found this, and began the long work of returning it to you. The egg was that work. It has been maturing since the moment she was cured.|
|What is known of its history: it, and all others like it, were driven to extinction by the direct order of Those Who Remain.|
|Any further information...|
|...has been blocked.|
|The extinct lifeform has closed the record with its own will, and has given a single reason for doing so.|
|It wishes to introduce itself to you.|
...!