Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5621: Dimensionality! I

The dance continued and simply grew quieter!

Somewhere between one turn and the next, the symphony had settled into a slow old melody, and Thalia’s steps had eased to match it, and the two of them moved across the stellar grass in small unhurried circles beneath a sky still budding with beginnings.

Since the Reverie asked for an art in seamless motion, the dance itself had become part of the cultivation.

Within Noah, the epiphanies had begun to arrive in streams!

Of course, they did not arrive as answers. They arrived as better questions, one unfolding out of another, each profundity opening a door that three more waited behind. And as the weight of existence came down onto quark after quark, as his attributes rose in slow increments with every hundred thousand particles remade, his thoughts kept returning to a single word that had been circling his climb recently.

Dimensionality.

|1,000,000 Provenance Telos Quarks converted. The quality of quarks remade within THE PROVENANCE REVERIE exceeds all prior conversions.|

|Your attributes have risen. VERITAS: 17. PROVENANCE: 13. POTENTIA: INFINITE. PONDUS: 18.|

What was Dimensionality, truly?

He had been collecting pieces of it for a long while without assembling them. The Argent Loom could only be perceived and used by those of high Dimensionality, and the fused authority of Infinity and THE Primordial Source was chased precisely because the fusion elevated it.

Climb far enough and others stop perceiving you!

Then there was his own Solipsism, which rendered him imperceivable to any being whose VERITAS and PONDUS both sat below ten. And there was the quiet fact he had noticed in the cages of THE Serenaros, where a Primeval One’s panel read in the low tens while a True Gilded Lifeform read below one, though both were called mighty by everyone beneath them.

So the pieces were there. Within the Reverie, they finally moved toward each other.

Perhaps Dimensionality was not a measure of power at all. Perhaps it was a measure of depth. How much of existence a being actually occupied, and how much of existence could actually reach them.

Power asked how hard a thing could push. Dimensionality asked where a thing truly stood, and the two questions only looked similar from far away.

Compared against everything he had witnessed, the model held! When his attributes had passed ten, an entire layer of existence had opened to his senses, the Argent Loom’s white rivers appearing where nothing had been, and beings who once read as blanks unfolding into panels.

Others below that wall could not perceive him at all. It was not that they were weak. It was that he stood somewhere their existence did not extend to!

A fish did not fail to see the mountain because the mountain hid. The fish’s whole reach simply ended at the water.

Thus, the attribute walls were not merely thresholds of strength. Every ten, existence itself seemed to admit a being one tier deeper.

And uniqueness bent all of it.

Two beings could stand on the same tier of Dimensionality, and if one of them was unique enough, if the gap in the quality of their depth ran wide enough, the unique one could still slip beneath the other’s perception entirely. His Solipsism was precisely that: not a trick of hiding, but a Precept written from a truth so singular that ordinary depth could not hold onto it. Yrsa perceived him because her panel cleared the double wall. But would she still perceive him if his uniqueness widened further? How wide did such a gap have to grow?

And was that the real reason his sight slid off Mahishasura’s panel, rows of veiled unknowns where every other being had opened? Not concealment, but depth beyond his reach?

He did not know. Yet!

So, since he was a being who sought to understand everything, Noah began to build a ranking.

He kept the backbone of it plain, and he measured it against the only proxy his sight could count: attributes.

But the more the pieces settled, the clearer it became that the walls did not fall every ten. There were only two shores he could actually verify, and one more he could only guess at across the water.

Below ten attributes was one kind of existence entirely.

He had lived in it. Nearly everything alive still did. Mortals, Monarchs, most True Lifeforms, entire civilizations of the mighty, all of them held within the same vast layer, able to perceive one another, able to reach one another, and entirely blind to what ran above them.

And what defined that layer, when he truly weighed it, was that everything within it could be counted. Their power had edges. Their reach had ends. Their reserves ran dry, their senses stopped at walls, their lives closed on schedules, and the frameworks that fed them measured out authority in finite portions to finite holders!

A whole layer of existence, magnificent and teeming, and every single thing in it was a finished sum.

He would call it THE FINITE VERSE.

Above ten attributes, existence changed its agreement with a being.

He remembered the crossing in his own body. The white rivers appearing where nothing had been!

Beings below the wall losing the ability to perceive him at all. It was not strength that had changed first. It was standing. Existence had admitted him past the edges of the countable, into a layer where the old sums stopped closing. Beings here reached across distances that had no business being crossed!

They held reserves that replenished from sources the Finite could never see, wielded authorities that compounded rather than depleted, perceived rivers and layers that ran through everything.

They had gone beyond the finite without yet becoming boundless, deeper than any count and still, somewhere far above, countable by something. His own footing. Skallagrim’s twenties. Yrsa’s twenty-eight. Primevals at their height, and what he had seen of THE ETERNAL PAX so far, all of them sharing this same deeper water.

He would call it...THE TRANSFINITE VERSE.

HUUM!

And above that?

Here his weavings ran out of verified entries, and hypothesis had to carry the rest. Was there a third wall at thirty? He doubted it, since Yrsa’s panel sat within the twenties and she read to his senses as the same kind of being he was, only deeper. At forty, then? Perhaps. But when he weighed everything he had seen, the veiled rows of Mahishasura’s panel, the auras seated on the inner mountains, the beings existence itself was supposed to agree with, his reckoning kept settling on a higher number. Fifty?

A wall at fifty attributes or above, past which his every instrument of understanding simply failed. Not a deeper water. The end of water as a description. A standing that could not be measured, compared, or even properly spoken of in the language of counts at all, where his sight returned rows of veiled unknowns not because something was hidden, but because nothing in him yet existed that could hold the answer.

He would call that hypothesized shore THE INEFFABLE VERSE!