Read Novel Full Chapter 5689: The Slime At The Lake
Chapter 5689: The Slime At The Lake
There were beings you postured before, and there were beings you did not.
Noah became entirely serious as he looked at the small lifeform in front of him.
One of the oldest followers of Vakochev!
A shaper from the era when what was and what was not had still been negotiable, a splitter of Chaos by pure will, and every instinct in his two hundred Decillion quarks reported the same reading.
The melancholic little slime laying beside this lake was unfathomably more powerful than the father of Thalia, more powerful than anyone he had ever stood before, and quite possibly more powerful than even something like THE Sealed One!
It was OLD, old in the way the first light was old, and as much as Noah liked to act tyrannical and border on arrogant before ancient terrors, his arrogance had always been aimed at the self-serious and the cruel.
This being was neither.
So he gave the slime the respect that it deserved. He nodded towards it, once, with a serious expression, and he chose to say nothing at all, because there was a great deal here that he did not understand, and a wise man did not fill the silence of his elders with noise!
Instead, he sat down.
Noah lowered himself onto the luminous soil at the edge of the lake, casually, unhurried, the warm ground giving softly beneath him, one masked farmer settling at his station among a hundred masked farmers doing the same.
The whirlpool of obsidian gold turned slowly before him, drowned suns swirling in its depths, and to any distant eye he was simply working, simply sitting, simply one more white robe in a Dimension full of them!
Because the slime had said it itself. It should not be perceivable here, not even to the Immense One hanging smug in the layered sky.
And Noah was entirely perceivable, a visible farmer at a visible lake, and he had no intention of standing over an invisible fugitive and giving away the position of the only friendly piece on this entire board by talking down at empty air!
Masamuk watched him do all of this.
The dim crimson eyes moved over him slowly, up and down, taking in the disguise, the caution, the deliberate casualness of the seating, and the ancient slime’s expression remained serene throughout.
"You should be fine to communicate," Masamuk said, its soft rasped voice arriving directly against Noah’s existence.
"My weavings cover this whole region. It will not even seem like you are talking, to the eyes of others."
Noah nodded at this, and let his shoulders settle, and spoke in a low, even tone toward the turning lake.
"I have heard a few stories regarding you. I never thought I would actually come across you."
"For what happened to Vakochev... I am sorry. Are you here to unseal the part of him within that grave as well?"
...!
He asked his questions very clearly, and a flash of surprise bloomed within the ancient slime!
Its small body rippled once, and its crimson eyes widened by a fraction, and then narrowed.
"Existence is vast, and filled with unfathomable terrors," Masamuk said slowly. "My friend and Master had cast out many weavings. I did not think one would appear here so quickly. He expected hundreds, or even potentially thousands of years to pass before any chances could arise."
The slime seemed melancholic as it said these words, its gaze drifting back toward the distant humming grave.
Something in the phrasing snagged against Noah’s mind and held! My friend and Master.
And... chances.
The crystal in his storage, the beacon that had waited patiently in his collection.
Noah couldn’t help but turn serious as he leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping lower.
"What truly happened before these new rulings of existence came to play? What happened between THE Immense Ones and Vakochev?"
...!
The slime’s eyes flashed!
Immense sadness and immense hatred moved through those dim crimson depths together.
It looked out across the lake filled with budding Causes silently.
After a moment, the slime asked a question of its own.
"Do you believe you will die?"
...!
A heavy question arose between them, laid down without warning, and Noah found that he did not need to take a long time to answer it.
He had answered it before, in the quiet of his own Pantheon, in the years before crowns and Verses, in every hour since a hospital room in 1997 that he had personally stood inside.
"I am only human," Noah replied. "I live, and in the future, I may die. Maybe to be truly human, it is certain that I will die. But before then... I have boundlessness before me."
Masamuk turned its crimson gaze upon him and nodded
And then the serenity cracked.
"For the first time in my existence," Masamuk said, and its soft voice did not rise, "Those Who Remain, these failures of existence... made me want to die."
BOOM!
The words landed against Noah’s existence heavily!
They made him... want to die?!
This being! A splitter of Chaos! A shaper of the first Domains, older than authority itself, deep enough that an Immense One hung directly overhead and could not perceive him! What could possibly be done to such a lifeform to make it want to DIE?!
Noah continued to listen silently, his hands resting still upon his knees, and Masamuk spoke, and the Dimension around them seemed to quiet itself to make room.
"When they moved against us, our side had one banner. One enemy stood before them. Vakochev. And do you know what these failures did?"
The slime’s gaze stayed on the far grave. "They did not focus their attacks on him. From the very first hour, they focused their attacks on those who followed him. And even that, even that, was not the worst of it."
Its small body was utterly still.
"The worst was the unnecessary cruelness of it. There was no strategy that demanded what they did. No war that required it. It is as if they wish to be cruel simply because they can. They targeted all those that followed Vakochev, and they did not simply kill us, because they know what death is. Death is singular. Death is potentially final. A dead follower feels nothing, and a Master mourns once, and it ends. So they chose otherwise. They chose to make those closest to him, and him by extension, feel pain. Lasting pain. Renewable pain."
The crimson eyes closed for a long moment.
"And across existence, pain comes from connections. From relationships. From memories."
...!
Noah’s chest tightened.
He remembered a memory of...a red-haired woman’s voice crying out from a white pool saying...You promised to always remember!
He pushed it down and kept listening.
"I knew someone," Masamuk said.
The hatred drained out of its voice as it said it, and what remained underneath was so much worse.
"I knew someone who made my entire existence feel brighter and happier just by being near her. Do you understand what that is, at my age? I had watched the first boundaries harden and the first eras turn to sediment, and I had felt many things across all of it, but she walked near me and existence itself was simply... better. I was in love with her. Wholly. And she loved me wholly in return. Two old things, in love the way young things are supposed to be."
The slime’s voice rasped softer.
"And when Those Who Remain targeted me, they did not come for my body. They came for her. Her records. Her...memories. They stripped me of all the memories of my love."
...!
"Can you imagine it?" Masamuk asked, "Not even remembering or knowing those you love? They were artists about it. They cruelly left me with just enough. Enough to know that there WAS someone I loved. Enough to know the intensity of that love, its exact weight, its entire shape pressed into me like a fossil. And then... nothing. I do not remember her name. I do not remember her face. I do not remember her smile."
The small obsidian body trembled, once.
"And yet I remember how her laugh alone used to make me believe that everything would be okay. They left me that. They took away her very memory, her very Records, they took away even more than her, and they left behind the gaps, carved clean, so that I would always know the things that I lost even though I could never again remember them. I live inside a home where every room I loved has been emptied, and the outlines of the furniture remain on the floors."
BOOM!
Noah did not move. Behind the golden mask, his endlessly blue eyes burned!
"The pain that came from this was so unbearable," Masamuk continued, quiet as falling dust, "that for a moment... I wanted to die. I wanted... to die. Because why do we live? We live to enjoy, and to struggle against adversity. We live to be safe, and content, and happy. And Those Who Remain looked at all of that, everything living things live FOR, and they systematically took it away from me, piece by piece, gap by gap, as they almost took my will to live with it."
The crimson eyes opened, and turned from the grave, and looked directly at Noah, and in their dim ancient depths, beneath the sorrow and beneath the hatred, something grand and unbroken still burned.
"Almost."
"Almost..."
...!