Read Novel Full Chapter 5694: A Kindness To Kill!
Chapter 5694: A Kindness To Kill!
She looked at them the way an era looks at a single day!
THE REMINISCING WIDOW had risen from the page of an obsidian journal, and she stood above the golden spring with her barely-perceivable face angled down, her two golden halos turning their slow deliberate circles in the steam-heavy air, and she did not move or speak as she regarded the two small frozen figures below her.
She did not need to hurry. She had presided over evenings that outlasted kingdoms, and two lifeforms arrested mid-embrace in a sacred spring were not, by any measure of her long experience, cause for urgency!
The dusk she carried pressed down as her gold eyes swept across the figure of Thalia Vasiliou and settled upon THE True Human Emperor, and she spoke!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW speaks.|
|It is always the same. Lifeforms touch power. They look at the existing structure. And then they promise themselves that they will change it.|
|Why?|
|There is a system in place, and no matter its potential negatives, it has been working. Those like you, when you seek to enact change, cause such tremendous bloodshed. Truly. All you need to do is stop.|
The halos pulsed, golden light rippling through the steam!
|I permit you to speak.|
...!
Noah moved!
The golden spring erupted around him as he came free, his Infinite Sanguine Mana surging up in a massive crimson tide, his eighty-six Provenance singularities igniting across every particle of his Baryogenesis-hardened existence, nine Teloi blazing through two hundred Decillion Provenance Telos Quarks as the weight of THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist Mantle coiled behind his eyes with the pressure of a narrative about to be REWRITTEN!
And then he said absolutely nothing.
He took his time with it! He turned slowly in the golden water and he faced the manifestation standing above him, this impossible figure of dusk and golden light and barely-perceivable grief, and he looked at her with the full swirling weight of his existence behind his eyes, and he was simply, completely, wordlessly silent.
She had told him he could speak. She had permitted him.
Just because she permitted him, he now had to?
He chose not!
But while his mouth stayed shut his mind did not, as behind those seas of blue, THE True Human Emperor thought at the speed of a being whose quarks had each carried the weight of Existence and survived it.
He stared at the Immense One and he worked, because something about this entire picture was wrong in a way that the threat itself could not account for!
Masamuk had known. He had to have known! The ancient slime had existed since before the first Domains had a name, had served the grandest maker of his era, had suffered the stripping of every loved memory and still endured, and he had sat in a Dimension with three Provenance Causes and the weight of Vakochev’s chained weavings pressing down on him, and he had willingly handed Noah his journal!
He had known what was written in it! He had known that reading it could do exactly this!
So why?
Would a being who had suffered so precisely not understand the danger? Would a mind that had persevered through eras of loss make an oversight so catastrophic?
Noah’s eyes held steady on the Widow’s golden rings and he turned the question over and over as his Teloi hummed their low burning note through his matter, searching for the answer that a grieving ancient slime had buried somewhere in the ink!
And one sentence surfaced above all the others!
A single line from the closing of the entry, the thing Vakochev had asked at the door when the evening was ending and the warning was finished. WHY warn him at all?
And she had answered!
Because someone once built something grand for my sake, and no one warned him either.
"..."
Someone had built something grand for her sake. Nobody had warned him!
And Masamuk had known this too!
There was something in that! Something Noah had not yet pulled to the surface, but he was circling it now as his existence hummed with the warmth of a coming understanding.
Above him, THE REMINISCING WIDOW looked at his silence with patience that had no floor to it, and the golden halo at her mouth pulsed once, and she spoke again.
|Vakochev is done for. He was done for across many deaths and ages of pain inflicted upon him and all those who loved him. You are reading the musings of one of his greatest, and yet I hold no memory of you, which means you are not one of Vakochev’s people.|
|You are one of those like him. One of those with Boundless Potential. Infinite Potential.|
|Lifeforms like you are walking disasters. You carry a sense of infinite hunger within you that you cannot quiet and will not quiet, and you bring destruction and apocalypse to every corner of existence your trajectory sweeps across. The greatest threat to your people is not any enemy you will face. It is you. People like you who simply will not stop.|
|You do not need any of this. You could sit still on a farm somewhere. You could enjoy your family, your feasts, your people, let the millions and millions of years of existence wash over you and hold you warmly. Existence will continue to unfold without you. It has done so since before your kind had eyes to witness it.|
|Just stop.|
|I warned Vakochev before he fell. He did not stop. I warn you now. If I must be forceful, if ending you here is the necessary kindness to save countless lifeforms the pain your trajectory will inflict on them, I will do so.|
BOOM!
She descended!
She came down through the steam and the golden light, the halos orbiting her descent, her form lowering until her barely-perceivable face was close, until the dusk of her filled the whole of Noah’s vision and the pressure of an attended eternity sat in the air between them!
"Will you stop?"
...!
Noah looked at Thalia.
She was frozen at his side, the Queenling of the Vasiliou, with her eyes wide and that first-ever flash of fear across her face, and for one stretched instant he held that sight and felt everything that lived inside him on the subject of it.
And then he spoke!
"I cannot stop," Noah said. "Nobody knows this. But I live in constant fear! Fear of exactly something like this, a power I cannot deny standing before me and I cannot even lift a finger against it! Because of exactly something like this, I cannot stop! I have to attain more power! I have to find the absolute peak of existence to make sure that nothing can ever stand before me and simply decide my fate!"
HUUUM!
THE REMINISCING WIDOW looked at him, and her gold eyes held no anger, and they held no mockery.
"But this is only because you will not stop," she said.
"If you stop, nothing like me will appear before you again. You will have no need for that fear."
Noah shook his head!
"I live in fear that if I ever retreat to my farm, if I simply live and eat and love my family and do nothing to advance, we will all one day die from a choice others like you made! My Dimension collapsed without our say! My people were ground beneath an existence they never once consented to stand inside! Existence itself changed around us without a word in our direction!"
His Provenance blazed through the steam as his voice held its quiet and steady weight. "If I do nothing, if I stop, I would live every day of every million years feeling like an ant. Waiting for a boot I cannot see, held by a foot I cannot name, and knowing that when it falls it will find everyone I love standing beside me. And I will have been the one who decided that the feast was worth more than the capacity to PROTECT the feast!"
He looked at the barely-perceivable face before him and let both things be true at once, the fear and the refusal of the fear, and his voice did not waver!
"So no. Regardless of what you say here. Regardless of what happens today!" A pause, as his singularities blazed their quiet blue-gold light through the golden water. "I cannot stop. My fear will not let me. My Quintessence will not let me. My humanity..."
BOOM!
"...will not let me!"
The spring held its quiet around those words.
THE REMINISCING WIDOW looked at him.
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW looks at you, and she grieves, and she speaks her decision.|
|Then for the sake of saving the pain and deaths of many, even your own people, I will end you.|
|Every point of your origin across Existence and Time. I will make it so that you never exist, so that your people and many others can attain salvation from what your trajectory would bring them.|
|It is the kindness I can give you.|
...!