Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5733: An Idle Existence!

The space where the dream lived was a strange one, and Noah was still learning what it could do.

It was not the sandy-gold storm his body had floated in, and it was not the Cabin he had watched from above. It sat between them. A room made of nowhere, held open by his own Provenance, where he could pull his attention out of one story and hold it still before deciding where to send it next.

Versatile, was the word he kept landing on. It did more than he had asked it to!

Seventy-five Provenance to open the Infinite Dream, and it had been a heavy price. He did not regret it, but he felt the size of what he had spent!

He did not know much about the Provenances the other First Lifeforms carried. There had never been anyone to ask. He had the one he shared with Thalia, the two of them holding a single grand thing between them, and there was the strange separate one her father wore, and beyond that, the record was thin as he didn’t do much research for others.

But he suspected, looking at what his own could do, that his was one of the grandest ones! Of course, this could be his own hubris.

He was only human, so he could be prideful! Superbius and Humilitas ran through him all at once!

But his Provenance did all this. It let him hide his own existence from the highest watchers in existence, borrow the rulings the Immense Ones had strung across everything, and dream himself into their exact seat, a gaze over a story, present and unseen.

That was not a small thing. Standing here in the room made of nowhere, looking at the plain human body he had shaped for himself in the space between spaces, he understood that it was closer to terrifying than he usually let himself think.

Then, a few feet from him, the air folded and a second body stepped out of it.

Eckert.

He came through looking like a handsome king who had misplaced his kingdom and did not much mind. Dark hair, a face built for easy confidence, and eyes that would not settle on a color. Blue, and then not blue, then something warmer, then something colder, changing from one blink to the next, as if the man behind them was one thing in this instant and a different thing in the next and had made peace with being both.

He saw Noah’s blue-gold body across the empty room, and he did not bow, and he did not posture. He crossed the space and wrapped Noah in a hug.

Noah blinked.

Then he brought up his arms and returned it!

Eckert pulled back and held him by the shoulders, looking him over, smiling!

"Why so surprised," he said. "It has been weeks for me. A little more, maybe. And you are the strangest thing I have been near for the longest stretch of my whole existence, all the way back to when the two of us barely had a spark to our names."

"From Primordials in The Primordial Cosmos...we have come far. The us of this moment can look at our past selves running through Cosmos as mere ants we can crush with a shred of thought..."

...!

His changing eyes were fond.

"Growing apart from you was a curve I had to learn. There were plenty of times I wanted to call out for help. I would get to the edge of it, right to the edge, and then I would stop myself and think, there was a time before Osmont existed at all. When people hit a wall, or fell into trouble, back before there was a you to call, did they all just sit there waiting for someone who had not been born yet?"

He shrugged. "No. They got through it. So I persevered. And here we are."

Noah looked at him, and he couldn’t help the smile.

Two thrones bloomed out of the dream behind them, blue and gold, and the two of them sat.

"You got past all of it, though," Noah said. "And you climbed at a strange pace. You almost kept up with me."

"Hah. Almost?" Eckert leaned back into the throne. "You don’t have to soften it, big guy. I made my peace with that a long, long time ago. Existence is full of wonders and full of monsters, and I stopped measuring myself against you before I even understood what you were. Anyone who measures himself against you tends to dig an early grave out of his own thoughts and climb in."

He waved a hand. "No. I climbed as fast as I climbed, on my own, and it is more than fine that I am nowhere near you. Existence is vast. Maybe there is a timeline somewhere where one of us sits out ahead of you. Who knows."

His eyes changed color again as if amused. "Maybe in every timeline your Infinity just wins. Doesn’t matter. What matters to me is living true to what I am. I found that lining myself up with existence, with the actual shape of me, threw my unity wide open. And the shape of me has always been, and is idle. I am...an Idle Existence."

He said it grandly, and then he said it like it meant something!

"I am. I AM."

HUUM!

The dream buzzed around them, waves of it stirring at the words, and prompts opened quiet across Noah’s sight.

|You are gazing upon an existence that carries a unique Trueness, one you helped forge.|

|Your own PROVENANCE and VERITAS rise by 1.|

Noah shook his head slowly, and he almost laughed.

"Just how idle have you been?"

"I went back to my roots." Eckert spread his hands like a man showing off a garden he had let grow wild on purpose.

"Every Observable Existence I spread my unity into, every Dimension, I lay down my Idle System over it. And then the Causes that hold that place together, the ones that make it what it is, they have to feed me. Idle Loot, dripping back up the line into me. Into my existence. My Trueness. My weight."

His grin widened. "So I worked it out. If I seed myself across enough of existence, across enough different points in time, I can be a thing that sits in the dark weavings of it all and does absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. And every nanosecond that passes, without me lifting a single finger, I get grander. And grander. And grander still!"

WAA!

He spread his arms in the throne, delighted with himself.

"Now what," he said, "is that if not a dream come true."

BOOM!

His trueness rang out and the dream shivered with it, the whole space between spaces buzzing like a struck bell, and Noah found himself pulled all the way into the conversation, leaning in!

So he stretched the moment out. Long, and then longer, out toward the edge of infinity, and held it there!

He was doing something he almost never let himself do.

He was simply talking to a friend!