Read Novel Full Chapter 5751: The Long Night III
Chapter 5751: The Long Night III
Across the whole of THE Infiniverse, the two sisters worked to shield the dreamers.
Upon the boundless blue-gold sea, THE Infiniverse and Ruination moved their hands in vast and patient rhythm, and waves of infinity and seas of THE Primordial Source surged out from them, rolling across the folded Realms toward the great chrysalis and the countless sleeping bodies within the empire.
The authorities wrapped around each dreamer, layer upon layer, a blanket of the oldest powers there were laid over the people Noah loved and cherished as they lived their centuries in dream, holding the descending cold at bay.
And yet, even as they worked, Ruination’s crimson eyes were troubled!
"A condition was supposedly fulfilled," she said, her voice its usual calm and analytical self, and yet somber beneath it now. "The weaving of existence declared it plainly to all who could perceive, and it came in the very instant that Immense One died. The two are linked. Of that there is no doubt. The question that remains, is the one I cannot yet close."
Her hands never stopped their work!
"Why?"
She turned the problem over as she wove!
"I currently hold a hypothesis. That after a certain number of Immense Ones fell, paired perhaps with other conditions I cannot yet perceive, something was triggered. Something that, in the deep weavings of existence, tied somehow to IT. Atlas was killed. Other Immense Ones have likely been killed across the ages. Vakochev was killed. And now, today, with another Immense One killed before the eyes of his own kind, whatever their deaths mean in the reckoning of existence has tipped a scale that was already tipping."
Her crimson gaze sharpened!
"It has been tipping for a long time. And this last death was the weight that finished it. But why? Why should the deaths of the mighty summon a cold that hunts the mighty? Why?" She said it again, quietly. "Why?"
And at that moment, Noah’s body appeared upon the golden shore!
He came into the Realm calm and unhurried, but his expression was heavy. He raised his hands, and from him a tide of Infinite Sanguine Mana poured out, crimson and gold, and he wove it into thick, warm coats, and he wrapped them around the ones he loved.
He wrapped his floating mother, sleeping in her pool, in a heavy coat of his own vitality! He wrapped little Seo-yeon, and Henry, and Riya, and one by one every other soul dreaming within his empire, layering the warmth of his own blood over them, shielding them with the one authority that answered to nothng but himself.
And as he worked, Noah reflected!
He wondered about his own hand in all of this! He had dreamed, and he had reached across the Cluster and lent his red ink to Calliope.
That lending had led to the emergence of Vakochev! And Vakochev’s emergence had led to the death of an Immense One. And that death had tipped the scale that Ruination spoke of, had fulfilled some final unknown condition, had called down this cold across the whole of existence.
His actions were part of this causality!
And yet...
So were the actions of a great many others! So were the deaths the Immense Ones themselves had dealt across the ages! So was the killing of Atlas, and the killing of Vakochev, and every weight the mighty had ever laid upon the scale! He was one hand among countless hands, one cause among an ocean of causes, and the scale had been tipping long before he ever lent his ink to a bleeding writer.
But that changed nothing about the question at the heart of it all.
Just what was this? What was this emergence of coldness that ignored authority itself, that fell hardest upon the strongest, that reached even into the sealed heart of his empire and touched the skin of a being like him?
Noah finished wrapping the last of the dreamers, and he turned to his Ruination.
"Give me your confirmed analysis of this Condition," he said. "Fully. Everything you have so far."
And Ruination answered,.
|No barrier of THE Infiniverse has been able to halt its emergence. No authority, no sealing, no Elsedimension, no weaving has stopped it or slowed it.|
|It has covered every Realm across the whole of THE Infiniverse. It has covered THE Ymnaros. It has covered every Dimension and Observable Existence over which our influence has ever spread. It is everywhere our reach extends, and it is beyond it also.|
|Effect confirmed: those who hold no authority are affected LEAST. The strongest lifeforms must enact the strongest protections merely to steer clear of the cold. Power is not a shield against this Condition. Power is a target.|
Ruination’s voice continued, and it grew heavier.
"And it is not only the suppression, Master. I have begun monitoring your own existence, and I must tell you what I find there, because you will feel it soon yourself. Your biological systems have already begun to respond. Even now, energy is being metabolized within you, burned and spent, consumed to hold the cold at bay from the inside."
|Master’s biological systems are metabolizing energy at an accelerating rate to resist the Condition.|
|You will begin to feel hunger. Soon.|
"For now," Ruination went on, "the Infinity running through your existence can feed your cells and your quarks faster than the cold can drain them. You can sustain yourself on your own boundlessness, or so I first believed."
Her tone tightened. "But my monitoring shows that even your Infinity is not fully reclaiming everything the cold takes. There is a loss. A leak that your boundlessness cannot entirely close. Which means that in time, even you, Master, may need to consume biological matter to protect yourself from this cold."
|Projection: authority alone will not sustain existence against the Condition indefinitely.|
|All existences, whether of the Finite Verse, the Ineffable Verse, or the Immense Ones themselves, will likely feel the need to consume biological life to sustain themselves against the cold, in addition to spending their authority.|
"And I must be honest with you about the limits of what I say," Ruination finished. "All of this, everything I have told you, is only what we have been able to grasp in the first few minutes of its emergence. We do not yet understand the full scope of this Existential Condition. We understand almost nothing of it. We only see the edges of a thing that is still arriving."
And even Ruination, who was never anything but composed, seemed somber and serious as she spoke those last words.
Beside her, THE Infiniverse stood with her starlit eyes closed, utterly still, her whole vast attention turned inward and outward at once, sensing every change occurring across the whole of her boundless existence, feeling the cold creep into every Realm she held, cataloging a catastrophe she could not stop from spreading through her own body.
And Noah stood upon the golden sands of his shore, and he looked up!
Snowflakes drifted down out of the golden sky and settled upon his skin and did not melt, and the cold pressed at him even through all that he was, and his expression was heavy, heavy with the weight of a thing he had helped to cause and could not yet understand, a catastrophe with no name and no source and no cure, falling silent and white and terrible across the whole of Existence.
---
Another of Noah’s bodies arrived in a place where time had come apart.
It stepped out of a conceptual tear and into a Dimension of deep purple and drifting green, and it was a broken and beautiful ruin of a place! Scattered through the twilight air hung the hands of clocks, thousands upon thousands of them, some vast as mountains and some small as needles, spinning and stopped and spinning backward all at once.
And through them drifted meteorites, tumbling slow across the purple dark, and every one of those meteorites was shaped like a number, ancient figures of stone and starlight wheeling through a sky that had forgotten how to keep time!
This was a Dimension lost to time itself, one of the most profound Elsedimensions Atlas had ever made.
And yet even here, even in this sanctuary of shattered hours, the cold had come.
Noah looked, and he saw a storm of snow gathering, wrapping itself around the drifting clock-hands, frosting the numbered meteorites, and creeping even up his own arm to wreath the illusory ring upon his finger.
Even Atlas was affected! Even a Dimension outside of time could not keep the descending cold from its door!
But first, Noah turned his attention inward, and he analyzed.
He examined the cold as it pressed against him, studied the way it sank past his skin and reached toward the deep structure of his existence, and he traced its effect through every layer of himself. His Perpetual Baryogenesis was running, the weight of existence trickling down onto his two hundred decillion quarks without pause, and he could feel the cold trying to slow that trickle, trying to press heavy upon each quark and dim its generation.
His Nine Teloi burned steady against it, holding the lattice of his existence firm, and his Provenance surged warm and boundless through the whole of him, feeding his cells and his quarks against the chill.
For now, he held! For now, his foundation was more than the cold could take.
And as he took stock of himself, the prompts of his recent trials bloomed before him, the gains he had earned in the writing of a Fallen Hero!
|For your role in aiding and ushering the emergence of an Unfathomable Narrative, and for witnessing the fall of an Immense One, your existence has been enriched.|
|Your foundation, tempered by Perpetual Baryogenesis and the guiding of grand dreams, has climbed.|
Noah pulled up the full account of himself, and read where he now stood.
|THE True Human Emperor / THE Human Dreamer|
|VERITAS: 223|
|PROVENANCE: 275|
|POTENTIA: INFINITE|
|PONDUS: 223|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 251|
| THE Enduring Gu Elsedimension Ring +20 all; THE Existential Foundational Narrative Inscription +50 all, folded into the totals above.)|
His Provenance had surged well past everything else, climbing faster than his other attributes with every dream he guided and every narrative he touched.
A few dozen points gained in these last trials alone, his authorship swelling toward something the rest of him could not yet match.
He was becoming, more and more, a creature of pure Provenance, of pure infinity and dreaming, and the numbers only confirmed what he already felt.
But even reading his own grand ascent, Noah felt it.
A small thing! A slow and growing emptiness deep in the core of him, rising patient beneath all his boundless power.
Hunger!
It was beginning, exactly as Ruination had warned! The cold was metabolizing him from within, burning his energy to hold itself at bay, and even his Infinity could not fully close the leak as it was not even for lack of its authority or brilliance.
It was as if this Existential Condition purposefully made things this way.
Slowly, softly, Noah Osmont was beginning to grow hungry.
Then he turned to the ring upon his finger!
"Atlas," Noah said. "Do you know what this is all about? This Existential Condition? This coldness?"
The illusory old body of Atlas flickered up out of the ring, and snow gathered around his translucent shoulders even as he formed, dusting his ancient projected frame with white!
|I cannot say for sure,| Atlas said. |But it should be linked to IT. Maybe. I have heard musings, across my long life, that I never once thought I would need.|
The clock-hands turned in the cold behind him!
|One musing was this. That if a certain threshold of something is reached across the whole of Existence, if Existential Narrative is abused, or torn, or spent and then discarded, time and time again, across enough ages, then something would arise to correct it. A response. A balancing. Existence, pushed too far, pushing back.|
His projected eyes were distant!
|Another musing I know is older still. You know how we speak of Those Who Remain, the Immense Ones who stayed? There were Immense Ones who leapt across an uncrossable barrier, once, in the earliest age. And the others, the ones we call Those Who Remain, are the ones who FAILED to make that leap. And in that failure, in whatever they did all those ages ago when they tried and could not, something was done to Existence itself. Something was broken, or bent, or spent. And IT was involved then, at that failure, just as I believe IT is involved now.|
Atlas lowered his hand slowly!
|No Immense One holds IT. Not truly. You have told me yourself how your girl came back from a future where THE Sealed One was given IT by the Immense Ones, and even that cannot be entirely true, because IT cannot be given. Perhaps he was granted a grasp of some power related to it. Perhaps that action, in that future, abused something and fulfilled yet another condition of the many. I cannot be certain of the shape of any of it.|
He looked up, into the drifting clocks!
|But this coldness spreading across existence is a point of change. A great one. What this change will entail, even I do not know. But time.| He almost smiled, and there was iron beneath it.
|Time will have all answers, and time will give them, to those patient and clever enough to ask. That is why we are here, in this body of yours, in this Dimension of mine that stands outside the flow. We are here to look for solutions using time itself. And there is much to do before either of us understands what just changed in the bones of Existence...|
Even Atlas could not be sure.
Noah stood among the broken hours and the falling snow and turned it all over in his mind! An Existential Condition tied to IT, to the failure of the ones who Remained, to the abuse of Existential Narrative across the ages, to the death of Immense Ones, to a scale tipped at last.
A change in the very bones of existence, and no one, not Ruination, not Atlas, not the Immense Ones themselves, understood it.
He needed to understand!
His masked portion of existence, his eye that dreamed among the Immense Ones, the presence within his Infinite Dream that could be destroyed and destroyed again and would always return, that may be the best instrument he had for gathering the truth of this.
For where better to learn what an Immense One knew, than to sit among them and watch and listen as their own certainties crumbled in the falling snow?
He had to understand!
He had to understand exactly what this change meant, before existence itself grew cold enough to answer the question for him.
Because...nobody knew if it would continue to get colder. Nobody knew if there was a future where it grew so cold...that Gilded Lifeforms, Source Lifeforms, Infinite Lifeforms, Primeval Ones, Descendants, Provenance Lifeforms, Gu...or even Immense Ones...would become frozen blocks of ice.