Read Novel Full Chapter 5815: A Big, Fat, Panda! I
Chapter 5815: A Big, Fat, Panda! I
<THE True Human Emperor>
The last seventeen Guards did not get far at all.
Noah ran them down across the Basal Floor one volley at a time, and one by one the bright points on Ruination’s lattice went out, until the lattice held nothing at all but the thing in the north. Their Lesser Kryos came to him in handfuls. He fused them as they came, four into one, and sent every Kryos away to his people until none were left to send.
Then he ate what the Tide gave back!
|All fifty-five Guards of THE Basal Floor have been granted death.|
|Lesser Kryos received: 550. Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins fused and given: 137. The two Lesser Kryos remaining have been given as well.|
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has answered, though gifts weigh less due to power discrepancy.|
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins received and integrated since the first volley: 90. Total integrated: 156.|
|THE Osmontian Culmination. Present saturation: 34%.|
|Estimated Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins still required: 314.|
...!
Thirty-four percent!
He looked at his panel. It showed one in every line. The real numbers underneath flickered as they always did now, sliding between one and nine hundred and ninety-nine, telling him nothing he could hold.
But he did not need the numbers to know.
He felt it! His existence, which was his Root, which was all of him now, sat denser than it had ever sat. Packed tighter. Every Quintessential ECG had gone in and pressed the rest down, and the whole of him had settled into something so compact and so reinforced that he felt heavier standing still than he had once felt at full strength.
His diamond-jade skin had darkened a shade. The blue-gold tendrils beneath it had thickened into rivers. The crown of light above his brow burned steadier, its horns longer.
He wanted to know what that meant in practice. So he took a step.
One step, on the empty air, toward nothing in particular!
Dreams poured out of him!
Clouds of blue-gold rolled away from his foot in every direction, and behind the clouds came seas, soft shining tides of dream washing out across the frozen dark for a thousand miles. They broke over the nearest floating islands and the islands began to dream. The ice on them went hazy and slow.
The cold-filled trees on their slopes swayed as though a wind were moving through them, though there was no wind. A drifting corpse of one of the Guards, torn and aged by his arrows, rolled gently in the tide and settled, and its dead face softened into the expression of something sleeping.
Everything the dream touched, dreamed. He had not told it to. He had only moved!
So he tested the rest.
First the dreaming corpse: he chose to let its dream run forward, and it aged. Its torn edges softened, then crumbled, the whole ruined body sliding through a billion years of decay in the time it took him to breathe out, until it drifted away as dust. He turned to one of the dreaming trees and chose to run its dream backward.
The rime came off its branches. Its trunk narrowed, straightened, grew young, shrank, until a single frozen seedling hung in the air where a tree taller than a mountain had stood.
He let the seedling go, and looked at his hands.
Nothing needed to be spoken, or built, or aimed. His Provenance and his existence were one, and whatever that existence moved through fell into dream. And whatever fell into dream, he could run forward or backward, age or unmake or restore, as easily as turning a page.
It was very simple.
It was also terrifying!
Noah stretched. He rolled his shoulders, loosened his neck, flexed his hands, and felt the whole packed weight of himself move with him, and the dream-seas around him rippled with each small motion.
Then he turned to Ling.
"I am going after the one in the north," he said. "It should be Half-Immense."
Ling said nothing!
She hung in the air beside him with her arms crossed over her chest, looking at him, and then past him, north, toward the rift and the thing coiled around it. Her face gave nothing away. For a long moment she was completely silent.
Then she stretched. Arms high over her head, back arched, one thick powerful leg pulled up and held and released, then the other, the great muscles of her thighs flexing and loosening under the blue silk, and her whole body settled into that coiled, humming readiness he had seen before the Naga.
"As long as I don’t die right away," she said. "Let’s go, Big Boy."
...!
Noah took a deep breath.
A light of dreams rose around the two of them, blue and gold, closing over them like a curtain drawn around a bed.
And in the next instant, they were somewhere else!
—
The north of the Basal Floor was grand.
Everywhere else, the frozen islands floated free in the dark, turning slowly on their own. Here, they had stopped. Thousands of them lay jammed together in a vast ring, pressed edge against edge, ground and heaved and stacked into a single frozen plain that curved away around a hollow at its center.
The torn Dimensions that hung everywhere else had been pulled down here too, crushed into the ice of the plain and frozen in place, their broken seas and realms showing through the surface like things drowned under a lake. Pillars of rime rose from the plain in crooked rows. Some of them had shapes inside them. Figures. Beasts. Things that had come this way before and stopped.
At the center of the ring, the blue rift split the dark from top to bottom.
And coiled around the rift’s mouth, the thing in the north.
This close, its shape finally resolved!
It was a...panda!
A panda the size of a mountain range, and nothing about that was funny. It sat hunched at the mouth of the rift with its great round back to the dark, its fur black and white and gone hard with ages of frost, every hair of it a spine of ice. Where the white fur should have been, the ice was clear, and through it Noah could see the bones of the thing, massive and ancient and glazed in rime. Where the black fur should have been, the ice was dark as a starless sky and seemed to go down forever.
Wings rose from its shoulders. Vast, jagged, made of frost, like panes of frozen glass shattered and set back together by a hand that did not care how the pieces fit. They hung in tatters behind it, and wind that was not wind moved through them with a sound like a very old choir.
Chains of broken rime hung from its neck and its thick forearms, snapped links trailing down onto the plain, as though it had been bound here once and had simply grown too large for the binding. A mantle of frozen banners draped over its shoulders beneath the wings, stiff and cracked, each banner bearing a sigil too eroded to read. And in one enormous paw, resting across its knees, it held a great club carved from the spire of a Dimension, the stone of it still carved with the windows of the city that had once stood on it.
Over its head hung the halo of stilled snow.
Its face was the face of a panda, round, with the dark rings around its eyes. But the eyes within those rings were pale, and old, and cold beyond anything Noah had met on this Floor. Its jaw moved slowly. It was chewing on somethng. A long frozen stalk of something white that Noah realized, after a moment, was a bone.
His sight opened it, and gave him almost nothing.
|Empowered Hollow Night Lifeform.|
|VERITAS: ?????. PROVENANCE: ?????. POTENTIA: ?????. PONDUS: ?????.|
|Immensity: halfway.|
...!
Halfway!
The aura came off it and went back into it, there and gone and there, the finished weight of Immensity pressing down on the whole frozen plain and then lifting and then pressing again. Every time it pressed, the rime pillars groaned. Every time it lifted, the air felt strangely empty.
The panda looked at him!
No rising, no spreading of wings, no lifting of the club. The panda simply turned its great round head, slowly, still chewing on its bone, and fixed its pale ringed eyes on the small figure hanging in the air at the edge of its plain.
There was no anger in that look. There was nothing in it but a deep and total boredom, the look of something vast glancing down at a bug on the arm of its chair and deciding, without much interest, whether it was worth the effort of lifting a hand.
Noah looked back at it.
He hung in the frozen air above its plain, bare-chested, dark diamond-jade, tendrils of blue-gold burning beneath his skin and a jagged crown of light above his brow. The dream-seas he had raised were still rolling off him in slow shining tides, lapping at the edge of the frozen ring. His eyes were very calm.
He did not look away.
Neither did it!