Read Novel Full Chapter 5816: A Big, Fat, Panda! II
Chapter 5816: A Big, Fat, Panda! II
The panda only looked at him, and its gaze came down on Noah like a hand the size of a sky!
It struck his existence, all of it at once, and pressed him back hard enough that the dream-seas rolling off him caved in on themselves and the air behind him cracked. He slid backward across the frozen dark a full mile before he stopped himself, his diamond-jade skin groaning, his crown of light flickering at its tips.
One look, and it was still chewing!
|Designation: THE Warden Who Does Not Rise.|
|Empowered Hollow Night Lifeform. Keeper of the Northern Descent.|
|VERITAS: ?????. PROVENANCE: ?????. POTENTIA: ?????. PONDUS: ?????.|
|Immensity: halfway.|
The Warden Who Does Not Rise. Noah turned the name over. It had sat here since before anyone thought to write a name down. In every branch he could see where he turned back, it went on sitting here, forever, chewing its bone.
He left those branches where they lay.
|Leave, young thing.|
The voice was deep and slow and utterly unbothered, and it came from everywhere on the frozen plain at once.
|You cannot even touch me, much less get past me. And even if you did, those grander than me lie behind here.|
|This is not playtime.|
Noah rolled his neck.
Then he walked forward!
One step, and the dream-seas poured out of him again, a thousand miles of blue-gold tide rolling across the jammed islands and the rime pillars and the drowned Dimensions under the ice. Everything it touched began to dream. The pillars went soft at their edges, and the frozen figures inside them stirred in their sleep.
Then the tide reached the Warden, and broke!
The seas washed up against its great hunched body and slid away on either side, undreaming, parting around it like water around a stone that had sat in its riverbed since the river was born. Half of it was Immense, and that half stayed as solid as bedrock.
So Noah tried the other half.
He crossed the last distance in a single stride and hit it. Everything he was, every packed quark and every Quintessential ECG he had eaten, the whole dense weight of the Fiend in him, driven into the Warden’s shoulder through one closed fist!
HUUM!
The shoulder held as still as a mountain!
The Warden turned its head, slowly, and looked at the fist resting against its fur. Then it lifted the club.
It was a slow motoin, lazy and certain. The tower of Dimensions came around in a slow, bored arc, and Noah saw it coming, and it caught him anyway.
It hit him!
BOOM!
The blow stopped him entirely. His existence came apart under it so completely that nothing was left to break, and he died on the frozen plain before the club had finished its swing.
|Your Dream is Infinite. Even death will not stop it.|
Golden clouds spat him back out a mile away.
He came back already dreaming the death through, slowly, from inside. The angle of the club. Its weight and Immensity. The exact moment it found him. By the time his feet touched the ice he had learned it, and it could never kill him that way again.
The Warden watched him get up. It went back to chewing.
|You do not know Immensity.|
Noah dusted the frost off his shoulder, and kept his answer to himself. He was thinking.
Half-Immense. That was the whole puzzle, and he had been looking at it wrong. He had been trying to hurt the half that was Immense. That half stood beyond the reach of everything he currently was. But the aura kept flickering. There and gone and there. And in the moments when it was gone, the Warden was only a Hollow Night Lifeform.
A very large, very fat, very old one, carrying something Immense in its chest and the borrowed cold of the Long Night in every hair of its fur.
Borrowed.
"Ruination," he said.
|Already done, Master. The flicker is not random. It follows a rhythm. I am marking every window where the Immense half withdraws. The next opens in four heartbeats.|
Noah went forward again!
The Warden swung. He had learned the club; it passed a hand’s width from his face. It swung again, low, a new angle, and killed him. He came back. It swung a third way and killed him again. He came back, and back, each death something he would never die to twice, and every time he returned the Warden had fewer ways left to kill him.
Four heartbeats. Three. Two.
The aura went out!
Noah laid his palm on the Warden’s chest and turned its cold!
THE Kneeling Frost poured into it, and the borrowed winter packed into the Warden’s fur turned inward, freezing from the inside out, spines of ice cracking and splintering across its whole flank. The Warden grunted. It was a small sound. It was the first sound it had made besides speech.
The aura came back, and flung him away across the plain.
He landed on his feet, unhurt and interested!
|Next window in six heartbeats, Master.|
He took it. And the next. The Bow of the Ending Epoch came into his hand between windows, and he aimed its arrows past the Warden, at everything it was attached to: the broken chains trailing from its neck, the mantle of frozen banners on its shoulders, the rime pillars ringing its plain. All of them were borrowed from the Night, and all of them could age. They aged to dust under his arrows, and every link and banner and pillar that crumbled was one more piece of the Warden’s winter gone.
On the ninth window, he dreamed its bone.
The frozen stalk it had been chewing since before he arrived went soft in its mouth, and aged, and crumbled into white powder between its teeth.
The Warden Who Does Not Rise stopped chewing.
...!
Then it rose!
Oh, it rose!
Mind you, this was a Half-Immense monstrosity!
It rose to its feet for the first time in more Ages than anything on the Basal Floor remembered, and the whole frozen plain groaned under it. Ice split for a hundred miles. Its shattered wings of frost spread wide behind it, vast and jagged, and the wind that moved through them was no longer an old choir. It was a roar. The halo of stilled snow above its head flared white, and everything under it stopped.
Time stopped. The dream-seas froze mid-wave. Noah’s own existence locked in place, pinned in a single instant, his thoughts sliding to a halt.
THE Sovereign of the Lived Hour drew that stillness into his Dreams, and a dreaming hour moved as he wished. He came loose. Slowly, then all at once, and he moved out from under the halo just as the Warden’s club came down where he had been and split the plain in half!
The Warden looked at him, and for the first time its eyes held attention!
|Dying is easy for a thing like you. A blow lands, your breath cuts out. The heart just quits. That part takes only an instant. It is over before you even have time to miss the warmth. It is the darkness that comes after which is not so easy. The dark has weight. In that quiet, there is no fire to borrow, no walls to lean on, and no one. You just sit there forever, alone with whatever small, cold thing you made of yourself. Do you fear that darkness? Is that why you try to come back?|
...!
Its voice had changed. It was still deep, still slow, but there was attention in it now. Weight. The aura stopped flickering. It held, half-Immense and steady, pressing down on the whole plain.
Noah didn’t reply as he looked at Ling, hanging at the edge of the frozen ring with her fists clenched and her thighs coiled, a breath away from throwing herself in.
"Sit this one out," he told her.
She opened her mouth to argue. Then she looked at his face, and closed it, and stayed where she was.
Noah turned back to the Warden. He breathed in slow and deep, and let his Dream go wide.
To beat something even half Immense, he had to dream a grand dream.
He dreamed himself.
Once, at first. A second Noah stepped out of the blue-gold light at his side, diamond-jade and crowned, identical to him in every way. Then a third. Ten. A hundred, a thousand, stepping out of the dream-seas one after another, more and more, until they filled the frozen plain from edge to edge and kept going, out past the ring of jammed islands, out into the dark of the Basal Floor, versions of him stretching away in every direction without end.
|THE Waking Decree, THE Dream Without a Far Wall, and Dialetheic Infinity have been combined.|
|Formed: THE Endless Waking.|
|You dream yourself, and existence agrees that each dreamed self is you. Each one carries your full existence. Each one may die and return. Each one learns from every death any of them has ever died.|
|Their number has no end.|
...!
The Warden Who Does Not Rise looked at the infinite sea of him, and roared!
It fought. It fought with everything it had, club and wings and halo, the steady half-Immense aura crushing down on the whole plain. Its club took a thousand of him in a single swng. Its halo froze ten thousand in place, and its wings shredded whole ranks of him into golden dust.
Every one that died came back having learned.
And behind every one that fell, there were infinitely more!
They came at it from every direction at once! A million palms on its fur turned a million lines of borrowed cold against it. Arrows of dreamed decay poured into every flicker and seam. Its wings came off pane by frozen pane, and its club broke at the grip. Up its legs and its back and its shoulders they climbed, and every step they took dreamed another piece of it away!
HUUUM!
It fell!
The Warden Who Does Not Rise toppled backward onto its own frozen plain, and the whole Basal Floor shook with the impact, and the infinite versions of Noah stood back and let it lie there.
One of him walked forward.
He climbed onto its chest, where the black fur had gone dark as a starless sky, and lay down on it, as a man lies down on a warm hillside at the end of a long day. The Warden’s great ringed eyes looked up at him.
He looked at the Panda and said lightly...
"Do not fear that endless darkness."
HUUM!
"Rage."
WAA!
"Rage."
BOOM!
Noah pressed his arms down into its chest!
They sank in. Through fur and ice and ancient bone, into the dark at the center of it, where its dream and its existence lived. He took hold of both. And pulled.
|THE Warden Who Does Not Rise has been granted death.|
|Taken: its Dream. Taken: its existence.|
|The Half-Immense core it carried is yours.|
...!
The Warden breathed out, once, long and slow, like something very old finally being allowed to sleep.
Around them, infinite versions of Noah Osmont stood across the frozen dark, and one by one, gently, they dreamed themselves away as the one plunged into the existence of a massive Panda trembled!
The Warden lay on its back across its frozen plain, and the whole of it was treasure.
Noah could feel that from where he stood on its chest. Every spine of frozen fur carried ages of the Long Night’s cold, packed dense. Every bone under the clear ice was old enough to have watched the Basal Floor fill with Guards one by one. Its broken wings still held the shapes of stopped moments in their panes. A corpse of a Half-Immense Lifeform was worth more than a hundred beings who merely carried Roots.
He knelt, and reached further inside it!
His arms sank through fur and ice and bone, down into the dark at the center of the great chest, and found what lay waiting there.
A singularity!
It hung in the dark of the Warden’s chest, and his sight could only take half of it. One half was there, plain, a point of pale blue light so dense it bent the frozen dark around it. The other half slid away from his perception every time he reached for it, present and absent at once, flickering at the edge of seeing exactly as the Warden’s aura had flickered while it lived.
Around it, thick as the walls of a fortress, coiled weavings of Immensity.
His hand closed toward the singularity and met them. They were solid as the door he had felt at the top of his own existence. His fingers pressed and met solid Immensity at every point.
And the weavings spoke, in the voice of the panda!
|You cannot grasp Immensity if you have no Immensity.|
...!
Noah stayed kneeling on the corpse’s chest with his hand pressed flat against the weavings, and looked at them for a while.
Then he smiled, very slightly.
"Immensity," he said.
His voice was calm.
"Everyone reaches for it. I see them. Every being that ever climbed, climbing toward the same door, as though it were the only door there is. They build their histories on the way to it. Their dreams, their hopes, all their power, poured into one shape, because they were told that shape was the top of everything."
He pressed a little harder, and the weavings held. "This one sat at the door for more Ages than I can count, and got halfway through, and stayed. That was all its Immensity ever gave it. A doorway to sit in."
He looked down at the half-seen singularity in the dark.
"I reject it. All of it. Immensity is only one of the things they did. The key was never the door. The key is everything they lived on the way there. Their history. Their dreams. What they hoped for, sitting in the cold. That is the part that belongs to them. That is the part I can reach."
He let his Dream open!
Seas of it poured out of him and down into the Warden’s body. Blue-gold tides, boundless, flooding through the frozen fur and the clear ice and the ancient bones, filling every hollow of the great corpse until the whole of it glowed from inside like a lantern. The dream soaked into the Warden’s dead existence and went looking for what was still there.
It found the Warden’s dream!
Noah saw it. The whole of it, all at once, as the dream-seas carried it up to him.
"It dreamed of rising," he said softly.
The corpse beneath him glowed brighter.
"Ages at the mouth of that rift. Chained there, then too large for the chains, then too still to remember why it stayed. Guarding the way down for those grander than itself. And every Age of that watch, it dreamed of standing up and walking away, down into the dark, or out into the light, anywhere but here. It dreamed of rising for so long that the dream grew heavier than the rest of it." He breathed out. "THE Vigil That Wished to Rise."
...!
Behind him, something began to form!
It gathered out of the blue-gold seas pouring off his shoulders, dream-stuff drawing together, taking shape. A panda. Vast, nearly the size of the Warden itself, made entirely of golden-blue light, its fur shimmering in slow drifting waves, its great round eyes ringed with gold instead of black. Wings spread from its shoulders, whole ones, unbroken, pane after pane of clear shining dream set together as neatly as the Warden’s had once been set by a careless hand. Its body was free of chains, mantle, and club alike.
It rose up behind Noah to its full height, standing tall on the frozen plain, and moved when he moved.
He lifted his hand. The dream-panda lifted its paw!
He reached forward, and it reached with him, its great shining paw sinking down past his arms into the Warden’s chest, down through the dark, to the coiled weavings of Immensity and the singularity inside them.
The weavings let it through!
They parted around the dream-panda’s paw as a mother’s arms open for her own child. It was the Warden’s dream. It was the accumulation of everything the Warden had lived and wanted across every Age of its watch. The Immensity recognized it, and gave way.
The golden paw closed around the singularity, and drew it out!
|THE Vigil That Wished to Rise has been dreamed into form.|
|The Dream of a Half-Immense Lifeform is the accumulation of its existence. What guards its Immensity recognizes its own Dream, and yields to it.|
|Loot obtained: THE Stillborn Singularity of THE Warden’s Immensity.|
|A singularity of Immensity, half-perceivable and half not, holding within it a failed Immensity: an ascent that reached the threshold and never passed through.|
|Its properties are sealed. They may be studied.|
...!
Noah took it from the dream-panda’s paw and held it tightly.
It was cold, and heavy past anything its size had a right to be, and it flickered in his grip, there and gone and there. He could feel the whole failed ascent inside it, an Immensity that had climbed halfway through the door and frozen on the threshold. A thing that almost was. He closed his fingers around it until the flicker steadied against his palm, and put it away, deep inside himself, where nothing could reach it but him.
Then he stood, and looked down at the corpse.
The dream-panda behind him lowered its head, and sank into him.
It poured back into his shoulders in a slow golden flood, and he felt it settle somewhere deep, kept, ready to be dreamed again. The Warden’s Dream was his now. Its body was another matter.
He looked it over as a collector looks over the finest piece he has ever found. The frozen fur, every spine of it packed with the Long Night’s cold. The clear ice over ancient bones. The broken wings still full of stopped moments. All of it, whole, the corpse of a being that had sat halfway to Immensity for longer than anything on this Floor could remember.
He could swallow it right now. He could feel his existence leaning toward it, hungry, eager to press every Age of that watch into his quarks.
He kept it whole instead.
Blue-gold dream closed over the great body in a slow tide, sealing it from fur to bone, until the Warden lay wrapped in a shell of shining dream on its frozen plain. Then the shell drew inward, smaller and smaller, and the whole vast corpse went with it, down into the depths of his Dream, where it settled beside the Stillborn Singularity. Kept. Untouched.
|Consumed: the Dream of THE Warden Who Does Not Rise. THE Vigil That Wished to Rise has been kept, and may be dreamed again at your will.|
|Stored within your Dream: the corpse of THE Warden Who Does Not Rise, a Half-Immense Lifeform.|
|Held: THE Stillborn Singularity of THE Warden’s Immensity.|
|THE reach of your Dream has expanded.|
...!
Noah stood on the frozen plain where a Half-Immense guardian had sat, alone now except for Ling watching wide-eyed at the edge of the ring and the blue rift splitting the dark before him.
A hundred deaths had brought him here. The rift behind the Warden opened downward into cold that pulled at every quark he owned, toward those grander than the Warden, waiting below.
He was hungry for them already. But first, he had to make proper use of the loot of the big, fat panda to ensure he obtained the grandest returns. Which meant giving it all away. The singularity of Immensity, and the whole Half-Immense corpse along with it, so that his Tide could give him back something even grander!
He wanted to see if that would be enough...to trigger an evolution!