Read Novel Full Chapter 5900: Infiltration! II
Chapter 5900: Infiltration! II
Noah stayed inside Seren Valadhi only a short while.
There were so many other dreams!
From her lotus lake, he could see them all across the snowbound Legacy, drifting like silver mist around the Immensities of the Keepers, each one the inner life of a being that had lived for Ages. He let go of Seren gently, so gently she stayed unaware of his leaving, and slipped into the snow again, and went looking.
|Quantum Dream 5 continues.|
|Hour 1: You leave the dream of Seren Valadhi. She remains unaware.|
|Hour 1, Minute 6: You enter the dream of a second Established Immense One.|
He jumped from dream to dream!
Each time, it went the same way. His Shinjitsu matched the rhythm of a sleeping mind, the dream remembered him as having always been there, and a whole life opened up to him like a door left unlocked.
Each time, he stayed only long enough to take what he needed, and then he moved on, and the Immense One he had left behind went on with its day, unaware that a stranger had just read every page of it.
|Lucius, THE Lamplighter of Lost Children.|
|Established Immense One.|
|In a quiet Dimension of his own, he keeps nine hundred orphanned Root Bearer.|
|He feeds them a little of his own Immensity every year.|
|No other Keeper knows. He has never told them.|
Noah stayed in that one a little longer than he needed to.
Most of the others were nothing like Lucius.
|Kassandros, THE Reaper of Old Bloodlines.|
|Established Immense One.|
|He has ended eleven entire Lineages of Provenance Lifeforms, every member down to the unborn, and taken their Provenance into his Immensity.|
|He tends the Keepers’ archive of origins. He calls his work preservation.|
|Octavia, THE Mother of Many Tithes.|
|Established Immense One.|
|Every Newly Risen Immense One born within her reach owes her a tithe of Immensity, forever.|
|Those who cannot pay are hollowed out and hung as lamps in her halls. Some of them are still awake.|
|Theron, THE Hunter Who Smiles.|
|Established Immense One.|
|He seals Newly Risen Immense Ones inside empty Dimensions, gives them a head start of a hundred years, and then hunts them for sport.|
|He has never lost. He keeps their names on the walls of his house, in alphabetical order.|
|Livia, THE Quiet Harvest.|
|Established Immense One.|
|She has emptied nine hundred Observable Existences of every living thing to reach the First Causes at their hearts.|
|Aurelian, THE Gilded Bystander.|
|Established Immense One.|
|He watched a Legacy burn for an entire Age and took careful notes.|
|Phoebe, THE Gardener of Ashes.|
|Established Immense One.|
|She goes quietly to the places her siblings have broken and plants things in the ruins.|
|She cannot fix much. She keeps trying anyway.|
On and on it went.
He went through dozens of dreams, then more, and the longer he went, the colder he grew. A few were kind, like Lucius, like Phoebe, small warm lights in a very large dark.
Most were not. He found Immense Ones who had wiped out whole Lineages for a single step up in power, others who kept Newly Risen Ones like cattle and milked them for their Immensity, others who had destroyed Dimensions and Observable Existences simply because something inside them was worth having.
For some of them, it had stopped being hunger long ago. It was simply habit.
They called themselves THE Keepers of Existence.
Many of them had kept nothing but themselves.
By the time he was done, the Keepers had stopped feeling like a strange place he had walked into.
They felt like a place he had lived in for countless lifetimes.
|Hour 9: You have entered the dreams of forty-one Established Immense Ones of THE Keepers of Existence.|
|None of them has noticed.|
|Summary of what you have learned:|
|1. THE Keepers of Existence are ruled by a council in the spiral palace, led by THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral as an appointed figure head, but he is certainly not the strongest.|
|2. Of the forty-one you entered, most have destroyed far more of existence than they have ever kept.|
|3. The pact with THE Curator was made by THE Sovereign of the Endless Spiral and a few others at the very top.|
|4. Known Ancient Immensities within the Legacy: 88.|
|5. Hidden Ancient Immensities: 100. They rarely show themselves. They live in Isolated Dimensional Pockets underneath the Legacy.|
|6. Even most of the Keepers do not know where those pockets are, or what the hidden ones are doing in them.|
…!
Noah stared at that number.
One hundred Ancients, hidden underneath.
Inevitably, he thought of the statues under THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, standing in their silent rows deep beneath it, waiting for who knew what.
Was this simply how great Legacies were built? A face above, for everyone to see, and a hidden strength beneath, for no one to see at all?
Did all of them want to have hidden forces underneath?
But the Keepers seemed to have more than hidden forces.
|7. Within THE Keepers of Existence, multiple Unfathomable Immensities should be present. Their number: ?????|
|8. THE Keepers of Existence still has its founder present somewhere out there.|
|9. This is unlike Lucy’s Legacy. Lucy is not among Those Who Remain.|
|10. Over the Ages, the Legacy Lucy left behind has weakened without her.|
|11. A Legacy whose founder remains does not weaken in the same way.|
…!
Noah let all of it settle slowly, sorting it as his Shinjitsu sorted everything now, keeping what mattered and setting the rest aside.
Eighty-eight Ancients he could see. A hundred stayed hidden from him. Unfathomables, more than one. A founder, somewhere.
And among the eighty-eight, one Ancient he already knew was hurt.
He turned the dream toward her.
|Hour 10: You steer the dream toward THE Verdant Regard.|
|Ancient Immense One of THE Keepers of Existence. Used to belong to THE Legacy of THE Acharya, this traitorous bitch.|
|Immensity: Regard. Whatever she looks upon becomes her garden.|
|Assimilation Rate: 0.0%.|
|Condition: injured. Kirtimukha One split her chest open. Her immensity is still recovering.|
|Her orchard has frozen under your snow.|
In the glass, he found her sitting alone beneath the largest tree in her orchard.
It had been a plum tree once, the oldest in her garden, and now it stood black and bare and silver with frost. The snow fell steadily around her. She sat with her back against its trunk and one hand pressed to her chest, where the scar from Kir One still glowed faintly green through her fingers, and her eyes were half closed.
Even resting, even hurt, she was enormous. Her Immensity lay over the whole frozen orchard like a heavy blanket, and every frozen tree in it still faintly leaned toward her.
Around that Immensity drifted her dream.
It was nothing like Seren’s soft mist. It was a garden of its own, vast and green and full of eyes. Every leaf on every tree in it was a small open eye, thousands upon thousands of them, all slowly turning, all watching.
Noah looked at it for a long moment.
An Ancient. Even injured, she was far beyond any Established One he had touched. But she had no Shinjitsu at all. Everything she was rested on borrowed weight, on Regard she had taken and kept as a loan, and borrowed things gave his truth something to grip.
Would he have a chance?
There was only one way to find out!
|Hour 10, Minute 3: Your Shinjitsu flows toward her dream.|
|Her dream notices you.|
Every eye in her dream-garden turned toward him at once!
He felt them land on him, thousands of them, and for a moment the whole dream tried to make him part of its garden, just as her Regard made everything it looked at into hers. Roots reached for him. Leaves unfurled toward him. The eyes stared and stared.
He gave them nothing to hold.
THE Empty Hands That Hold. There was nothing borrowed in him for her Regard to grip, and her roots slid off him like rain off glass. He pressed on into the garden, matching its rhythm, and the eyes blinked in confusion as something walked through their garden that stayed stubbornly outside their reach.
|Minute 7: You reach the heart of her dream.|
|Minute 8: Her dream begins to remember you as having always been part of it.|
|Minute 9: It resists.|
The garden fought back!
This was something else entirely. The Established Ones’ dreams had simply opened. This one clenched like a fist. The trees bent toward him and their trunks tightened, and the eyes narrowed, and something old and stubborn and vast inside her dream refused, over and over, to remember a stranger as its own.
Noah poured more of himself in!
He gave it everything. His Dreaming Human Origin, his three Infinities, the still gold-blue weight of his Shinjitsu pressed down into a single burning point. THE Dream That Was Always So pushed against the garden with all its strength, insisting quietly and endlessly that he had always been here, that this had always been his.
|Minute 14: You have taken hold of her dream.|
|Minute 15: You begin to spread into her existence.|
|Control of her existence: 12%.|
And she woke!
In the glass, THE Verdant Regard’s eyes snapped open.
What was happening was a mystery to her. But she felt it! Something was inside her. Something was moving through her existence, quietly turning it, and it was someone else.
She sat bolt upright against the frozen tree, and her Immensity flared!
Her Regard blazed out across the orchard. Every frozen tree burst back into green at once, snow scattering, frost shattering, and her eyes, her real eyes, went wide and wild and swept the empty garden around her looking for whatever had touched her. Ancients were not Established Ones. She had lived through Ages of battles, and her whole existence knew how to fight.
|Control of her existence: 12% to 9%.|
|She is fighting you.|
Noah set his teeth and held.
He let go of nothing. His Shinjitsu clung to every thread of her existence it had already taken and kept reaching for more, steady and dense and stubborn, while her Immensity crashed against it again and again like a storm against a cliff. The scar on her chest blazed green, and then it began to bleed light.
Her injury was opening.
Kir One had split her chest wide, and it had stayed half open ever since, and now she was pouring everything she had into fighting him, and the wound gave way under it.
|Control of her existence: 9% to 18%.|
|Her injury is reopening.|
|Control of her existence: 18% to 31%.|
She gasped, and pressed both hands to her chest.
“Who?!” she breathed, to the empty orchard. “Who is in my garden?!”
HUUM!
Noah stayed silent. He used every shred of his power.
He pushed through her dream and into her existence with all of it at once, every grain of truth he had, every Infinity, the weight of three Shards of IT humming at the center of him, and her Regard bent back before it, and the green of her orchard flickered between her color and his.
|Control of her existence: 31% to 44%.|
|Control of her existence: 44% to 53%.|
|Control of her existence: 53% to 61%.|
…!
THE Verdant Regard slumped back against the tree.
Her hands fell from her chest. Green light seeped quietly out of the reopened scar and dripped onto the snow. She was still there, still fighting somewhere deep inside, her Immensity still burning in pieces of herself still beyond his reach, but most of what she was had slipped out of her hands.
It answered to him.
|You have gained control of 61% of THE Verdant Regard’s existence.|
|She is aware that something has taken her.|
|She does not know what.|
In the glass, THE Verdant Regard slowly lifted her head and looked out over her orchard.
One of her eyes was still her own, wide and green and terrified.
The other was gold and blue and perfectly calm.