Read Novel Full Chapter 5905: No Path For You! I
Chapter 5905: No Path For You! I
"Come on," said Noah’s voice, out of THE Verdant Regard’s mouth. "Let’s spar with this body now, and test its limits."
On the golden shore of the Maze of Destiny, Kir One slowly stretched its titanic neck.
Its vast obsidian head came down out of the haze, faces carved all along it, and it brought itself close, very close, until its open eyes hung just a few paces from the Verdant Regard’s chest. The same chest it had split wide open not very long ago. The scar was still there under her robes, sealed now with a faint line of gold.
Kir One looked at it for a long moment.
"Are you alive?" it asked again.
HUUM!
The Verdant Regard’s gold eyes shone, and her mouth curved into Noah’s smile.
"We will see!"
A little way off along the shore, Noah’s own body sat cross-legged on the golden sand, perfectly still, hands resting on his knees. He glanced up once at the scene, the Ancient body he wore squaring off against the titan that had nearly killed her, and then he closed his eyes.
There was something else he needed to see first.
He began his next Infinite Quantum Dream!
|Quantum Dream 7 begins.|
|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 2.1%. True Order III.4.|
|You hold two Epitropos seats. THE Long Night across THE Keepers of Existence answers to you.|
|Goal: grasp the weavings of THE Sealed One.|
The blue-gold glass rose around him.
|Minute 1: You follow the threads of THE Long Night back into THE Keepers of Existence.|
|The snow falling over their Legacy is yours. You travel inside it.|
|Minute 4: You move toward THE Sealed One.|
He went slowly.
Of everything in the Keepers’ Legacy, this was the one thing he had learned to be most careful of. Forty-one borrowed lifetimes had shown him where the Sealed One lived, a quiet stone tower at the edge of the frozen gardens, but none of those lifetimes had shown him what the Sealed One truly was. The Keepers themselves were in the dark. They spoke of him with a strange, uneasy respect, as people speak of a guest who has stayed too long and somehow become part of the house.
|Minute 9: You stop at a distance and watch.|
|THE Sealed One stands alone at the top of his tower, looking out at the snow.|
In the glass, Noah drifted closer with the falling snow, flake by flake, until he hung in the cold air just outside the tower window.
From the outside, there was almost nothing to see. A tall, slender man in plain grey robes, his hands folded behind his back, his face calm and ordinary, his dark eyes resting on the falling snow as if he had watched a great deal of existence and expected a great deal more. He could have been anyone.
|Minute 13: You see his dream.|
|It is hazy. It is murky. It is very old.|
Inside the Sealed One, his dream drifted like smoke in a room with no windows. It was nothing like Seren’s soft mist or the Verdant Regard’s garden of eyes. It was thick and grey and curled in on itself a thousand times, so dense and so old that it was hard to tell where one part of it ended and the next began.
Then Noah looked closer, and saw what the smoke was hiding.
The dream was a patchwork.
It was made of pieces, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, every one of them severed from something larger, then sealed at its torn edges and stitched to the next. Some pieces were bright and some were faded nearly to nothing. Some were sewn neatly and some were dragged together with thick, rough stitches that had clearly been redone many times. Each piece felt like a different time, a different name, a different life, all of them cut loose and sealed and sewn into one dream that had every reason to fall apart, and somehow held.
|His dream is a patchwork of severed and sealed things, stitched together.|
|Each piece comes from a different life.|
He was a man made of everything he had ever been!
Noah watched it for a long time before he moved.
Then, carefully, more carefully than he had done anything in his life, he let a single thread of his Shinjitsu drift toward it.
|Minute 21: Your Shinjitsu touches his dream.|
|Its rhythm is slow and strange. It has been broken and remade many times.|
|You match it.|
|Minute 26: His dream begins to remember you as having always been part of it.|
|It hesitates. It has remembered many things. It does not trust what it remembers.|
|Minute 31: You are inside.|
The smoke closed around him!
|THE Sealed One’s dream:|
|To put everything under his vision.|
|To have all of existence flow, grandly and in order, under his guidance.|
|Not to destroy it. Not to rule it for its own sake. To steer it, as one steers a river toward the sea.|
Noah looked at that dream for a moment, and something cold went through him, because a part of it sounded very familiar.
Then the memories came!
They came slowly, one at a time, like old letters falling out of a book.
He saw the Sealed One before he was sealed, long ago, before the First Sundering, when existence was younger and he had a single name and a single face. He was already ambitous then, and he already had his dream. An Immense One already, he reached for that dream with everything he had, and he failed.
He saw him fall. His body broke, his existence collapsed, and the Immense One he had been was gone, Ages ago.
But something remained!
|His existence carries a unique anomaly.|
|As long as a single drop of his blood or a single sliver of his consciousness remains anywhere in existence, he will always return, in time.|
Noah saw him come back.
He woke into an existence that had moved on in his absence. The First Sundering had come and gone while he lay in pieces. Everything he had built was dust, everyone he had known was gone, and he had to begin again from almost nothing. So he began. He lived, and climbed, and tried to reclaim his old power and reach his old heights.
And something always got in his way!
Noah watched it happen again and again. A rival who rose faster, a war at the wrong time, a betrayl from someone he trusted, a plan that was perfect until the one day it failed. Each time, the Sealed One died. Each time, a drop of blood or a sliver of thought survived somewhere, and Ages later he woke and began again, a little smaller than before.
Every death made him weaker. He knew it. He went on anyway.
Then Noah saw the last one.
|His most recent identity: Riven.|
In that life, he had been the one called Riven, and he had nearly done it. Noah saw armies moving at his word, saw whole regions bending to his vision, saw the edges of his old dream coming finally into reach. And then whatever he had done at the very end of that life, something so great that Noah’s view of it blurred and slid away, had brought existence down on him all at once.
Multiple sides allied against him.
That time, death passed him by.
He was sealed instead!
His existence was broken into pieces and scattered, flung across THE Source Lands and THE Infinite Carcosa, every piece locked away from every other.
|After the identity of Riven, he was sealed and scattered across THE Source Lands and THE Infinite Carcosa.|
|He began to emerge again from his scattered pieces.|
|He was weaker than he had ever been.|
Noah watched him gather himself back together.
It took years. Piece by piece, the Sealed One found the scattered parts of himself across two vast regions of existence, sealed the torn edge of each one, and stitched them back together into one existence, one rough seam at a time, so they would stay shut forever. Every patch in his dream was a life he had carried back. When he was done, he was whole, and he was the weakest he had ever been, and he made himself one promise.
This time would be the last.
|This time, he intends his return to be his last.|
|He attached himself to THE Keepers of Existence.|
|Using everything he had learned across every life, he remade his body into a vessel that can accept Narratives.|
Noah saw him come to the Keepers, quiet and polite and full of old knowledge, a guest who knew things no one else did. He saw him make himself useful, then trusted, then necessary. He saw him reshape his own body, patch by patch, into something that could take Narratives inside itself and hold them, as a cup holds water.
And he saw why.
|He means to steer THE Keepers of Existence.|
|He means to gain their support, and then their control.|
|The Keepers have already infused something into his existence.|
Deep inside the Sealed One’s dream, at the very center of all the patches, something glowed.
It was small and dim and very, very heavy, heavier than anything else inside him, heavier than the Sealed One himself. It sat in the middle of his patched-together existence like a stone at the bottom of a deep well, and the stitches around it strained, every one of them, just to hold it in place.
|A recovered sliver of THE Regret of THE Dissolved Progenitor.|
|It was left behind by the founder of THE Keepers of Existence.|
|For Ages, no one among the Keepers could grasp it.|
|THE Sealed One accepted it into his body.|
...!
Noah stared at it.
Regret. Of all the things a Progenitor could leave behind in existence, a being whose own daughter had chosen an ending over power, a being who had been dissolved and was somehow still ranked twenty-second among Kings, the piece that had come down to the Keepers was regret.
And the Sealed One, the man made of all his failed lives, had swallowed it whole and held it.
Noah looked at that small, heavy, dimly glowing thing for a very long time, and found himself wondering what a Progenitor could possibly have regretted.