Read Novel Full Chapter 5939: A Mighty Hoe! III
Chapter 5939: A Mighty Hoe! III
Noah stood beside the sapling with the hoe resting on his shoulder and blood drying on his lip, and he looked at the blade for a long moment, because he was honestly surprised at how well it had worked.
He had swung it at a falling reinforced constructs filled with Half-Unfathomable Immensity and split it in half, and he had turned over the sky itself with a single stroke. The hoe hummed quietly in his hands, a little warm, and he had the strange feeling that it was just as surprised as he was.
It had not only been the hoe, though, and as he stood there, he went back over the fight and understood what he had actually done. Every Immense One he had ever faced fought the same way, by taking their Narrative and their power and forcing existence to follow it, pushing existence around them into the shape they wanted until it broke or gave in.
He had not done that even once, because he had sent his Dreams out into existence instead, his endless Infinite Dreams and Nightmares, and given his authority to everything around him and let it decide how to help.
That was why the sea had risen when he needed it to rise, and why the ground had opened to pull his enemies down, and why every current of infinity in the Carcosa had pushed behind each swing of the hoe. He had moved with THE Unstriving Current and existence had moved with him, so that every stroke he made carried the weight of the whole region and not only his own. The Half-Unfathomables had fought him alone with their own power, while he had fought them with everything around him, and that difference had closed a gap in strength that should never have been closed at all.
He had not won by being stronger than them, because he was not stronger than them. He had won because he was not using power the way they were, and the hoe made from four Shards of IT had turned all of that borrowed help into something sharp enough to cut through Half-Unfathomable Immensity.
Noah smiled at that, and then he rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms over his head until his back cracked, because there was still work to do.
---
Orren Mourncrest was still lying in the crater in the turned sky, with light leaking slowly from every wound, and Saelith Vane was still hanging where he had left her, staring at the stone house on the cliff with both hands pressed over her mouth. Noah walked up through the air toward Orren first, taking his time, while the currents of infinity bent toward him with every step and the snow parted in front of his boots.
Orren saw him coming and tried to rise, gathering what was left of his Immensity into his fists, but the ground of the overturned sky closed around his arms and legs and held him down before he could lift them.
Noah hooked the blade of the hoe under Orren’s jaw and pulled, and the broad, silent man came up out of the crater with a sound that was halfway between a roar and a sob!
Noah dragged him down through the sky toward the farm the same way he had dragged Corvin, and the soil beside Corvin’s small green shoot opened before they even reached it, wide and dark and waiting. He pressed Orren into it with one boot, and the ground closed over him, and the hoe and the roots of the sapling went to work while Orren’s muffled shouting slowly went quiet under the black-gold earth.
Saelith did not fight at all when he came for her. She only looked at him once, with her eyes full of the house she had never found, and then looked back at it, and she was still looking at it when he hooked the hoe through the front of her robe and drew her down to the farm. He buried her near the edge of the field where she could face the stone house.
...!
The Ancients broke. There were twelve of them still alive, batered and bleeding from the fight, and when they saw the third Half-Unfathomable go into the ground, every one of them turned and fled in a different direction at once!
They tore open the sky to escape, ripping holes into space and diving through them, riding the currents of infinity at full speed, scattering across the Carcosa in twelve streaks of white and gold light, and in a moment they were all gone from sight.
They were, after all, Immense Ones.
Noah watched them go and let out a long breath, because he did not like leaving work half done.
He closed his eyes and gave more of himself to existence than he had given at any point so far. His Dreaming Human Origin flowed out of him in a wide, slow tide, blue-gold and obsidian-gold, spreading through the Carcosa mixed with the spreading Fallow in every direction, through the rivers of infinity and the falling snow and the dark between the Dimensions, and everything it touched leaned toward him and listened.
He did not chase the Ancients, because he did not need to, since existence itself already knew exactly where every one of them was.
The first Ancient was halfway through a veiled Dimension when the Dimension closed around him and turned him back the way he had come.
The second was riding a current of infinity at full speed when the current curved under him, gently and completely, and carried him straight back to the farm, while the third found the sky in front of him turning into soil and the soil drawing him down.
The power expressed by each of the surrounding points of existence was heavy!
One by one, across Dimensions and across rivers of infinity and across the snowing dark of the Carcosa, existence turned every one of them around and brought them home to Noah’s field.
OOOH!
They came down out of the sky screaming, all twelve of them, dragged by the currents and the snow and the ground itself, and Noah stood among the rows of black-gold soil and planted them.
He planted them one at a time, with a stroke of the hoe to open the ground and his boot to press them in and another stroke to close the soil over them, working his way down the field in a straight line. By the time he reached the end of the row, the farm was quiet again except for the snow, and fifteen small green shoots stood in the soil behind him.
...!
Noah leaned on the hoe and looked back along the row of shoots, and he nodded slowly to himself.
"Half-Unfathomables and Ancients," he said, to no one in particular, his voice calm and even. "Every one of them full of Immensity and Narrative and dreams they never finished, and every one of them came here to take what was mine. They will make good fertilizer...better than anything I could have bought."
...!
Above the farm, the prisoners hung in the falling snow, and their shackles had come loose and fallen away somewhere during the fight, so that they were free now and could have gone anywhere. None of them moved!
Octavius Infinitum and the two other Ancients and the ten Established stared down at the neat row of green shoots and the man in the straw hat leaning on his hoe, and their faces had gone grey with horror, because they had just watched fifteen Immense Ones buried alive in a field and called fertilizer.
Noah felt their horror and shook his head, because he did not see it the way they did. This was only nature, the oldest law that existence had, eat or be eaten, and these fifteen had come to eat him and his farm and had been eaten instead, and nothing about that was strange.
He turned his back on the freed prisoners and looked out over his field, because there were more important things in front of him now than what a handful of frightened Immense Ones thought of him, and he wanted to see how his first harvest was coming along.
|You have defeated three Half-Unfathomable Immense Lifeforms and twelve Ancient Immense Ones.|
|They have been planted in your farm.|
|Corvin Astrael: Half-Unfathomable Fertilizer.|
|Orren Mourncrest: Half-Unfathomable Fertilizer.|
|Saelith Vane: Half-Unfathomable Fertilizer.|
|Ancient Fertilizer: 12.|
|Each may be used as pure fertilizer to enrich your farm.|
|Each may instead be allowed to sprout Unique Existential Vegetation.|
|What each would grow: ?????|
...!
Noah read the prompts twice and laughed quietly. Fertilizer or vegetation, he thought, and he looked at the fifteen shoots and wondered what a Half-Unfathomable could bloom into.
Then...the sky above the Carcosa lit up, and the banner of THE Narrative of Kings appeared high above the farm, vast and burning with light, the same banner that was hanging in the sky over every Legacy and Dimension and region of existence where it had ever been seen, and every name on it shone.
Near the bottom of the ranking, one of those names moved, sliding upward a single place while the name above it slid down to take its old spot. Then words bloomed beneath it, written in light so that everyone in existence who could see the banner could read them.
|THE Narrative of Kings has shifted.|
|THE Dreaming Human Origin rises from Rank 49 to Rank 48.|
|THE Dreaming Human Origin has faced the forces of two Kings ranked far above him, THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate and THE Shepherd of Falling Stars.|
|He has dominated the forces of both and has not lost.|
|His Rulership has increased.|
...!
Noah looked up at the banner and scowled, and then he shook his head slowly.
This...was not an effect he intended!
Every King on that banner had just read his name next to the Iron Psalm and the Shepherd, and every one of them would now be wondering who THE Dreaming Human Origin was and where he could be found.
The two aforementioned Kings may even easily connect the dots!
He let out a long breath through his nose and decided that this, too, was only part of the flow of existence, and that he would not fight it.
Above him, Octavius and the other freed prisoners were looking back and forth between the farmer in the straw hat and the burning words on the banner, and Noah watched their eyes go wide one after another. They had been here, and they had seen everything, and they were the only beings in existence who could put the two things together rapidly, a nameless farmer who had just buried an army of the Shepherd’s people and a name on the banner that had just risen for doing exactly that.
He could see the moment each of them understood it, and he could see their fear and their awe arguing with each other on their faces.
He was not planning to attack them, because they had not attacked him, and if they knew now that he was THE Dreaming Human Origin on the banner, then that was simply how things had turned out. He was about to tell them they were free to go wherever they liked, when Octavius Infinitum came down out of the sky, and all of the others came down with him, and every one of them knelt in the snow at the edge of his field and bowed.
"O King on THE Banner," Octavius said, his voice shaking, while the others nodded hard beside him, "we would be honored to follow you."
Then he looked up quickly, glanced at the row of fifteen green shoots, and looked back down at the snow again.
"We also did not really see anything," he added, very fast, "and we could also just be passing by, if that would be better!"
...!
Noah leaned on his hoe and looked down at the thirteen Immense Ones bowing in the snow at the edge of his farm, and he smiled at them, very kindly.
They wanted to follow him, and they had seen nothing, and they were also just passing by, all at the same time, and he waited patiently to hear which one of those it was going to be!