Chapter 5549: Lapse! II
Chapter 5549: Lapse! II
<On Those Who Remain>
We are accustomed to viewing existence as a reality where living beings enter from different doorways, distinct and separate from the stage beneath their feet.
Yet this... is the primary illusion. An ocean does not construct waves the way a mason builds a wall; the ocean simply waves, and in doing so, it expresses its own nature.
So it was with Those Who Remain. They were not merely builders standing outside the halls of reality, but the very impulse that caused the dark to tremble and take shape.
Among Those Who Remain, only a few distinct identities survived the erosion of ages to be remembered by name. Among these few, THE Sleepless Fiend was noted as a particularly eccentric existence.
Where others of its kind sought static absolute authority or spoke final decrees, THE Sleepless Fiend was consumed by a curious, playful fascination with the nature of Causes. Rumors across ancient epochs whisper that it treated Causes as living experiments, grafting First Causes into living marrow and weaving foundational anchors into organic forms merely to see what burdens those existences could bear.
It is a narrow view to believe that only those explicitly known as Descendants carry the legacy of Those Who Remain.
Look closely at the staggering spectrum of lifeforms moving across Dimensions and Time. They are not mere accidents of ambient density. In truth, many are the lingering, self-sustaining ripples of those ancient trials: existences whose bodies, instincts, and very identities were carved out of manipulated Causes eons ago, still acting out a play designed by a weaver who refused to sleep.
Among the Descendants of Those Who Remain, many carry names that make epochs tremble, but a rare few sit upon heights so grand that their legends threaten to eclipse the progenitors themselves.
THE Infinity Eater was such an existence. It spun thin, imperceptible threads of itself outward across the weavings of space and time. Across untold multitudes, lifeforms tapped into these delicate threads of Infinity, foolishly mistaking the borrowed tide for their own awakened power.
They knew nothing of the weaver. Through every thread of Infinity woven across the dark, THE Infinity Eater felt every breath, every intent, and every pulse of energy.
Whatever it lent, it could reclaim at a whim. It could wear another’s existence like a fitted garment or drown their soul from the inside without casting a single spell. In truth, any Infinity-wielder who lacked a root or a Source of their own was never a master of power; they were merely a mouth that THE Infinity Eater had not yet decided to close.
There is the record of the Fall of the Pale Dimension, where a colossal alliance of Primeval Ones and True Lifeforms gathered to erase THE Infinity Eater from existence. Thousands of sovereign entities unfurled their immensity, their weapons shining with endless, infinite energy as they encircled him.
THE Infinity Eater stood alone upon a ruined escarpment of petrified earth, silent and unmoving. He did not summon an army. He did not draw a blade. He merely reached out and plucked the threads.
In that singular, terrifying instant, more than half of the opposing army gasped as their own Infinity revolted. Their Trueness caved inward, their Intent shattered in their throats, and their bodies moved against their will as the borrowed force reclaimed its master.
With hollow, silent eyes, more than half of those ancient lords lost control of their existences, turned around, and came to stand beside THE Infinity Eater, drawing their weapons against their former allies.
Let this be the standing lesson for those who seek the heights. Power is never ownerless, and force without a true, personal origin is merely a collar worn by the blind.
Be relentlessly careful to understand the exact root from which your strength springs, and trace the stream back to its source before you drink too deeply. Otherwise, you may lose your existence before you even know it has been claimed.
---
<THE True Human Emperor>
After getting a feel of his existence and its ongoing processes in that space, Noah nodded to the massive visage of Damodred.
"Let’s go back."
The Laestrygonian severed hands blindfold twitched as gray brilliance spilled.
The gray space folded away, and the ruined domain of the showing rushed back into color and weight, and Noah opened his eyes in the light of THE Ymnaros.
And he looked around and understood at once that Damodred had not done what he had assumed.
The titan had not stretched a single moment into infinity the way Noah stretched instants to think inside them. Time had passed out here, the whole long teaching unspooling at its true length while existence went on around them.
The dead were buried.
Theron Adranos and Anaximander had finished the work, the small white and blue bodies laid into the scorched ground beneath rows of low mounds, and Ryaenara stood among them. All of them were simply waiting for him now.
And Anaximander wore a conflicted expression!
The scholar looked as though he wanted to ask something and could not make himself do it, the mild curious face caught on a hesitation!
Noah smiled, and looked at the mounds a moment, and then at his friend.
"There shouldn’t be hesitation between friends," he said. "What’s up?"
Anaximander sighed and opened his mouth.
And Theron Adranos put a hand on the scholar’s shoulder, and stepped forward instead.
"I put Sir Anaximander in a difficult position," the golden-haired man said, "by asking a heavy request of him."
He drew a breath, and told him.
"THE Ymnaros is facing an invasion we have not faced before these past days. Our Dimension is colliding....fusing, slowly, into another Dimension entirely, one filled with Infinite Lifeforms, the same kind you cut down in this garden." His jaw tightened.
"Our defenses were built for enemies who come through the doors. They do not work against this, because the two Dimensions are becoming one, and where they overlap, the enemy can appear anywhere at all. Inside our strongholds. Beneath our feet. In a garden that should have been a hundred layers deep in safety." He gestured faintly at the ruin around them. "The way they appeared here."
...!
"We call it the Dimensionlapse," Theron said. "And from what I saw here today...that capability of yours. The one that strips the power from all those nearby..."
He looked down at his own hands then, and turned them over.
"When you imposed it, I did not feel any different. I felt like me. Whole. Myself. The same strength I have always carried, untouched, while others fell out of the sky around me."
...!
Noah’s attention sharpened!
"Our toughest battles are occurring or already coming," Theron went on. "Against the mightiest of the invaders, in the places the Dimensionlapse has fused most deeply. If your power leaves the Superpowered Lifeforms standing at the height of their strength while it strips our enemies bare, then it may be the very thing that lets us overcome an invasion that has been grinding us down."
His voice steadied into something formal.
"I do not ask it for free. Existence is give and take. Nothing in it is free."
He half-turned, and looked at the obelisk behind him, the tall stone still pouring its steady blue-gold light up into the smoke, the shrine his people had died in rows to keep.
"This is one of many," Theron said quietly. "Doorways, all of them. They open onto the place the invaders have bled us for, generation after generation. What grows there is the thing every Infinite and Source Lifeform in reach has spent ages trying to take from us." He looked back at Noah.
"A Panacea. It grew in our lands on its own, and it is what made us the Superpowered Lifeforms that we are. And to others, they say, it can do something stranger still. They say it can cause the emergence of a Purpose. The emergence and nurturing of a Cause."
BOOM!
"I can bring you through," Theron finished. "You are the allies of Sir Anaximander, so that you may confirm all of it with your own eyes rather than take a desperate man’s word. And if Existence deems it fitting, then afterward, we could work together."
...!
Noah’s eyes shone.
He looked at the obelisk that so many had died to protect! He thought of Dimensions fusing and colliding into one another. Dimensionlapse!
That did not sound natural to him at all, not remotely. The Infinite True Lifeforms had besieged this place for ages and failed to break it. Had they stopped trying to break it, then, and started trying to merge it instead, to fold THE Ymnaros into a Dimension of their own so that no wall or door could keep them out any longer?
And laid over all of it, the last thing Theron had said, the thing that mattered most of all.
A Panacea that could cause the emergence and nurturing of a Cause!
He looked at Theron, and then at Anaximander, and his decision was already made.
"It is only humanto help each other. Let’s go in and see."
...!
Yes. It was human to help!
But it was also human to make gains while helping, and Noah had never once in his life been able to deny himself an unfathomable treasure when one was laid in front of him! A Dimension besieged for ages by Infinite and Source Lifeforms both. A Panacea everyone in reach wanted badly enough to grind a whole people down for it!
And a thought rose in him, quiet and enormous, as he looked at the doorway.
What if this was the place? What if THE Ymnaros became the first ground he claimed, the first stake driven for the rule of THE True Human Emperor, a unique Dimension full of the more human beings he had come to meet, defended by people his power left standing while it stripped their enemies bare?
Maybe.
Maybe!