Chapter 5713: A Clash of Dreams! II
Chapter 5713: A Clash of Dreams! II
The blade found him as the dream shattered!
BOOM!
Noah was flung backward across the stellar region, visible again, an Immense One’s power having reached clean across the fold his dream had folded into!
Crimson gold blood sprayed from a wound that opened across his chest, and he tumbled through the falling silk and caught himself in the air, and for the first time all nine burning gazes fixed on the small bleeding figure!
"There," the leader breathed heavily. "There you are, little fucker!"
It hurt! The wound was deep, and he was bleeding in open air in front of nine titans who each outweighed himA
"Kill it before it disappears again! Whether its a Gu or not doesn’t matter!" the leader roared. "It cannot hide from the blade! Move!"
Voss, whose golden Steed was crippled but whose arm was not, hurled a spear of woven Argent Loom and Dimensionality, and Noah twisted in the air as this sharp Dimensionality tore through his shoulder instead of his heart.
Others came as Noah closed his eyes and imagined a dream where dodged every threst coming towards him!
It was an an infinite dream of THE Human Dreamer as he felt like he could do it endlessly!
The old assumption tried to rise in him, the one that whispered the story bent his way, that he was the protagonist and would be fine.
He srifled it.
He caught himself against a drifting continent of dead chitin, bleeding from chest and shoulder, and he thought about the one thing that mattered, which was the thing he had felt in the instant before the sword landed.
Her records had lurched.
For one moment, before she drew an Immense One’s power, the leader’s existence had shuddered, because the dream he was writing and the records she was built of had stopped matching. He had felt a Descendant’s foundation tremble because a story it stood on had been told a different ending!
That was the solution!
|The blade will find you whenever you are perceived. You cannot out-power it. But its bearer stands on a dream, and you are the thing that writes dreams. You can fight the war you can win.|
Noah stopped trying to survive the sword.
He stopped dodging toward safety, stopped answering their tempo, and hung in the burning air, bleeding, letting them come, because the fight they thought they were in was not the fight anymore!
He spread his hand across the nine dreams turning in his Sonder-sight, and he wrote into all of them at once.
The leader’s blade came for him even as he did it, and it hit, and he let it hit, taking the wound across his ribs and keeping his hand open!
Into Voss he wrote that he had betrayed the leader long ago, been caught, and been forgiven, and that the forgiveness was the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to him!
Voss’s raging storm of Dimensionality dropped from his hand mid-throw as a shame that had never occurred crashed down through him.
Into the winged rider he wrote that its wings had always been a lie, that it had never truly flown, that every flight had been a dream it told itself, and the rider faltered in the air!
Into the plain-horse rider he wrote that the hunts had already ended, ages past, and that everything since had been a dream it was having as it died, and the rider went still and silent and stopped fighting entirely, staring at a nothing it had privately expected for a very long time.
And into the leader, into the woman with an Immense One’s power in her hand and his blood on her edge, he wrote the cruelest true thing he had found in her.
That her Father had looked at her once, directly and had given her his Recognition an Age ago, and that she had been too busy hunting to notice, and had missed the only thing she had ever wanted while it happened, and could never have it again!
He wrote it into her Dreams as a thing that had always been true.
And the Descendants of THE Sleepless Fiend roared as their Existence fought against their Dreams!
They shockingly began to come apart! The dreams Noah had written and the records they were made of could not both stand, and no existence can hold two truths at its own foundation, and the disagreement ran outward from the center of each of them, a crack finding every edge at once!
Effectively, he had fucked around with their Trueness as for beings of high Dimensionality, their Trueness was critical!
Atlas had talked about DEPTH, MAGNITUDE, and AGREEMENT when it came to the power of lifeforms.
The Depths were their Dimensionality as theirs were higher than his, and Agreement with existence was heavy, but theit MAGNITUDE...he fractured it inside out.
|You are overwriting the Existential Narrative of nine Descendants. Their dreams and their records no longer agree. An existence at war with its own story cannot hold its shape.|
Voss clutched his head and howled at a betrayal that had never happened. The winged rider forgot the lie of its wings and fell. The plain-horse rider dismounted, slowly, and sat down in the silk, certain it was already dead and merely waiting to notice.
And the leader dropped the sword.
The weapon carrying a sliver of power of an Immense One fell through the silk and its terrible song went quiet, because the hand that held it no longer knew whether it had ever wanted the thing it was fighting for!
She clutched at her own chest and found there the memory Noah had written, of having had it, of having missed it, and her crimson eyes went wide and wet and utterly lost!
"I just wanted him to look at me...did I really miss it? Did I truly?!"
...!
A crack ran up through the old bronze of her body. The white stag beneath her screamed as its rider’s Narrative tore, and the whole wedge was breaking now, nine titans going mad as their records ripped away from one another, madness blooming in a place made of the very concept of dreams.
Storms of Argent Loom and typhoons of Dimensionality began to rage around them as weaker Lifeforms would be shredded if they came nearby!
Noah hung above them, bleeding from three wounds as he did not derive any pleasure from this!
A day ago he might have enjoyed it. Today, with Sonder awake in him, he saw each of the nine fully as he unmade them, saw the whole vivid interior of nine existences that had each stood at the center of a long story, and he broke them anyway!
Because they had opposed his grsnd and infinite dream, and he had promised himself he would come out standing.
But even now, his eyes flashed coldly as he thought about everything.
It was about their Father.
These were the First Borns of THE Sleepless Fiend, one of Those Who Remain. They could see many things.
He could not leave the broken dreams of nine of the Fiend’s children lying in the Chrysalis for anything to find.
"Against terrifying enemies, I have to be careful," Noah said quietly, to the falling silk, to himself.
"I put my hand heavily into an Immense One’s bloodline today as I have been doing recently, altering their Curses or Sentences. That leaves marks and clues. And I cannot afford to leave clues to such cruel beings."
He looked at the nine, mad and splitting, their dreams hanging around them in torn golden clouds, and he made a grand decision.
"So there will be no evidence."
He opened THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer, and for the first time in his existence, he... devoured dreams.
He bypassed the Dimensional storms and drew the torn golden clouds off the nine dying Descendants and into himself, every hope and every dream these nine had ever carried, and he took them in and shut them behind his eyes where nothing that looked at the Chrysalis afterward would ever find them!
Emptied of the dreams their existences had been at war with, the Descendants went quiet. Then they went still. Then, one by one, with nothing left at their foundations to hold a shape, they simply ceased, and their whole burning Steeds ceased with them, and the region went dark and cold!
|You have devoured the Existential Narrative of nine Descendants and Steeds of THE Sleepless Fiend. No dream remains for any perceiver to read. In them, the event did not happen.|
|THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer deepens. You have learned to take what you long only borrowed. +5 PROVENANCE, +3 VERITAS, +3 PONDUS|
Noah hung in the silence, bleeding, full of dead dreams, and he did not feel grand.
He felt careful!
He looked down. The three bound Dream Gu drifted free of their fallen ropes now that their captors were gone, and the little Common Dream Gu he had first come for still hung in its nest, awake, its many eyes on him, its small dream of warmth turning around it untouched by any of it. Four Gu!
His gains from this were grand, grander by far than what he had come for!
He didn’t sit and dawdle!
He debated taking the vibrant binding ropes or the sword filled with slivers of an Immense One as he was not foolish enough to carry things holding the marker and power of an Immense One! But could they be seamlessly devoured and broken down? He formed a bubble of blue gold dreams to wrap around them as he tried to analyze and devour even them rapidly.
He formed his Provenance of THE Human Dreamer into chains that wrapped around the Gu and drew the four of them to him, and golden jaws of an endless dream erupted out as they began to chew on the corpses of Descendants and Steeds that floated listlessly!
And...
Caution said do not linger. Caution said a place where you have just done something this large is a place to be gone from before anything arrives to read it!
For once, Noah did not argue with caution as he turned into a streak of light shooting in the distance, every step taking him Gigaparsecs away as he even intended to leave the region of Dreams of THE Chrysalis entirely!
Noah streaked across the vast reaches of THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering, each stride carrying him across gigaparsecs of falling multicolored silk and turning nebulas as dreamy light swirled steadily around his frame. Floating beside him, encased in a shimmering sphere of blue-gold dreams, drifted the spoils of the First Borns.
The obsidian rope and the pale crimson-white sword.
As his perception probed the sealed sphere, information surfaced in his consciousness, revealing the dark history woven into the very structure of the relics.
|THE UNSLEEPING BINDINGS|
|Classification: Immense One Relic (Defective Echo).|
|An obsidian rope braided from the harvested Causes of ten primeval Steeds who failed to bear the harness of THE Sleepless Fiend. It carries the unfinished cadence of his binding-sentence, burning through the unspent potential of captured existences to enforce an unyielding stillness.|
|THE FIRST BORN’S TOOTH|
|Classification: Immense One Relic (Severed Gaze).|
|One of nine blades carved from a crystallized fragment of THE Sleepless Fiend’s own peripheral sight. Forged so his eldest progeny could observe across the Folds of existence on his behalf, it perceives across THE SEAM and severs lifeforms. It has never been drawn by its creator.|
Noah kept moving, his eyes analyzing the dark script drifting within the blue-gold bubble.
"What happens if I devour the Narrative of an Immense One?" Noah asked, directing his thought into the illusory ring resting against his finger. "Consuming the Existential Narrative of nine Descendants granted an increase of Provenance and deepened my standing across multiple metrics. What would a weapon carrying the sliver of an architect yield?"
The ring took its toll, drawing a fraction of his authority.
|-0.1 PROVENANCE ESSENCE|
The records-cluster within the illusory band vibrated with sharp, derisive amusement.
|It yields an early burial, O Chance of Chances.|
Atlas’s words arrived flat and dry, stripped of any theatrical warmth.
|Do not confuse a sentence with the mouth that spoke it. Those nine First Borns were Descendants. They carried blood, instructions, and borrowed weight, but their Existential Narrative belonged to them alone. When you ate their dreams, you consumed a branch. It made you heavier, and because their depth was within your reach, you could digest that shit without choking.|
|These relics are entirely different. They carry fragments of the Weave itself. The Dimensionality of an Immense One is not a higher tier of what you hold, it is a completely separate cloth. If you attempt to swallow a sliver of the Fiend’s actual Narrative, your Provenance will not absorb it. You cannot digest it. The conceptual mass will sit inside your foundation as a jagged wedge of iron, tearing through your inner architecture while it radiates across every fold of existence.|
|It is poison that glows in the dark. It paints your entire presence in blinding phosphorescence, shouting to him as he is listening across the expanse: hey, I am right here. Trash them as quickly as possible. Drop them into the silk and keep moving.|
...!
Noah thought for a moment before he sighed.
With a single flick of his will, the blue-gold dream bubble dissolved.
The obsidian bindings and the pale crimson blade fell away, tumbling into the endless cascade of falling silk. They drifted down into the deep, turbulent nebulas of the Chrysalis, their lingering weight swallowed by the timeless expanse as Noah accelerated away without looking back once.
He continued to move for minutes, crossing unmeasured expanses of the conceptual domain. Caution was not cowardice, it was simply the prerequisite for continuing to exist! He had been far too tyrannical for his own good recently as he...was Quintessential, but he was not invincible!
As he traversed the thinning drift of silk, his chest resonated. THE Dreamer’s Scale hummed with a quiet, steady frequency, attuning his perception to the subtle shifts in the surrounding medium.
Ahead, resting beneath the shade of a petrified conceptual bough, another soft luminescence caught his eye.
It was another Common Dream Gu.
This one was slightly smaller, translucent azure ripples pulsing through its rounded shell as it lazily filtered the ambient concept of dreams. Sensing the resonance of THE Dreamer’s Scale, the small creature did not scatter. It simply drifted, regarding him with calm, multifaceted eyes.
Noah reached out, letting a strand of blue-gold dream essence curl around the creature. It nestled against his palm, accepting the warmth, and he drew it into his internal realm alongside the four others.
Most of them truly seemed to exist with nature as they showed no aggression. These insects were wondrous things!
At this time, the architecture of THE Chrysalis began to shift.
The falling silk thinned until it vanished entirely. The dry nebulas of the Dream region receded into the distance, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming moisture that was not water, but liquid starlight.
The surroundings opened into a vast cosmic ocean.
Waves of deep violet and shimmering silver rolled across millions of Gigaparsecs, surging with the heavy concepts of Weight and Memory. Immense phosphorescent currents drifted through the depths, illuminating vast oceanic trenches carved from crystallized epochs. It was an aquatic expanse of raw stellar essence, where the pressure of ancient records pressed down with the weight of uncounted stars.
In the distance, suspended within a slow-moving whirlpool of golden light, floated a colossal mountain-reef. It stretched for thousands of miles, built from petrified stellar coral, calcified bone of forgotten leviathans, and dense mineral crusts that absorbed the rolling currents.
Noah descended through the shimmering waves without causing a ripple, diving deep into the interior of the floating reef. He slipped into a cavernous hollow shielded by thick layers of fossilized coral and crystalline stone.
He exhaled, the tension that had gripped his body since the descent of THE Unpaid Collector finally receding into a cold, steady equilibrium.
Inside his Provenance Realm, five Common Dream Gu hovered in a gentle spiral around the central river of light. Their soft luminescence mingled with the blue-gold hills, their small dreams of warmth and peace adding a subtle, stabilizing tranquility to the sovereign domain.
He summoned his status.
|VERITAS: 108|
|PROVENANCE: 115|
|POTENTIA: INFINITE|
|PONDUS: 104|
|OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 135|
His attributes held firm in the Seam, anchored by the weight of nine devoured Narratives and the unspent Causes he had claimed.
The illusory band on his finger pulsed with renewed clarity, the presence of Atlas resonating within the quiet sanctuary of the reef.
|This place should be THE Tide,| Atlas said, his tone carrying the calm assurance of someone stepping into his own forge. |Weight and Memory govern this water. It blunts stray perceptions and dampens the tremors of the outside continuum. Nothing should interrupt us here.|
Noah looked down at his palm, where the very first Common Dream Gu he had found, the clean one that dreamed only of being left alone in the warmth, manifested in a soft coil of blue-gold light.
|Take the little one,| Atlas said, the records-cluster humming with anticipation. |The one that wished for warmth. We are going to teach it how to be an Elseengine heart.|
WAA!
Noah looked at the small lifeform resting quietly against his skin. It had simple Dreams. He would incorporate it into his grand and Infinite Dream!