Chapter 5734: Boundless Dreams!
Chapter 5734: Boundless Dreams!
While one of him sat on a throne in a dream and talked to an old friend, another of him was at work!
This body sat on golden sand, on a shore inside THE Infiniverse. An endless sea ran out from it in slow blue-gold swells, and behind him lay island farmland so quiet and so full!
He thought about his people while he worked.
His children. His mother. The Queens. The ones who had walked beside him across his journey. The Emperor Penguin, Erikson, Titano, Ul’moreth, Kazuhiko, all the rest.
They were technically safe in THE Infiniverse all this time.
But safe was not the same as growing. Shelter kept a thing alive. It did not make a thing strong.
In the cass things went wrong, their Dimensionality could not be so weak that all then could be broken with a single foot coming down!
Of course, he would not just give them power. He thought of the jade lifeform in a story Atlas told, who had never once failed and shattered the first time he met a wall, and Noah had no intention of building a house full of jade lifeforms.
He would give them a place to earn it.
He called the full weight of his Provenance up out of himself and let it pour onto the sand.
Infinite Sanguine Mana came with it, crimson and gold, and the eight elements turned in the air over his hands, hydrogen through neodymium in their strict order. Nine droplets of Distilled Cause Essence condensed beside them. And into all of it he threaded the two things that made this his and no one else’s: THE Precept of the Waking Dream, and the fresh gold script of the Foundational Narrative Inscription running down his forearm, feeding the whole working a foundation that would not crack under its own size.
He began to build.
HUUM!
It was not a shelter, and it was not a weapon. It was a place to live a life in!
Time inside would not answer to time outside. A day out here on the shore would be a hundred years in there. That was the baseline.
And what they earned in there would be real when they woke!
A dream is usually a thing you wake up from and leave behind. Not this one! Built on his Provenance, mortared with Distilled Cause Essence, fed by his Infinite Sanguine Mana, the dream would hold onto whatever a sleeper forged inside it, every insight, every rank of Trueness, every scrap of Dimensionality won through struggle, and when the dreamer opened their eyes, the dream would hand it to their waking body and make it true.
HUUM!
|THE SOVEREIGN PROVENANCE DREAM ENGINE has been engineered.|
|A place to live, struggle, and advance. Power forged within crystallizes without on waking. Time within is decoupled from the continuum.|
The working finished, and it rose off the sand.
A chrysalis of blue-gold light, enormous, faceted, turning slow above the shore, its surface running with the same script that ran down his arm. It hummed!
Time.
Again and again, time was a factor as another body had already been sent out to head towards an Atlas Elsedimension where he would further throw himself into the weavings of time!
Noah looked at his design for a moment. Then he closed his eyes and called his people.
They came onto the golden sand one after another, and the shore filled.
His mother came, and Henry, and Seo-yeon. Adelaide. Barbatos. Eon, Naldine and the other Queens. Kazuhiko and Titano and Ul’moreth and the Great Beyonder, and behind them a long tide of others, every face he had gathered across a long climb!
Even the ones who were more record than flesh now, the weavings Oppenheimer, Commander Feng, a dozen more, took shape on the sand and stood among the living!
Noah sat before all of them as no pressure rolled off him. No aura pushed anyone back. He was only a man! Only a Human Dreamer!
He told them calmly about the Immensity all around them.
The Dimensionality where a monster could be standing right before you...and you wouldn’t even be able to perceive it. He told of Primeval Ones, Descendants, Provenance Lifeforms, THE Immense Ones and everything he was shielding them from!
"I have kept you safe," he said. "I would keep you safe forever if safe were enough. It may not be enough."
Then he showed them the chrysalis.
"I have Dreams, but so do you all. Dream an endless and glorious Dream in here. Your own lives, your own troubles, your own enemies, your own long roads. A hundred years in there for a day out here, more if your existence can bear more. Whatever you win in the dream, you keep when you wake."
"There is a library inside, everything I have ever learned or gathered, arts, techniques, and THE Infinite Scales. Study them if you like. Follow them if they fit. Or throw them out and build something that is only yours. I don’t much care which. I care that you come back able to stand next to me instead of behind me."
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Kazuhiko, THE Emperor Penguin, and Erikson stepped forward as they did not ask a single question!
RAA!
They walked to the chrysalis and entered in a flash of brilliance!
Henry, Seo-yeon, and others followed!
After that, the others slowly went as their eyes shone brilliantly!
A hairy Ul’moreth, yet another one of Noah’s Teachers, looked at Noah in a face hidden by boundlless obsidian gold hair as he also disappeared. THE Big Stepper made a move as he might make something out of THE First Tongue more than Noah did!
Noah’s mother was the last to go as she came up to him and floated beside him.
"I am already living my grandest Dream, but I will see what more is out there. After all, I am the origin of...your Infinite Dream. If I get serious, could I make something grand happen?"
His mother smiled as if she were joking as she let the threads of dreams wrap around her too!
Noah couldn’t help but smile.
The chrysalis hummed, and millions of fine threads spun up around the dreamers, weaving the shape of the lives they were about to live.
Out in the waking part of THE Infiniverse, their bodies were laid into warm pools of Infinite Sanguine Mana, and their cells began to drink.
Noah stood over them for a little while.
THE Infiniverse manifested at his side, and Ruination beside her as they were quiet.
Noah looked at the chrysalis a while longer, at the turning threads, at his people!
Then he stepped back and left it to the two of them.
"Tell me..." he said, "when the first one opens their eyes."