Chapter 5745: Change The Narrative! V
Chapter 5745: Change The Narrative! V
Noah’s awareness snapped back into the blue-gold clouds, and no time had passed at all.
The instant he had left was still the instant he returned to, frozen and stretched and waiting, and Calliope stood before him exactly as she had, the massive obsidian Runestone at her back, her eyes fixed on him and shining bright with a curiosity that had sharpened into something almost hungry!
She had seen the stone reach for him. She had seen the obsidian lightning climb his existence and the beams pour from his eyes. And she wanted, desperately, to know what he had been shown.
But Noah could not answer her, not yet, because his entire existence was BUZZING!
Something had changed in him! Something enormous and quiet had shifted in the deepest place of him, in the way he understood the very thing he had built his early climb upon, and he could feel it moving through him like a tide finding a new shore!
Infinity!
For his whole existence he had treated Infinity as a substance! A thing with weight and corners, an authority he had branded his identity onto, a power he wielded as though he had truly grasped it in his hands.
But the forest had shown him the truth!
No lifeform had ever grasped Infinity. No one had ever held it. It was only ever a word, a definition, a shape each existence poured into its own not-knowing! Lucy had not grasped Infinity when she scattered a million Dimensions to the fish. She had simply reached a definition so clear, so wholly and quietly HERS, that the infinite had poured from her hands like water because she had stopped trying to hold it and simply understood what it was to her!
And Noah understood, in that stretched and frozen instant, what he had to do.
He did not need to grasp Infinity. He never could have. Nobody could.
What he needed was a definition of his own, unique and clear and sufficient, his own understanding of the very thing that could not be understood!
His understanding of the edge. Of Impossibility.
His Infinite Sanguine Mana began to cycle!
Crimson-gold vitality surged and ran through the whole of his existense, through every one of his two hundred decillion quarks and as it moved, Noah gave it a task it had never been given! He poured his new understanding into it, his own fresh and hard-won definition of impossibility, and he let the Sanguine Mana carry that definition through his existence like ink spreading through water.
|You have witnessed a truth kept by a Hieroglyph Runestone: Infinity is not grasped. It is defined.|
|You have begun to reach a definition of unknown an impossibility that is wholly your own.|
Noah’s definition took shape as the Sanguine Mana carried it!
To Lucy, Infinity had been abundance, an endless joyful giving. To the earliest existences it had been the edge of their reckoning, a name for the dark past the center. But to Noah?
To THE Human Dreamer, who had lived a single life across time, who dreamed and made the dreams true, who authored narratives and stood outside the line of moments?
To Noah, Infinity was...a DREAM that did not end. His goals. His dream, ideals, purpose, loves, fears, hopes...his Everythings, that did not end.
That was his definition, his own and no one else’s, clear and sufficient and true to the whole of what he was! Infinity was not a substance and not an edge and not an abundance. It was a dream with no far wall, a story that could always add another page, a reverie that time could stretch forever without ever reaching its close! He did not need to hold the infinite. He only needed to dream a dream that never had to stop!
And his Infinite Sanguine Mana, carrying that definition, bled it directly into THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer!
HUUM!
The crimson-gold tide met the blue-gold depths of his Provenance, and the definition sank into it, and his Provenance DRANK it, understood it, and answered.
|Your definition of Infinity has been carried by your Infinite Sanguine Mana into THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer.|
|The two have merged. Your understanding of the infinite is now woven into the substance of your Provenance.|
...!
Something new began to rise in Noah’s existence!
His Provenance of THE Human Dreamer had always let him dream, and dream grandly, but now it took his definition of the infinite and wound it into its own foundation, and a new capability began to bloom, vast and quiet and terrible!
|A new understanding awakens within THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer.|
|THE INFINITE DREAM: your dreams no longer possess a far wall. A dream you begin need never end. A reverie may be extended without limit, a narrative continued without a final page, a stretched instant expanded toward a forever that answers only to you.|
|You do not hold Infinity. You dream it. And a dream that does not end is an infinite you will never lose. Even if you are killed within a Dream, so long as you paid an initial cost to initiate it, you can return even from collapse within that dream.|
Noah’s eyes blazed with blue-gold light!
This was it! He had spent his whole life carrying an infinite that was never truly his, an inherited definition of a thing he could not grasp, and now, at last, he held an infinite that belonged only to him, because he had stopped trying to hold it and had learned instead to Dream it.
And he felt like this was only the tip of the iceberg as if he was able to understand that edge even more, that impossibility...even more wonders would unfold!
But for now...
His Infinite Dreams could now run without end! A reverie could be stretched toward true forever! The 75-Provenance Infinite Dream he had opened to sit among the Immense Ones, the sanctuary of clouds, the stretched instant he stood in right now with Calliope frozen before him, all of it could now be extended without any wall at all!
And more! For if a dream need never end, then the power gained within a dream, the growth, the guiding, the authoring, all of it could compound across a dreaming that had no close.
His existence buzzed with the enormity of it, and somewhere far down he undertood that he had not merely learned a trick! He had changed what Infinity meant to him, and in changing the meaning, he had made the infinite finally, truly his!
The Runestone had said a path would light up before one who reached a definition of their own.
Noah could feel it now, faint and distant, somewhere at the edge of his newly infinite dreaming, a path beginning to glow, a road the stone had promised, leading somewhere unknown even to the stone itself.
He wouldn’t even need to gaze upon this stone again to try and follow that road as it had shown him what it had.
But that was for later.
For now, in a frozen instant that he could stretch toward forever, in a sanctuary of blue-gold clouds, with an obsidian Runestone at her back and her eyes shining brighter than ever, Calliope leaned in toward the man who had just walked out of a memory changed, and she opened her mouth to ask him what in all of existence he had just seen...!