Chapter 5843: Existence Wants You Dead! II
Chapter 5843: Existence Wants You Dead! II
THE Faceless Immense One lifted one long, too-thin hand, and closed it into a fist.
The storm stopped!
Every flake of snow hung where it was. The black and white walls of the blizzard froze mid-turn. And then, from the edges inward, the whole Evergrave began to fade. The open ruin of the tunnels went grey and thin, and the frozen city with it. The dead white sun dimmed to a smudge, and the smudge went out.
Noah felt the ground leave his feet.
For a moment, there was nothing. Nineteen Immense Ones hung in a dark without edges, and with them, Noah and his sixteen Risen Dreams, and the Lanterns with their glass beads, and the Ember-Keeper with its guttering flame.
Then a new place began to come in around them!
It came in slowly, and it came in real. More real than the Evergrave. More real than anything Noah had felt since his evolution. Every grain of it pressed against his senses with a weight beyond anything he had felt before, as if existence itself were insisting: this happened. This is true. This stands beyond argument.
Walls rose first. High grey walls, ringed with metal, soldiers pacing on top of them with heavy rifles across their backs.
Then a monolith, rising out of the center of an enclosure.
Blue!
A tall blue stone, smooth and square, with a door-like shape cut into its face.
Noah stared at it!
The monolith was vaster than the Rim-City now. It rose up past sight, its blue sides stretching away for light years, as if the whole place had been taken and enlarged until it could hold nineteen Immense Ones and a dead man’s army without anyone touching the walls. But everything else was exact. Every crack in the walls.
Every scuff on the soldiers’ boots. A dented metal sign by the entrence, half its paint peeled away. The smell of gun oil and dust and nervous sweat.
The smell of fresh...mana.
And down at the bottom of it all, at its true, small size, a young man in a cheap jacket was showing his ID card to a bored guard at the gate.
THE Faceless Immense One’s voice leaked out of the seam in its face, soft and thin.
|"Does anything seem familiar?"|
Noah stayed silent.
He was watching the young man walk in.
That jacket, he knew. He had bought it at a market stall a while before, because it had a lot of pockets. And how that young man was holding his shoulders, trying to look like he belonged there and failing completely.
He knew that face. It had been his!
His Dream reached out to the place on its own, and the prompts came back strange.
|You stand within a record of existence.|
|Its source: the Weavings of Existence. Everything that passes through existence leaves a record. This is yours.|
|Here, the past runs exactly as it ran. It can be watched. It cannot be touched.|
...!
The young man walked past a group of hunters checking their gear, and one of them laughed.
"Oy, is that kid thinking about going alone?"
"Bro, another one with a death wish."
"Just ignore him, who knows, maybe he’s one of those prodigies that can only be in an F rank dungeon? Haha."
Noah heard them as clearly as he had heard them then. Every word. Every laugh. The young man kept his eyes on the blue door and pretended he had heard none of it.
High above, around the edge of the enclosure, nineteen Immense Ones looked down at this small scene. The Lineage heads shifted, confused, their vast cold shapes leaning in to see. THE Choir-Mother’s song had gone quiet. THE Drowned Margrave’s hundred dead mouths hung open. THE Warden of the Heart stood perfectly still. And THE Gaunt Regent watched the young man with its thin, polite smile.
The young man put his hand on the blue door, and vanished in a flash of light!
The record followed him!
The enclosure dissolved and re-formed around them as a cavern. A vast one now, its ceiling lost far overhead, its stone walls stretching away for light years, every rock and puddle and drip of water exactly where it had ben. And in the middle of it, small and alone, the young man stood with his heart pounding, looking at two black apes a meter tall.
Noah watched himself lift a hand!
[Fireball].
A ball of fire, small and orange and bright, flew across the cavern. Then a second. Then a third. They burst against the apes’ faces, and the apes screamed and fell.
The young man let out a shaky breath, and Noah watched a grin spread across his face that he had forgotten he had ever worn.
|"Even if you take all your records into yourself,"| THE Faceless Immense One said softly, |"existence always has records of you. Because you... passed through existence."|
The young man knelt beside the dead apes and picked up a small glistening stone, smaller than a pigeon’s egg. He turned it over in his fingers, looked around quickly as if someone might take it from him, and tucked it carefully into his backpack.
|"Do you remember this?"| the Faceless Immense One asked. |"Your first dungeon. Right?"|
Noah said nothing.
|"I have taken us across existence and time, to where you first began."| The seam in its face tilted toward the small figure below. |"We exist, and don’t exist, in this Dimensionality of existence. We exist right now... and we also exist next to your weak self, years ago."|
The young man moved on down the cavern. Three apes came screeching. Three fireballs met them.
|"If only the past could be altered,"| the Faceless Immense One said, and for the first time, something in its thin voice sounded almost hungry. |"I would snuff you out back then. Right there. One small hand, one small fire, and nothing after."|
Its long fingers twitched toward the young man.
They passed through him like light through glass. The young man kept walking.
|"But this is only records,"| it said. |"Records you could not keep away from existence. Existence has told me all about you, Osmont."|
The seam widened.
|"A mere lowly thing calling itself a Hunter. So young. And now you think you can fuck around with things that have been going on for Ages? What arrogance. I thought you belonged to some big Legacy or was involved by those who carved Existence out ages ago. But...just a thing that didnt even have any authority in a normal timescale? Man."|
...!
Floor after floor went by!
The record ran on exactly as it had run, and nineteen Immense Ones watched it with him. The young man cleared the first floor, then ran down winding stone steps to the second. Apes came in batches of three and five, and he burned them before they came within four meters. Second floor. Third. Fifth. All the way to the ninth.
THE Faceless Immense One narrated it as it went, quietly, as if reading from a book.
|"Look at it. Counting stones in a bag."| It leaned down over the young man as he scooped up another [Core].
|"Existence remembers. It remembers you thinking every one of these was worth a thousand of your coins. It remembers you working out sixty thousand of them, in under thirty minutes, and your little heart beating so fast you pinched yourself."|
The young man pinched his own arm and laughed out loud, alone in a cavern full of dead apes.
|"It remembers you hoping you were not too full of yourself."| The voice turned, very slightly, amused. |"How did that turn out?"|
On the ninth floor, before a great stone door, the young man stopped, threw his head back, and shouted.
"WAAH!"
The sound echoed through a cavern now light years wide, small and bright and triumphant, and every Immense One in the circle heard it.
The Lineage heads looked at one another. One of them, the frost-veiled Bride, turned her face toward Noah, and under the veil, something in her expression changed.
The young man went into the boss room! A huge ape roared at him and charged. Five fireballs met it. It fell. A green crystal rose from the floor in a flash of light, and beside the dead ape, among a few small stones, lay a thin book. The young man picked it up and stared at the cover, and his mouth fell open.
[Minor Heal]!
Then he sat down on the cold floor of the boss room in front of the green crystal, his backpack in his lap, and stared at nothing, and thought.
|"A blank number,"| the Faceless Immense One whispered. |"A thing that should have run dry, and kept going. And you sat right there, small and scared and greedy, and you asked yourself: does it really never runs out? Is my Focus, is my Mana endless? Infinite?"|
The young man’s hand went to his chest, as if his heart had jumped.
|"That was the moment,"| it said. |"That was the first time you reached for something that was never meant to be yours. And you have been reaching ever since."|
It straightened, vast and pale above the small figure on the floor.
|"Existence showed me where that reaching ends. It ends with the Caretaker free and every chain I hold broken. So I have brought you here, to see where it began, before I make sure it goes no further."|
...!
Noah stood very still!
Something in his gold eyes had changed. The calm was still there. But under it, something heavy had come up.
He looked at his younger self sitting on the cold floor of a boss room, a cheap backpack in his lap, a cheap book in his hands, a stupid, beautiful, terrifying idea blooming across his face.
He remembered that idea, and how it had felt.
Then he lifted one hand, and his Risen Dreams came to him.
They gathered close around him in the vast grey record of the cavern. The thirteen giants of the Chase, their ribs glowing blue-gold. Their scion. The skinless Huntsman on its horse of white bones. The golden shadow of the panda, settling at his back like a hill. And around them, uncalled, came the Lanterns, two thousand three hundred thin grey dead with their glass beads glowing, and the Ember-Keeper in the middle of them, its flame burning higher than it had since the storm.
They ringed him. All of them!
Noah looked up at THE Faceless Immense One, and at the eighteen Immense Ones around it, and spoke.
"They exist here," he said. "And far away."
He looked down at the young man on the floor.
"I can see him. I can see him sitting there, and I can see him walking out of this dungeon an hour from now with a bag full of stones, and I can see him in other apocalypses after this one, and in a frozen underworld, and on a plain of snow with a dead Immense One under his feet. All of it at once. It’s all still there. It’s all... still happening."
The record ran on around them, the young man still sitting, still thinking, still reaching.
"For you to do all this," Noah said, "to drag nineteen of you across existence and time just to show me where I started... means I posed a great threat to you."
He looked back up at the seam in its face.
"And as unfair as existence is... adversity always has a path forward. It’s always been that way. That boy down there knew it before he knew anything else."
He smiled, very slightly.
"It might be a bit painful. But I want to say that maybe... you have only accelerated your downfall to me."
Around him, the Risen Dreams straightened. The Lanterns lifted their glass beads. The Ember-Keeper’s flame blazed red and gold.
"You can’t change the past," Noah said. "But... you may also have a hard time changing the future!"