Chapter 5952: Regeneration!
Chapter 5952: Regeneration!
It was not every day that a Shard of IT fell out of the sky and stopped in midair above a man’s mighty hoe, and Noah had stood in the middle of his half-planted row for a long moment afterward, staring up at the hole it had burned through the snowing clouds.
Was being connected to existence so grand now that the things he wanted simply dropped out of the sky for him? Then he had looked down at the hoe in his hand, humming quietly and a little too innocently, and he had known exactly who the culprit was.
The hoe was changing. He had felt it for a while now, a small and growing awareness inside the five pieces of IT stitched together in his hands, something that noticed things, and wanted things, and had apparently decided to go and fetch one of them on its own. He did not think about it too hard, because it seemed to mean well, and because his Shinjitsu had already reached out to the Shard and taken the thick Narrative wrapped around it and sent all of it toward his own power. If the gain was large enough to lift him a step higher, that was all the better.
|Narrative absorbed from a Shard of IT.|
|Your Shinjitsu has directed it to THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree.|
|Branch of Dreams: Level 3 to Level 4.|
|Branch of Nightmares: Level 3 to Level 4.|
|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 3 to Level 4.|
|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 3 to Level 4.|
|A new flower has bloomed on each Branch. Flowers: 4 to 8.|
|Narrative Walls built from your own Narrative: up to 4.|
|Narrative Wall 5: forming.|
|A fifth Shard of IT has joined your mighty Hoe.|
...!
He looked up at the bar above his head. It was no longer a single line of light but a thick, layered thing now, four full bars of obsidian-gold stellar light stacked one on top of another and burning steadily in the snow, with a fifth one beginning to fill on top of them, thin and pale and growing a little at a time out of his own story.
The label above it read |Narrative Wall- 5x(6%)|, and when he looked at it for long enough, he could feel each wall as a weight standing between his Dream and everything else in existence.
He kept looking at it, and the longer he looked, the more he thought about what it actually was and what would happen to it in a real fight. Something would hit him, and the walls would take the blow, and the light in them would drain away bar by bar until they were gone, and then the hand would be on his Dream again. That was the part he did not like at all.
But...
"They shouldn’t just be gone," Noah said aloud, to the snow and the sapling and the hoe, his eyes still on the bar. "If a wall breaks, it shouldn’t simply stop existing, as if I never built it at all. My Narrative is part of me, and it works the same as my Infinite Dream does, because no matter how much of it gets taken, it always comes back."
He lifted a hand toward the bar and closed it slowly into a fist. "So once a wall has been built, it stays built. If something tears it down, the wall is still there, only empty, and it fills itself back up again over time, on its own, whether I’m paying attention to it or not. That’s how it should work."
HUUM!
...!
What he wanted was very simple, when he put it plainly. If he had five walls and something powerful tore through every one of them, he would still have five walls afterward, only empty, and those five walls would slowly fill themselves back up without him having to do anything at all. He wanted his walls to heal.
His existence began to buzz. It started deep in his Dreaming Human Origin and spread outward through him, and then his Dreaming Human Origin moved, flowing across every part of his existence, searching for whatever piece of him could make a thing like that possible. It passed through his Dreams and his Nightmares and the grey place where his fire had dimmed, and then it stopped, and it brought something up into the light.
It was his Infinity. There was Dialetheic Infinity, which let a thing be two opposite things at once, and Adynatic Infinity, which let impossible things happen anyway, and Noetic Infinity, which ran through thought itself, and at the heart of all of them was the simplest idea of all, that some things never run out.
His Dreaming Human Origin held his Infinity up and focused on it, and then it reached out and connected it to two other things. The first was THE Unstriving Current, the part of him that moved with existence instead of against it and never stopped moving, and the second was his Shinjitsu, the part of him that knew what was truly his and would not let it be taken away for long. Infinity, the Current, and Shinjitsu lit up inside him one after another, three bright points of light, and lines of blue-gold and obsidian-gold ran between them until they were joined together in a single shining triangle.
|Your Infinity, THE Unstriving Current, and your Shinjitsu have been connected.|
|A new capability has been added to your Narrative Walls: THE Endless Retelling.|
|Narrative Walls that have been built will no longer disappear when they are broken. They will remain, empty, and refill on their own.|
|THE Endless Retelling has grown as a Sub-Branch of THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 1.|
|Regeneration: one hundredth of a Narrative Wall per second.|
|Sub-Branches require far less Narrative to raise than Branches.|
...!
Beside him, at the base of the small blue-gold sapling, a thin new shoot pushed out of the glass bark between two of the Branches, much smaller than any of them, with a single pale leaf on it that glowed with the same three colors as the triangle inside him. Noah looked at the shoot, and then at the prompts, and his eyes shone, the gold one and the obsidian one both bright at once. Above his head, the bar pulsed, slowly and steadily, and for a moment it seemed almost alive.
One hundredth of a wall every second meant that a broken wall could rebuild itself completly in less than two minutes, and that was only at the very first Level. If the Sub-Branch was easier to raise than the main Branches, and he poured his Narrative into it, how fast could it get? Could his walls one day refill faster than even a truly powerful being could tear them down, so that he could simply stand there and take everything they had while his defenses kept rising back up behind every blow?
Could he finally be a tank, if he played this right? He smiled at that thought, and then he turned and looked out over the long rows of planted corpses stretching across his farm, every one of them a little more Narrative waiting to be drunk. He leaned on his hoe in the snow and waited, and he did not have to wait very long.
Beside the sapling, the faint gold and silver shape of Lygara stirred. It had been lying still and faint for so long that Noah almost did not notice at first, but then the light inside her grew brighter, and her long body tightened and filled, and her eyes, closed since the ruins of the Maze, fluttered once and then opened.
|The Risen Dream of THE First Gu of Destiny has actualized.|
|Lygara has awakened.|
|Immensity: Half-Unfathomable.|
|She lives within your Dream as a Risen Dream. Her full Immensity and Narrative can be reclaimed in time.|
...!
Noah nodded at her with a light smile and waited. Her eyes moved slowly over the farm, the snow, the sapling, the rows of mounds, the man in the straw hat, and for a while they buzzed with a confused and wandering light, a mind waking up and trying to remember where it had been. Then, little by little, the old wisdom came back into them, and she looked at him, and he could see her rememberng the hand, and the threads snapping, and his silence.
"You did not tell it anything," she said softly. "About Lifthrasir. Thank you, Dreamer."
Noah shrugged a little and leaned on his hoe. "Such is existence," he said. "We’re somewhere else now, on a farm, and I’m trying to live out my dream here. I can reach Lifthrasir whenever I need to, so that’s taken care of."
He tilted his head at her. "What will you do?"
Lygara was quiet for a long moment, looking around at the black-gold soil and the three rivers and the snow falling gently over all of it. "Can I stay on your farm for a while?" she asked at last. "I will try to reclaim my full Immensity."
Noah smiled and nodded, and as he did, her Risen Dream buzzed and shifted, drawing in on itself until she was no longer a long winding creature at all, but a small and beautiful humanoid insect, delicate and slender, with gold and silver wings folded at her back and a quiet, ancient face.
She looked down at her new hands with mild surprise, and Noah, still smiling, pointed up at the great armored body of the Ancient Gu beetle that still hung in the snowing sky above the farm.
"Oh, and would you like to help me build a little house on the farm," he asked, "with the remains up there?"
Lygara blinked up at the beetle, and then at him, and then she nodded, and thin bright strands of destiny rose out of her and drifted up toward the great dark shell. The Verdant Regard went on working quietly by the rivers, the snow went on falling over the rows, and Noah’s small farm in its quiet corner of the Carcosa had gained another worker. For a little while, everything there was calm, and very peaceful.
For a little while.
---
Then Noah blinked. A message arrived in his mind from very far away, carried along one of the old threads of his Infinity that he had once left in an old friend, and the voice in it was one he knew well.
"Big guy," it said, "I’ve come across something that I can already tell is far out of my depth, by many, many scales and depths. This might be right up your weavings."
...!
It was THE Great Usurper, Eckert!
Along the thread, a flow of information came pouring into Noah’s Infinity, a path through the dark that ran out of THE Infinite Carcosa entirely and on across existence, and Noah followed it with his eyes closed until it led him to a far and distant place in THE Undefined Gaps!