Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5128: THE Wyld! II

The primal forest of THE Wyld changed around them as they moved.

Noah perceived every shift of it in something close to slow motion, his Hadean Mind stretching the instants so that he could take each detail fully into himself.

The trees and leaves moved in winds that didn’t come from anywhere. The roots drank from Observable Force without ever seeming to need more.

He studied the plant life closely as they passed.

These plants, these ordinary plants of the ordinary underbrush, felt more indestructible than the defenses of THE Surface Depth entities at the lowest level of Vakochev’s First Scale. A shrub here would have survived blows that would have shattered beings whom he had once considered powerful.

It was fucking laughable!

The small lifeforms scattered as the three of them passed.

Critters darted between the roots. Glowing things no larger than his palm flickered through the underbrush. Each of them carried power that would have placed them as Surface Depth lifeforms anywhere else, and each of them ran from his party with the specific fear of creatures that recognized predators beyond their weight class.

He had explored many regions across his existence.

A Beast World with its wonder. Atlantis, the Demon World with its carved cruelty. The Cultivation World where mortals clawed upward through borrowed breakthroughs...

Every one of them had offered something, and every one of them had been worth the journey. But he had always found a particular joy in places like this, in vibrant ancient forests filled with wonders. They reminded him of his journey back to The Earliest Folds.

A place like this always scratched the itch of exploration!

He always felt, in such places, that he would grasp many more things if he only paid close enough attention.

And he was not staying still.

Just as Emotive was doing what she did with emotions, pulling information from feelings scattered across Observable Existence, he could tap into the Infinity permeating everything around them to read information of his own. Her method was more precise because emotions were individualized, each one belonging to a specific being or moment. His was broader. He had used his weavings of Undifferentiated Fate before to gather information about Alexander, but right now he used something simpler.

He tapped Infinity directly, without invoking the Civilization of Hunger or Undifferentiated Fate, and let flows of information pour into him from every direction.

The region began to map itself across his mind.

The Infinity swirling through this area carried signatures of every life form within it. Small creatures and large ones. Plants and streams. Pockets of denser authority where ancient presences had once passed through and left traces that hadn’t yet faded. He extended his senses outward slowly and then further, handling the influx with care as he familiarized himself with this practice.

He didn’t have Infinity alone.

This place was drenched in Observable Force. Rivers of it cascaded throughout the forest, golden and slow, their currents holding memories of their own that he could taste with the right angle of attention. He tapped into that as well, letting the two streams of information layer against each other in his perception. Infinity gave him the texture of what was alive. Observable Force gave him the shape of what had moved through. Together, they painted the region in a resolution that no single sense could have managed.

Slowly but surely, he familiarized himself with the practice as they went forward silently.

Emotive floated beside him with the reverent gaze he had chosen to ignore.

He looked toward Naldine instead.

Her expression held something nostalgic as she passed through what should have been, by blood and origin, her home.

They were in her home.

But her home was about to get very bloody.

Because at this moment, standing in the filtered light of an ancient forest that had birthed beings she could no longer call her own, Noah found himself realizing something about the Civilizational Holy War that had been quietly assembling in the background of his thoughts.

There were many possibilities to consider.

Yes, he could raise his people as much as he possibly could in the remaining hours. He could push them through accelerated Hadean transformations, put them through forced sparring against Beowulf and THE Living Elemental, refine their bones and organs until the selected 81 stood at capabilities that made their designated opponents regret the day their names had been written into the challenge. When the Holy War began in less than twenty hours, wonder would unfold across Observable Existence. He had already arranged that much.

But wonder wasn’t the only option.

In that remaining window, in those twenty hours, what if those chosen among the 81 Primordial Architects to face his people began dying left and right? What if they began vanishing from their resting places, their training grounds, their quiet moments of preparation? What if their corpses started appearing across THE Wyld? What if he simply carved rivers of blood across this forest until the list of his opponents shortened into something more manageable by the hour?

The only thing giving him caution right now was the connection to THE Gilded Ones.

Their presence here was real. If he acted too openly, too quickly, he would draw attention he wasn’t ready to handle. So he would do this carefully. He would get his hands on a few Primordial Architects first, the ones Emotive had already pinpointed as engineered subjects. He would see if he could grasp whatever modifications had been written into them. He would make his decisions from there.

He never had to play fair.

Not against beings who had selected his mother for a Civilizational Holy War.

Who the fuck did they think they were to bother Amelia Osmont?

A brief burst of rage buzzed around him, subtle enough that most would have missed it and sharp enough that Emotive didn’t miss it at all. She trembled nearby, her hair flashing through reds before she caught herself. He gazed at her sharply without slowing his pace, and she controlled her reaction with visible effort. He looked forward again.

They kept going.

The forest began to thin around them as they moved, the archaic trees spacing further apart, the canopy opening to let more of the strange sky filter through. The underbrush gave way to stone. The stone gave way to a ridge. And then the ridge gave way to nothing at all, because the land they had been crossing simply ended.

They broke past the final trees and emerged into open air.

The vast forest stretched behind them, an ancient sea of green and bronze. Ahead of them lay something else entirely.

Endlessly dotting silver and gold floating islands filled the vista before them.

They hung in the sky at every altitude his perception could track, and further beyond that, and further still. Some were small enough to stand on. Others held whole landscapes of their own, with their own rivers and their own forests and their own tiny weather systems. Between them, rivers of golden Observable Force stretched across the open air for gigaparsecs, flowing from island to island without obeying gravity, connecting the drifting landmasses in a vast lattice of slow bright currents.

Noah felt a tug of Infinity.

It pulled from somewhere deep within the field of floating islands, a specific pull toward a specific direction, the signature of the Primordial Architect who had forged THE Primordial Mycelia.

Emotive drifted closer to him and spoke.

"We’re close enough now that I can collapse the distance between emotions," she said, her voice holding careful restraint. "Their emotional signatures are within my reach. I can pull us across to their location through that channel if you want. It’s fast and it’s clean. They won’t feel us coming."

Noah shook his head calmly.

"I’ve toured enough of this region."

His voice held the steady measure of a decision already made.

"We’ll traverse across Infinity to arrive where we need to be. There is boundless Infinity here. There is boundless Infinity there. The channel between them is mine to open. Confirm the coordinates with me."

Emotive’s eyes brightened at being given a task rather than having her offer declined outright. She closed her eyes, pulled her emotional thread taut against the specific feeling of the target Primordial Architect, and fed the coordinates into Noah’s perception with the precision of someone who had been waiting for the chance to prove her usefulness again.

Noah affirmed the coordinates within himself.

He reached for Infinity.

Waves of blue Infinity surged around the three of them in response to his call, swirling outward in currents that formed an incandescent endless galaxy of light. The floating islands of THE Wyld distorted through the blue veil. The golden rivers of Observable Force between them bent and rippled. Emotive’s eyes widened with genuine marvel as she watched the Infinity respond to him with the ease of a river responding to gravity.

An instant later, they disappeared!

Boundless Infinity surrounded them.

Noah floated within it with his eyes cold and his body stretching out slightly, testing the feel of his Hadean structure against the pressure of the channel they were traversing. Emotive floated nearby with her hair cycling through awed blues. Naldine floated on his other side with her vihuela humming faintly, calm as always.

He turned his mind toward what waited on the other side.

If Primordial Architects were eggs, how easily could he crack them right now?

How cleanly could his Hadean Hands of Infinite Grasp wrap around their shells and apply the exact pressure required to open them without destroying what lay inside? How quickly could he peel back their weavings and study the engineering that THE Gilded Ones had written into them? How many could he break before the cracks added up to a pattern that someone upstream would notice?

He would see soon!