Chapter 5768: Legacy! V

"There is cold in the chaos now," Moriarty said.

"The descending cold has soaked into the flows of existence themselves, and some of the information drifting out there is no longer merely useless. It is frozen. It is destructive. Reach into the flow carelessly now, cast your sieve without the discipline, and you may pull in a sliver of The Long Night itself, a shard of that killing cold, and draw it straight into the heart of your budding Root. And a Root is a fragile thing. It is a seed, cracked open, soft and new. The cold that the mightiest Immense Ones can barely hold at bay would freeze a young Root solid in an instant, and there is no coming back from that. So the Art was always hard. Now it is hard, and it will kill you if your discipline slips."

He looked at Noah steadily. "I would not blame you for waiting. Many do. They grow the slow way and hope to outlast the winter. Some of them even manage it."

"Show me the Art," Noah said.

Moriarty regarded him a moment silently.

"Very well. Watch closely. And do not flinch."

The octopus rose.

And the Immensity came off him!

Noah’s existence pulsed as grand Immensity bloomed!

It was no lesser than THE SLEEPLESS FIEND! Well, likely greater as this mosntrous being was likely a fiend too.

The hall trembled with it! The rivers of authority bent! The floating Domains shuddered on their strings, and Noah understood, all at once and with perfect clarity, that the affable creature who had told him he owed nothing and offered him a seat of light was one of the most terrifying existences he had ever stood beside, and had simply chosen, out of respect, to be gentle about it!

From that unfurled Immensity, Moriarty conjured the Art.

It bloomed in the air between them, an Inscription, intricate beyond intricate, a vast and terrible methodology of interlocking weavings that turned slowly in the snow, and Noah looked at it and saw the whole shape of it at once, the reaching, the rejecting, the sieve held against the ocean, the discipline that pulled a single sliver of Immensity across all of existence and time and let nothng else through.

It was the hardest thing he had ever been shown. It was also, he saw in the same breath, beautiful. Why was it so beautiful?

Moriarty extended it toward him, and Noah reached out, and accepted it.

|You are viewing the weavings and understanding of THE NARRATIVE IMMENSE INSCRIPTION ART: IMMEGAGENESIS.|

...!

Understanding the thing before him was not easy. But Noah was a dreamer, and dreaming was how he understood anything.

Profundity and reverie moved through his mind as he turned over everything the octopus had said, the idea of reaching out across every kind of existence to gather slivers of a thing he could not even have perceived an hour ago. He was a Provenance Lifeform. He generated everything he held, made it himself, and now his Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin generated his Provenance and his growth from within without asking anything of anyone!

But if a being wanted that growth faster, it seemed, it could reach outside itself and pull.

And when he came to the methodology of the Art, he found the shape of it familiar, and almost smiled.

It was an inscription.

It felt like the engineering Atlas had been drilling into him this whole time, and yes, it was intricate, layered with countless seams of Dimensionality turning inside it, a structure grander than anything Atlas had shown him. So what?!

He had carved inscriptions before. His body flickered, and infinite illusory pages flowed off him and into the floating Inscription of IMMEGAGENESIS, reading it, tracing it, learning it, and then his existence did what his existence did best.

It copied.

Beside the Art Moriarty had conjured, a second one began to form. Noah recreated its entire structure from nothing, layer by layer, every seam and layer and turning of Dimensionality, an identical Inscription blooming in the drifting snow beside the original. Then he waved his hand, and the new one flowed to him, and he closed his fingers around it, and his existence shone with resplendence as he took it.

He could feel Moriarty watching him.

The octopus looked at him intently, the small neat spectacles catching the light.

But Noah revealed nothing of himself. He simply sat down in the snow, and turned his attention inward, because his mind was full now, full of the way to spread himself across existence, which was all this Art really was.

IMMEGAGENESIS took the state he had reached in his transformation and sharpened it into a technique. He had learned, becoming what he now was, that existence was a set of boxes he could occupy at once, in different places, in different times, all together.

The Art took that raw ability and made it a craft. It let an existence stretch itself across those boxes on purpose, into layer after layer of reality, and perceive all the boundless information flowing through each one, the slivers of Immensity hidden in the roar of everything, and then reach out and pull them home.

It was, he thought, like a man learning to read a whole library at once. Not one book at a time, page by page, but every book in every room, open and legible in the same instant, and the trick of it was to find the single true sentence you needed in all those millions of pages and lift it out without carrying away the rest.

And to implement it, he was simply writing another inscription into his existence. But this one needed no Gu, no elements, none of the materials Atlas had taught.

This inscription asked only that its methodology be paired with a Root of Immensity, and then it would begin to cycle through the whole of an existence, reaching out for the boundless weavings of information across the deep.

So Noah reached out.

And.

HUUM!

His head rose, and from his eyes there erupted beams of golden-blue light, because the density of it nearly overwhelmed him. The information came flooding in the instant he opened, a booming roar of everything at once, more than any mind was built to hold, crashing into him from every layer and box of existence he had streched himself across!

His existence buzzed with the pressure of it, and he spoke to himself!

"My weavings are grand," he said. "No amount of information can overwhelm me. This is the first time I have met this Art. But I have always met this Art. I have always cast my weavings across the bounds of information and existence. I am proficient in this, because I have always been proficient in this. I am. I am. I AM!"

BOOM!

His existence stabilized.

And as it steadied, invisible threads erupted all around him and became visible, endless fine strings of light unspooling out of his seated figure and stretching away in every direction, across layer after layer of Dimensionality, out into box after box of existence.

Every thread was information. Every string a line cast into a different room of the boundless library, drinking what flowed there.

And at the very core of his existence, at his Root, he felt what all that information carried.

Cold.

It carried a tremendous, terrible cold. Frost crawled across his existence as the threads drew their harvest home, and beside him Moriarty stirred.

"Take it slow," the octopus said, and there was caution in it now. "Many have to be careful, and The Long Night has made this far worse than it ever was. You could do irreparable harm to your existence. You could freeze your very Root. Take it slow."

He was told to take it slow.

Noah did not take it slow.

As his senses spread through the boundless weavings, he cut apart and ignored the lifeforms that pressed on him like a storm, the churning weight of it filling this Domain and every Domain around it. It might have been information about others who had just formed their Roots in the Legacy. It might have been the weavings of full Immense Ones.

He did not care about any of it. He wanted the slivers of Immensity, the hidden ones, the fine loose fragments of the thing his Root was trying to become.

He was demanding with his own stretched existence, which felt now as though it spread out without end. Show yourself to me. Expose yourself. Open wide!

His existence buzzed as he screamed it inwardly, bellowed it into the roar of all that information.

And yet.

He could not sense a single thing that named itself Immensity. Not one sliver. Not one loose fragment of the thing he had reached across all of existence to find.

He frowned, and outwardly his seated figure fluttered with the endless light of illusory pages and the narratives of an infinite dream, and he said it aloud.

"I cannot sense any slivers of Immensity."

...!

The words snapped Moriarty’s eyes wide, and a sudden somberness moved into them.

"Nothing?" the octopus said. "Some small ones should be drifting even through this Domain. Your existence should have stretched itself far already, farther than most ever manage on a first attempt. And you... sense nothing at all?"

...!

Noah spread his senses out again, further, harder, into every box and layer he could reach.

And he felt only the endless blue-white wave of the cold.

Frost gathered thicker on his body as he reached, and he found The Long Night and nothing else. He visualized his endless strings of information, every one of them, all those fine lines cast across existence, and every single one carried the same thing back to him. Layers of snow. Layers of cold.

He looked down the length of all those countless threads, and where there should have been the whole churning wealth of existence, there was only winter, drifting down every line at once.

Nothing else.

"Was I...mistaken?" Moriarty said quietly beside him, in a deep and troubled voice.

Was he mistaken. Mistaken on what?

Noah did not ask. He did not care what the octopus meant. He reframed his focus and looked instead at the only thing he could sense at all.

The Long Night. The flakes of snow.

The cold.

It was so pervasive that it buried everything else, drowned out every other current of information, made it almost impossible to gaze at anything but itself. And Noah, sitting frozen in the falling snow with the whole of existence stretched out through him and nothing but winter coming back, turned the strangeness of that over, and asked himself the question underneath it.

What was this thing, that even Immense Ones felt it? That even Poona, who made two titans stand still with a smile, had to weave herself a coat of Immensity against it? What could reach past all of that?

And the thought came to him.

When it came to a thing that was truly immense, truly grand, then this cold, these endless particles of snow, were more immense than anything else in existence, right?

His existence went still.

What?

The cold that affected even Immense Ones was something more immense than them?

It was only a thought. He had only thought it. But the instant he thought it, he could not stop thinking it, could not unthink it, as he sensed the weavings of THE Long Night pouring down every thread and through every layer around him.

THUMP!

He felt the beat of his own heart, and a ridiculous, terrifying idea bloomed in him.

And a flicker of fear bloomed with it, because for all he had become, he was still human, and the idea was ridiculous!

But he felt possessed by his own intuition, the same intuiton that had never once led him wrong, and it did not care about the fear, and it opened his mouth for him.

"Come..." Noah said. "Come...COME!"

BOOM!

His existence opened itself.

His Osmontian Chorionic Gonadotropin opened wide, the infinite Root of him unfolding, and instead of reaching for the slivers of Immensity that would not show themselves, Noah reached for the only thing that would.

He pulled on the terrible cold. He pulled on the snow. He pulled on the Long Night itself, and dragged it toward his existence!

...!

And Moriarty, beside him, saw a thing that stopped even his ancient mind.

The snow moved.

All of it, at once, across the whole of the Domain, every falling flake and every drift of the descending cold turned as though a tide had been called, and it surged toward Noah’s small seated figure like an endless sea rushing to a single point, countless waves of white pouring in from every direction toward the one being in all of existence mad enough, or lost enough, or grand enough, to open his arms and call the winter home!