Chapter 5899: Infiltration! I

Snow fell over THE Keepers of Existence, and Noah sensed every flake of it.

His authority stretched out with the Long Night over this region now, across the Keepers’ frozen gardens and their silent halls and their spiral palace, out over every place the blizzard touched. It felt like having a second pair of hands, very large and very cold, resting lightly over a whole Legacy.

He sat back on his new throne and looked at what lay in his palm.

It was the Caretaker’s Shard of IT.

He turned it over between his fingers. It was small and bright and warm, and when he let it go, it stayed in the air and drifted in a slow circle around his hand, then around his wrist, then out around the still gold-blue film of his Shinjitsu and the compact, glowing weight of his Dreams, orbiting him like a tiny sun around a larger one.

He watched it go around once, twice, three times.

The decision came quickly.

Then he caught it out of the air, tossed it into his mouth, and swallowed!

HUUM!

It went down into him and flew straight to the center of his existence, where the other two Shards waited. The three of them met and pressed together, bright and humming, and once again his Shinjitsu surged to break them down, and once again, the Shards held. Their center was too old and too grand, closed to him completely.

But just as before, they gave him something.

It felt like being filled up. Like a tired body drinking deep after a long run, except that the strength stayed afterward instead of draining away. It settled in and stayed. His Dreaming Human Origin grew denser and brighter, and his Shinjitsu sank a little deeper into everything he was.

|You have consumed a third Shard of IT.|

|It has joined the other two within you.|

|Their center cannot be broken down.|

|Everything around them that can be broken down has been made your own.|

|Assimilation Rate: 1% to 2%.|

|VERITAS, PROVENANCE, PONDUS, OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: True Order III.3 to True Order III.4.|

Noah sat very still and felt the difference.

It was a strange thing to describe, even to himself. Before all of this, before Shinjitsu, his Dreams had felt like a beginner at the gym who could barely lift fifty pounds, straining and shaking with every rep. Now he was holding five hundred pounds with ease, and somewhere underneath that, he had the quiet, growing feeling that five hundred was nowhere close to where he would stop.

"What exactly are my limits?" he murmured.

The snow drifted down past the roots overhead, and nobody answered.

His Dream was a grand thing. He had always known that. His Infinity, his tyranny, his very essence, everything that made him what he was, all of it was grand. But the longer he sat with it, the clearer something else became.

A hundred grand abilities were unnecessary.

What he needed was utility.

He needed to know how to use what he already had, grandly and seamlessly, instead of stuffing his status panel full of a hundred separate names for a hundred separate tricks. All of those tricks were really one thing anyway. They were all just something his Dream could do, any time it wished, in whatever shape the moment needed.

And thinking about utility made him think of Ruination.

She had taken one quiet ability, keeping records, and understood it so completely that it had become something enormous. An existence inside herself. A weapon made of nothing but information, strong enough to freeze a First Gu.

Noah leaned his chin on his hand and let the thought unfold.

"Information," he said quietly. "Everything that exists is information..."

He looked at his own hand, the night-sky skin, the faint blue-gold constellations.

"And what is a dream, then, to something that can dream without end? A dream is information too. A memory is information. A feeling, a fear, a wish. Everything a lifeform carries inside itself, everything it is, can be written down as information, and everything that can be written down..."

His eyes began to shine.

"...can be dreamed."

The brilliance in his eyes grew, gold and blue and very bright, as if something had just clicked into place behind them.

He looked down through the roots, at the countless flows of the Long Night beneath him and the snow pouring out over the Keepers’ Legacy above, and he thought.

His Dream could move like boundless waves of information.

He could already raise Risen Dreams from the weavings of those who had died, no matter how long ago they had died, reading the shape of what they had been and dreaming it back.

But the dead were only information that had stopped changing.

The living were information that was still being written.

And with his Shinjitsu at this rate, pressing all his power into one dense, directed point, what exactly prevented him from doing the same thing to a dream that was still alive? From reading it, and joining it, and writing in it himself?

He thought about what Emotive and Ruination had done to the First Gu. Emotive had slipped into its feelings and replaced them one by one. Ruination had poured so much information into it that it had frozen solid. Two of his Kin had taken a being halfway to Unfathomable apart from the inside.

What prevented him from looking at the dream of an Immense One, and taking hold of that dream, and through it, taking hold of everything they were?

Noah leaned back on his throne, slowly, the blue-gold light settling around him.

There was only one way to find out safely.

He closed his eyes and began his next Infinite Quantum Dream!

|Quantum Dream 5 begins.|

|Starting conditions: your Dream as it is now. Assimilation Rate: 2%. True Order III.4.|

|Goal: test the limits of your Dream.|

|Minute 1: You send your Dream and your existence out into the falling snow.|

|Every snowflake now crossing THE Keepers of Existence carries a little of you.|

The glass rose around him, and in the nearest window, the snow fell across the Keepers’ Legacy, and Noah was inside every flake.

He drifted with it over frozen gardens and quiet halls, over the Gaoler’s snowed-in cages and the Mother of Closed Doors’ locked house, looking for the right one. Then he found it!

|Minute 7: You lock onto an Established Immense One.|

|Location: a swirling lake of white and gold, filled with lotuses.|

In the glass, a great lake turned slowly beneath the snow, its water white and gold, and lotuses floated across it by the thousands, wide pale petals catching the falling flakes. At its center, on the largest lotus of all, sat a tall figure in white robes, cross-legged and perfectly still, its skin a soft pale gold and its eyes closed in meditaton. Its Immensity rose around it in slow rings of light shaped like lotus petals, opening and closing with its breath.

And around that Immensity, Noah could see its dream.

It drifted there like mist over still water, soft and silver and full of slow movement, the inner life of a being that had been dreaming for a very, very long time.

|You can see its dream swirling around its Immensity.|

|Minute 9: Your Shinjitsu flows toward its dream, slowly, matching its rhythm.|

|Minute 12: You touch its dream.|

|Its dream remembers you as having always been part of it.|

|It accepts you as its own.|

|Minute 15: You take control of its dream.|

|Minute 18: From its dream, you spread your existence and your Shinjitsu into the being itself.|

|Minute 21: Its existence accepts you, as its dream already has.|

|You have taken possession of an Established Immense One of THE Keepers of Existence.|

|It has not noticed.|

...!

In the glass, the figure on the lotus opened its eyes.

They were Noah’s eyes!

He looked down at hands that were long and pale gold and not his own. He felt the lotus beneath him, the cool white-gold water stirring all around, the slow petals of an Immensity breathing in and out with his breath now. The snow landed softly on his borrowed shoulders. Every part of this body answered him as easily as his own.

And he felt everything it remembered!

|Identity: Seren Valadhi, THE Lotus That Remembers.|

|Established Immense One of THE Keepers of Existence.|

|Keeper of the White-Gold Lake.|

|Age: Old? Old.|

|You are grasping her dream, her memories, and Ages of her history and records.|

It came pouring in like a river through a broken dam.

He remembered the history of the Keepers’ Legacy, the first spring that had ever bloomed there, Councils in the spiral palace came back to him, under the Sovereign’s horned gaze, long arguments carried out in perfect courtsey over thousands of years. So did the faces of every lifeform who had ever come to sit beside this lake and ask Seren Valadhi what she had seen, because she had seen a very great deal and forgotten none of it.

|Her records are now open to you.|

|Ages of THE Keepers of Existence’s history are now open to you.|

|She remains unaware.|

...!

The Quantum Dream unfolded before him in all its terrible grandness, and Noah sat inside it, wearing the body of an ancient being, using everything he was as a Dreaming Human Origin!

Only days ago, before THE Long Night began, Immense Ones had been legends to him. Untouchable things, spreading Mantles and Roles and Narratives across existence, far above anything he could reach.

Days later, he had stepped inside one.

He had descended into an Established Immense One within his own dream of countless possibilities, taken her dream, her memories, and her body, and she was still completely unaware that someone else now lived behind her eyes!