Chapter 5928: A Pulse! A Pulse! A Pulse!

The forests kept growing, and Noah kept giving.

He couldn’t entirely explain this pivotal moment in his existence, but it felt like he was on the cusp of grabbing something extremely important as he just had to put in a little bit more effort.

With enough effort, everything was possible right?

He sat on the crimson terace with his legs crossed and his hands open on his knees, and let it flow. Dreams and Nightmares, blue-gold and obsidian-gold, out of him and into the Gaps, into the soil that had once been grey and bruised and was now dark and warm and alive. He gave no directions. He asked for nothing. He simply let it go.

And existence gave back.

The essence came home in slow tides, from forests thousands of Gigaparsecs wide, and settled into him so easily that he barely noticed it arriving. Like breathing in after breathing out. One followed the other, and the point lay in both.

He had read something like this once, long ago, in a hospital bed, in a thin old book his mother had left on the nightstand. He had been nine and bored and had understood almost none of it. Something about how the softest thing in existence wears down the hardest.

How water gives way to everything and yet nothing can stand against it. How the sage gives and gives and always remains full, because the more he gives to others, the more he has.

He had thought it was fucking nonsense at the time. A pretty way of saying absolutely nothing as philosophers weren’t shit.

Apparently a nine-year-old could be very wrong about a great many things.

He watched a river of liquid light wind between two gold-leafed trees, a few hundred Gigaparsecs out, and split around a black stone, and come back together on the other side. It left the stone alone and went around, and kept going, and in time, the stone would be sand.

That was it.

The strong held on. The strong grasped and pushed and replaced and took, and they grew strong doing it, and then they grew rigid, and then they cracked.

He had watched it happen to many of his enemies that only added to his foundations.

The soft gave way. The soft flowed. The soft went around the stone.

And the soft was still here.

He had spent his whole climb being hard. Being hungry. Being the thing that pushed. It had made him strong, and fast, and dangerous, and none of that had been a mistake. A stone has its uses.

But a valley is only an empty place, and so it answers every voice that calls into it.

He was beginning to understand how to be a valley.

So he tried to be a larger one.

He reached past the Gaps. Past the new region, past the Fallow-touched forests, far out across existence toward THE Chrysalis, that strange vast place of golden seas and impossible things where Lifthrasir and Lygara had built their Maze of Destiny. It was an old region. Rich. Full of possibility. If giving worked here, surely it would work there.

He opened his hands and let his authority flow toward it, the same way. Freely. With nothing in them.

It reached the edge of the small region of THE Chrysalis near the Maze of Destiny.

And...

And nothing happened.

The authority went out, and touched the golden seas, and the golden seas lay unmoved. THE Chrysalis kept perfectly still. Soil and essence alike stayed absent. His Dream and his Nightmare simply lay against the edge of that old region like rain on glass, and slid off, and was gone.

|Your Authority has reached THE Chrysalis.|

|THE Chrysalis does not receive it.|

|There is nothing here for your Authority to take root in.|

...!

Well, that wasn’t too good.

He pulled back and looked at it.

THE Chrysalis had raised no wall and offered no rejection. It simply had nowhere to put what he offered. Like pouring water on a tabletop. The water was good water. The table had no soil. Even that may not really be a good analogy.

He turned back to the Gaps and looked at the forests again, carefully now.

The difference was there, once he looked for it.

Every place that had taken his authority and bloomed was a place the Fallow had touched. The grey bruises in the Gaps. The stretched region where the Legacy had been. The thin places where his Dream had followed the expansion and found the soft half-real dark of unwalked roads mixed in with everything else. Even Ruination’s existence, built entirely of kept possibilities, every branch she ran, every road that would otherwise have fallen.

That was it.

His authority was more than authority. It was the authority of THE Dreaming Human Origin, in its Nightmare state. The dreaming that held every road, walked and unwalked. And the Fallow was the place where unwalked roads went.

Where existence had been mixed with the Fallow, it recognized him. It accepted what he gave, because what he gave was made of the same stuff it was now made of. Kin to kin. Like rain falling on its own river.

Where existence was untouched by the Fallow, it lacked any way to hold him. For now.

|Your Authority takes root only where existence has been mixed with THE Fallow of Existence.|

|There, your Dreaming Human Origin and its Nightmare cause existence to accept you.|

|Elsewhere, your Authority finds nothing to hold. As of now, this is the theory.|

...!

He could keep giving in the regions around him. The new region. The Gaps. The places the Fallow had reached when he broke that door. That alone was vast, vast beyond any Legacy, enough to grow on for a very long time.

But it had edges.

Unless.

He sat very still on the crimson terrace, and let the quintessential thought come.

What if the edges could move?

What if he opened the Fallow somewhere else? Somewhere far from here. In THE Chrysalis. Or in some quiet corners of existence? If existence touched by the Fallow accepted his authority, then every place he let the Fallow touch would become a place he could give to. A place that would bloom. A place that would give back.

Well, if the Fallow was a critical factor alongside his existence being what it was.

He believed his authority was compatible with the Fallow itself. He believed that was why the Fallow-touched places accepted him. But believing a thing and knowing a thing were two very different roads, and he had stood at the edge of the Fallow only twice. Once through a moth’s eyes. Once through a door he broke and then stepped back from.

He had always stayed outside.

If his authority truly had a say in the Fallow, the Fallow itself would tell him. And the only way to find out was to step inside, and see what the place where every unwalked road ended thought of the being who now carried all of his own.

That was a door for another day.

—

It was at that moment the Gaps lit up.

Far out, thousands of Gigaparsecs away. Dozens of Unfathomables, white and gold, bending space around them until it groaned.

And at their front, one wholly new to him.

A blue halo. Nine blades of cerulean light. A pressure that made the dozens behind her look like candles beside a bonfire.

Then space tore in nine places, and nine lotuses bloomed!

Each petal wider than a Dimension. Tens of thousands of Immense Ones inside them, linked in great turning lattices, Immensity flowing from the outer petals inward, ring by ring, to a single blazing core in each flower. A formation. A very old one, and very well made.

Beautiful!

Terrifying, too. A single one of those could flatten him in a breath. All nine together could probably flatten the Legacy he had just moved.

Power...was truly relative as...Immense Ones were popping up like they were fucking nothing now. And yet their power was still...Immense as officially, he should barely be arriving at the power of an Ancient Immensity right now.

It felt like he jumped from being capable of taking down a Newly Risen Immensity one day, an Established Immense One the next day, and an Ancient Immensity the day after.

Would he be able to handle Unfathomable Immensity by tomorrow?

But even this line of thinking was somewhat...not true as he had already stood against 9 Unfathomable Immensities and survived, but he just could not hurt any of them either.

His power was just...too unique and different.

But anyways.

THE Shepherd of Falling Stars had sent his army!

Or part of it.

"O Esteemed Nightmare of THE Fallow! Might we test our power against yours?"

The voice rang out across the Gaps, clear as a bell, and far off, the Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened turned to look.

Oh?

A woman with nine blades and fifty-five thousand Immense Ones at her back, asking a monster from the Fallow for a duel!

Then the forests rose up around her army. His forests, still spreading, still giving, rising in great walls of dark gold growth around the nine lotuses, and he watched the Legion go still and look around, somber and wary, and he watched the woman with the halo look at his trees with her Shinjitsu and go very wide-eyed.

She was searching for him and finding no one.

Of course. He was elsewhere. Only what he had given was there.

Moments later...

The battle began.

He watched it differently than he would have a few days ago.

A few days ago, he would have watched the combatants. The woman with the halo. The vast grey thing with its hundreds of eyes. The lotuses. He would have measured them, counted them, weighed what each could do against the other.

He did some of that now. Old habits!

But mostly, he watched the forest.

Because his authority was in it. Every tree, every river, every patch of obsidian soil between the Legion and the Nightmare carried a piece of what he had given, melded with it, breathing with it. And through all of that, he could feel things that had always been beyond him.

He felt the Stillness move first.

It turned toward the Legion, slowly, its grey glass rolling outward ahead of it, the Held Breath stretching across the dark. And as it moved, the forest moved with it. Something underneath the trees, rather than the trees themselves. A pull. The whole stretch of existence between the Nightmare and the Legion leaned, very slightly, toward the grey.

HUUM!

Then the lotuses moved.

All nine of them flared at once, their petals lifting, fifty-five thousand Immensities pouring inward to their cores and then out, into the woman with the halo, into her Narrative. Her body lit blue. Her nine blades rose and spun. And as they did, the forest on the other side leaned the other way, toward the light, pulled by the sheer gathered weight of that much Immensity ans Narrative bending toward a single point.

Two pulls. One from each side. And the forest between them, full of his authority, stretching between both!

He could feel it all.

The rivers of light running faster on one side, slower on the other. The soil tightening here, loosening there. The trees bending toward the lotuses and away from the Nightmare in the same breath, and toward the Nightmare and away from the lotuses in the next!

Everything tuging on everything. Everything connected to everything else, from the smallest blade of black grass to the farthest Gigaparsec of gold-leafed forest, all of it one great woven thing, moving together!

The forest was the smallest part of what moved.

Existence was moving.

His forest was only the part of existence he could feel.

And underneath it all, deeper than the pulls, deeper than the leaning trees and the running rivers, something else was moving.

Slow. Steady. Vast beyond any Narrative, beyond any Immensity. It was there before the Stillness turned. It was there before the lotuses bloomed. It rose and fell under everything, under the Nightmare and the Legion and the forests and the dark, as patient as tides, as simple as breath.

The Nightmare’s movements rode on it.

The lotuses’ movements rode on it.

They thought they were pulling on each other. They were. But both of them were floating on something much larger, as two boats pulling against each other still rise and fall on the same sea.

Noah went very still.

What was that?

A rhythm. A beat. Underneath everything!

A pulse?

A Pulse of Existence itself?

BOOM!

It hit him all at once!

It came as understanding, or the edge of understanding, rather than power or essence: a vast slow wave of it breaking over him and through him and leaving him sitting on the crimson terrace with his hands open and his eyes wide and his breath gone.

Holy fuck. His Existence felt squeezed and vast at the same time as infinite blasts of information bloomed!

Everything moved together.

Every Nightmare and every Narrative, every King and every Legion, every Dimension and every Gap.

Every forest he had grown and every road he had walked and every road he had left unwalked. All of it, rising and falling on the same slow tide, moving in time to the same deep beat, whether it knew it or not.

The strong thought they were pushing existence. They were floating on it. The soft thought they were yielding to it. They were moving with it.

Existence moved, and everything moved in Existence, and the ones who fought it cracked, and the ones who flowed with it remained.

And for one instant, sitting there, he could almost feel which way it was moving.

Almost.

His Shinjitsu pulsed. Hard. Then again. Then again, faster and faster, reaching for the thing beneath everything, trying to hold still enough to feel it properly, trying to match its beat!

|You are grasping something unknown.|

|It cannot be measured. It cannot be named.|

|It is hard to grasp.|

|It is unfathomably difficult.|

|Yet your existence persists in trying.|

...!

Noah sat on the crimson terrace, unmoving, while far away, across thousands of Gigaparsecs, a woman with nine blades and a monster from the Fallow began to tear the dark apart.

He barely saw them.

He was listening to the pulse!