Chapter 5929: Awakening I

Noah reached for the pulse again.

Far out in the Gaps, thousands of Gigaparsecs away, the battle had begun in earnest.

Nine lotuses blazed. Nine cerulean blades spun. A woman with a blue halo poured the Narrative of fifty-five thousand Immense Ones into a single line of light and drove it into a wall of crimson-edged glass. The Stillness answered with frozen moments, trillions of them, rolling out across the dark like a tide made of almost.

Through his forests, he could feel all of it. The pulls on either side. The trees bending. The rivers running fast and slow.

And underneath it, the pulse.

It was right there. Slow, steady, vast, rising and falling under the battle like a sea under two ships. He had felt it once already. He knew it was real.

So he reached for it.

His Shinjitsu pulsed, matching the beat. He narrowed everything down to that one rhythm and held still, very still, and reached.

And it slipped away.

It was...ridiculously slippery.

He tried again. Harder. He pulled his whole attention inward, pushed his Dreaming Human Origin toward it, opened every sense he had and leaned into that deep slow rise and fall with everything in him.

It slipped away again.

Again. Harder still. His Shinjitsu pulsed so fast it hummed. The crimson terace beneath him trembled!

HUUM!

And...

Nothing.

What the fuck?

It was right there! He could feel the edges of it! Every time he reached, it moved, just slightly, as a reflection moves when you reach into the water to grab it.

He sat back and breathed.

Looked at what he was doing.

He was clenching. His hands were fists. His Shinjitsu was humming like a plucked string. His whole existence was leaning forward, grasping, reaching, pushing.

He was trying too hard.

Noah opened his hands, and laughed quietly at himself.

Then another thought came, slower.

Why was he even looking at the battle?

He had felt the pulse there because the battle was large. Two enormous forces, pulling on existence from both sides, and his forest stretched between them. It was easy to feel a beat when the drum was being hit that hard.

But the pulse lived under everything, the battle included. He had seen that much. Every Nightmare, every Narrative, every forest and every road. Everything was connected to everything else. That was the whole point.

Which meant the grandest thing in existence was unnecessary for feeling it.

He could look anywhere.

From any angle. Any scale. Any small, quiet corner. If everything was connected, then every corner held the same pulse, just as surely as the battle did.

Okay!

He left a portion of his attention on the battle. A sliver. Enough to know if anything changed, if the Stillness turned his way, if a lotus came looking for whoever had grown these trees.

The rest of him, he turned around.

---

Ruination’s existence stretched out behind him, crimson and endless, its sky full of scrolling records. Below, across hundreds of light years, the Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity sat in its new home, and around it, scattered through the crimson dark, drifted hundreds of smaller Dimensions that had been carried in with it. Little ones. Old ones.

He let his gaze go loose.

He let it choose where to look, and it drifted, as his authority had drifted into that first grey gap, while he waited to see where it would settle.

It settled on a small floating Dimension at the edge of the Legacy. Unremarkable. Dim. Turning slowly in the crimson dark like a marble someone had dropped and forgotten.

His gaze went in.

Past its outer edges. Through its folds, one after another, the soft creased walls that held a Dimension together. Down into its Wheels of Existence. Down further, through the Frequencies of the Wheel, the countless overlapping hums that made each level of it real. Past a cosmos, still and dark. Past universes, hundreds of them, strung along the frequencies like beads. Past galaxies, spiraling and quiet. Past stars.

Down to a single small planet.

It was covered in snow.

Even here, even after being lifted out of the Legacy and set down in another existence entirely, the residue of THE Long Night had followed. A soft grey sky. Snow falling slowly, steadily. Mountains white to their roots. Forests black and white beneath them.

And in a valley between two of those mountains, a town.

Small. A few thousand people. Stone houses with steep roofs to let the snow slide off. Chimney smoke. A frozen river with holes cut in the ice. A market square, half-buried, with people moving through it in thick wool and fur.

Just people, mana-less and Rootless, far below any Immensity, in the snow, getting through the day.

Noah looked at the town for a long moment.

Then he went down into it.

He formed a body at the edge of the market.

A purely human body with absolutely no authority, so he could truly experience things. A young man, dark-haired, a little thin, in a heavy grey wool cloak and boots that were too big. Brown eyes. Bare-headed. The kind of face anyone’s gaze would slide right past.

Then he walked into the town.

He had no plan. That was the plan! It was fucking genius.

He watched a baker open her shutters at dawn, a broad woman with flour on her forearms, setting out loaves that steamed in the cold. When the dough was cold and slow, she left it alone. She covered it and set it near the fire and went and did something else, and came back once it had risen on its own.

He watched children drag sleds to the top of a long white slope and simply sit down on them. The hill did the rest.

He watched a fisherman on the frozen river sit beside a hole in the ice for an entire afternoon, line in the water, doing nothing at all. Near sunset, the line went taut. The fisherman pulled up a fish as long as his arm, nodded to it, and went home.

Noah stayed as above this world, his Nightmare enveloped it as he altered its flow of time, making it so that barely an instant passed outside while hours would pass in here.

A day. Then two. Then ten.

He helped the baker after some time. She showed him how to knead, and then showed him when to stop.

"You don’t make it rise," she said, slapping flour off her hands. "It rises. You just give it what it needs and get out of the way."

He went ice fishing with the fisherman. Sat beside a hole in the frozen river for six hours, his fingers going numb, doing nothing at all.

"Fish don’t come faster because you want them to," the fisherman said, eyes on the ice.

On the seventh hour, Noah just sat. Watched the snow falling into the black hole in the ice. Listened to the river moving, slow and deep, under his feet. Felt the cold, and the quiet, and the gray light going gold as the sun went down.

The line went taut.

He pulled, gently, just enough. Just when the fish was already coming up.

It was a small fish. The fisherman laughed at it.

Noah laughed too!

---

It came to him on the walk back to town, in the dark, with the small fish wrapped in cloth under his arm and the snow falling soft and steady on his shoulders.

Everything here moved unforced.

The bread rose. The children’s sleds ran downhill. The fish came when it came. And the people in this small cold town were not idle, not at all. They worked from dawn to dusk. They baked and shoveled and fished and built and mended.

But none of them fought the thing they were working with. They found which way it was already going, and they went with it, and they let it do most of the work.

Laziness had nothing to do with it.

That was the most efficient thing he had ever seen.

The baker gave the bread warmth and time and stepped back, and the bread rose by itself. The fisherman sat where the fish would come, and was ready when it did.

Action, unforced.

Effort, moving with the current instead of against it.

Doing, in a way that looked very much like not doing anything at all.

He stopped in the middle of the snowy lane.

All this time, he had been reaching for the pulse with his whole strength. Grabbing at it. Fighting toward it. As if it were a fish he could jerk out of the water.

But the pulse needed no catching. It was already moving. Everything was already moving with it. All he had to do was stop fighting it, and go wherever it was already going.

He closed his eyes, there in the snow, with a fish under his arm.

And there it was!

Faint. Very faint. Slow and steady and vast, rising and falling under the snow, under the town, under the small planet and its stars and galaxies and universes and its turning Wheel, under the little Dimension and Ruination’s crimson existence and the Gaps and the battle and everything.

The same pulse.

Here, in a valley full of snow, as surely as in the clash of an army against a Nightmare.

This time, he kept his hands open.

He just stood there, and let it move through him.

HUUM!

|You have grasped an understanding.|

|Action without force. Effort that moves with existence, rather than against it.|

|Your Shinjitsu has gained a new quality: THE Unstriving Current.|

|You move with what is already moving. What you do, existence does with you.|

|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 6% to 8%.|

...!

He stood very still in the falling snow.

Eight percent!

The uniqueness moved through him, faint and steady. He could feel it now. Truly feel it, as he could feel his own heartbeat if he stopped and listened.

But only feel it.

When he turned his attention toward it, gently, trying to understand it, to see where it came from or which way it was going, it remained exactly what it was. A tide he was floating on, its shore far beyond sight.

|You can now feel the pulse beneath existence, the Sphygmos of Existence.|

|You have failed to grasp it.|

|It remains unknown. It remains unfathomable.|

|Your existence continues to try.|

...!

He opened his eyes.

Snow was settling on his eyelashes.

Somewhere behind him, a child was laughing on a sled. Somewhere far beyond the edges of this small planet, in a battle countless Gigaparsecs away, a woman with nine blades was tearing at a wall of frozen moments, and the sliver of his attention he had left there told him she was winning ground, and losing it, and winning it again.

He had failed.

And he found that he was smiling.

He had failed to grasp the pulse today. That was fine!

He would grasp the pulse when he grasped it.

And maybe that when was already here, in some way still beyond him. Maybe the moment he finally grasped it was already somewhere down the current, waiting.

The past, when he had first felt it. The present, standing here in the snow. The future, when he would understand.

All of them could be now.

All of them were already moving, together, on the same slow tide.

Noah tucked the small fish more firmly under his arm, and walked on into the snowy town, toward the warm yellow light of the inn.

The current would carry him where he was going!