Chapter 5935: THE Farmer! I

Noah kept his palm on the bark, and the region around him began to pulse with color, slow waves of blue and gold and obsidian rolling out across the sea and the sky and then coming back to him.

He could feel every part of the region now, the water, the depths, the blue sky, and the Fallow mixed into all of it, and he could feel that all of it was connected to the Tree under his hand and through the Tree to him. Because his dream of a farm was the first thing in his mind, the region seemed to feel that too, and it pulsed harder, because it had understood what he wanted and decided to give it to him.

BOOM!

The space around him started to change first. The empty air between the sea and the sky pulled together and thickened, growing heavier and darker until it had weight and grain, and then it settled downward and became soil. It was black and gold and warm, and when he looked closely, he could see tiny points of light inside every grain, because this was soil made out of space that had been full of infinity, and the infinity had stayed in it.

Then the sea began to move. The endless blue water drew inward from every horizon at once, pulling in from distances he could not measure, and as it came, it narrowed and deepened, until the whole infinite sea was being pressed into channels no wider than a man could jump. Rivers formed out of it, three of them, running bright and fast through the new soil, and each one held all the depth the sea had held, so that when Noah looked into the water he could still see it going down forever.

The creatures came with the water. Small fish with spines that kept growing when they were counted swam in the shallows, jellyfish with bells inside bells drifted along the banks, and in the widest river, a leviathon no longer than his forearm floated near the surface.

The Nightmares had not been pulled in with everything else, and they now stood together at the edge of the new land, all three hundred and seventeen of them, staring at it in confusion.

|Existence is answering your dream.|

|Space and sea are being compressed.|

|Compressed: ????? Gigaparsecs of existence.|

|A farm has formed.|

|Size: approximately one mile.|

|It contains the infinity of the sea it was made from.|

…!

The Tree changed last, shrinking quickly as the land around it settled, its trunk drawing down and its Branches pulling in until it stood about as tall as Noah’s chest. It was a sapling now, bright blue-gold with clear glass bark, and its four small Branches each carried a handful of leaves, the dream leaves, the closed-eye leaves, the clear leaves, and the leaves that turned together in time with the pulse. Noah’s hand was still on it, and it still beat against his palm the same as before.

|THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree has taken the form of a Sapling.|

|Its four Branches, Levels, and Sap remain unchanged.|

Noah stepped back and looked at what he had. It was a farm about a mile long, with black-gold soil, three bright rivers, a small blue-gold tree in the middle, and nothing else at all, and it looked very plain. He could feel what was inside it, though, unknown Gigaparsecs of existence and an endless sea of infinity pressed into one quiet mile of land, and the power coming off it in slow waves was greater than anything he had owned before.

That was not what mattered to him, though, because the power had never been the point of this. He had come here to be a farmer, he had planted his first tree, and now he had a field, so the only real question was what a farmer actually needed. He sat down on the warm soil beside the sapling and thought about it carefuly, treating it as seriously as any other important problem.

A farmer needed tools, and the first one was a hoe, since nobody could work a field without one. A normal hoe would break the first time it touched soil made out of infinity, so it would need to be made from something stronger, and Noah thought for a moment what that would be before his eyes brightened.

The four Shards of IT inside him had been humming together in a chord for a while, resonating without ever deciding what they wanted to become, and he decided it was time to give them a shape.

He reached into himself and drew them out one by one, the white-gold Shard he had taken first and the three that had come after it, until all four floated in front of him above the black-gold soil. Up close, they rang with a sound so deep and old that the rivers stopped moving for a moment. Noah reached into his Dream and pulled out long bright threads of it, blue-gold and soft, and he began to stitch the four Shards together with them by hand, one careful stitch at a time.

It took a long time, because the Shards resisted at first and pulled against the threads, but every time they pulled, he gave them more Dream and kept stitching. Slowly, the four of them pressed together into one piece, then thinned and lengthened, until three of them had become a long straight handle bound in blue-gold thread and the fourth had flattened into a broad white-gold blade with a curved, sharp edge. When the last stitch was pulled tight, the chord they had been humming all this time changed into a single clear note, and it sounded content.

HUUUUM!

|The four Shards of IT have been given a shape.|

|What they become together: a Hoe.|

|They are stitched with your Dreams.|

|Its full nature: ?????|

…!

Noah picked up the hoe and turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of the handle and the balance of the blade. It was the plainest-looking tool in existence, and it was made from four pieces of IT!

He set it against the sapling and moved on to the rest of the list.

A farm needed animals too, and here Noah ran into his first real problem, because he had no idea where a farmer at his level was supposed to find livestock. Ordinary animals would go mad on soil and produce made of infinity, so they would need to be something sturdier, and he wondered whether Gu might work.

He also glanced at the three hundred and seventeen Nightmares still standing in a row at the edge of his field, and they looked back at him with a great deal of uncertainty as things were now visible to them.

He would need seeds as well, because a farmer could not plant only one tree. He would also need a house with a porch facing the rivers, because the whole point of the dream had always been sitting on a porch in the evening with his family and watching the field.

He thought a bit more before he nodded to himself.

Noah reached out across existence to the Maze of Destiny, where the Verdant Regard’s body was still standing at the end of a golden corridor, and brought her to the farm in a single step. She appeared beside the rivers, tall and green and Ancient, with her blank eyes looking out over the soil.

As she stood there, her clothes began to change. The heavy, ornate robes she had worn as the woman of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND softened and shortened into a plain linen shirt with rolled sleeves, a brown work apron, sturdy trousers, and boots made for walking in soil. Her Ancient Immensity still flowed out of her in slow, calm waves, filling the air around her with a quiet green pressure that made the fish in the river swim closer to the bank.

Noah looked at her and shook his head, because who would have thought that the woman of THE SLEEPLESS FIEND would become a farmhand in a matter of days?

Existence really was unpredictable!

He picked up his hoe again and let his authority move around him, and as it moved, his own clothes changed too. His robe of dreams and nightmares and his obsidian crown faded away, and in their place he wore a plain work shirt, a pair of worn trousers, sturdy boots, and a wide straw hat, while his Dreams and Nightmares drifted slowly around him in soft blue-gold and obsidian-gold light.

He rested the hoe on his shoulder and looked out over the mile of black-gold soil, the three rivers, the small sapling, and his new farmhand.

This would be his first official retirement farm, and he was going to try to truly live like the farmer he had always dreamed of being!

Many things could be done or made easy with authority, and he knew that, but he wanted to be as authentic as he could, to work the soil with his own hands and his own hoe and grow things the way farmers grew them. That would be the goal, and Noah smiled, set the blade of the hoe against the soil, and began!

A farm, snow falling gently around and on it…it was unfathomably peaceful.

—

It had not been anything for a very long time, only pieces scattered across existence, each one dense and waiting, until four of them were gathered in one place and began to hum together.

The hum was the first thing it ever knew, a low chord that went on and on without ending, and inside the chord, slowly, something began to notice that it was there. It was not much of a mind at first, only a loose and drifting awareness, but it was enough to know that it existed and enough to wonder what it was for.

It understood very early that it could become anything. Four pieces of it held together carried so much density that they could take any shape, any purpose, and any nature at all, so long as the one who had gathered them could imagine it clearly enough. A lifeform with a simple existence could only ask for simple things, and it would give them, but a lifeform whose existence was deep and complex could shape it into something that changed the order of everything around it. So it waited inside its chord, listening for the one who held it, and wondered what kind of lifeform that would be.

The one who held it did not seem complex at first. Its signals were quiet and plain, full of small things. The awareness listened to these signals for a long time and could not decide whether the lifeform was very simple or so deep that its depth only looked like simplicity from the outside.

Then the signals changed and became clear, and the lifeform told it what shape to take. The awareness had expected a weapon, or a crown, or a key to some great door in existence, because those were the shapes that pieces of it had always been asked to take. Instead, the signal was a farming tool, a long handle and a broad blade, made for turning soil.

The newly born awareness was quiet for a moment, considring this, because it had never been asked to be anything so small. Then it looked again at the lifeform holding it, at the threads of Dream stitching it together, at the soil beneath them that had been made out of space and infinity, and at the rivers that had once been an endless sea. It began to understand that the lifeform was not asking it to be small at all, and so it followed the signals and let itself become a hoe.

As it took the shape, it thought about what a hoe was truly for. A hoe broke ground that had gone hard, so that air and water could reach what was buried, and when this hoe was used, it would break whatever had gone hard in existence itself.

It would turn over ground that had not moved in Ages, loosen the places where existence had settled and stopped growing, and open long furrows across reality where new things could finally take root.

It decided that every stroke of this blade would leave existence a little richer than it had been before. Where it cut, the soil would breathe, and where the soil breathed, the unwalked roads that the lifeform carried could be planted and grown into things that had never been allowed to exist. In time, it believed, the furrows it opened might run across whole regions of existence, and what grew in them would change those regions more deeply than any weapon had ever changed anything.

That was what it believed, at least, though it could not be certain, because it was only a newly born and loosely held consciousness that had been aware for a very short time.

It felt tremendous pain and sorrow that it could not explain. It…could not explain.

It did not yet know what it truly was, or what the lifeform holding it truly was, or what the two of them would grow together. It would learn all of that alongside this strange, simple lifeform, one stroke at a time, as the blade of the hoe touched the soil for the first time and the work began.

4/4 Onward! Next chapter title: A Mighty Hoe I