Chapter 5963: Surprise

Noah stood in the middle of the pen with the first egg in his hand and the twelve chickens fluffing their stellar feathers around his boots, and he set the cycle running for good. He let the farm’s authority settle into the ground beneath the pen so that it would rise into the chickens on its own, and he let the gentle Nightmare stay rooted in each of them so that what they took in would keep moving, and he did not have to do anything else. The pen settled into a quiet hum.

|Farm structure established: THE First Coop.|

|Residents: 12 Nightmare-Chickens.|

|Cycle established: your purified authority is given to the Chickens, cycled through their existence, and returned as Pure Narrative.|

|Pure Narrative is gathered into eggs.|

|Each Chicken lays one egg every few hours.|

...!

Then he looked at the egg in his hand. It was a little larger than his palm and very heavy for its size, its shell a deep stellar obsidian speckled with tiny crimson points that drifted slowly across the surface, and it was warm. When he held it up to the snowing light, he could see through the shell to what was inside, a small clear swirl of Narrative turning slowly, so pure that there was nothing in it at all except itself.

|Pure Narrative Egg.|

|Purity: complete. No taint of any kind.|

|Can be consumed safely by any lifeform, of any Immensity.|

He weighd it in his hand for a moment and thought about cracking it himself. Then the prompts kept coming, and he understood very quickly that it would not do much for him.

|Your Branches grow harder to raise with every Level.|

|For you, one egg is worth very little. You would need them in tremendous numbers.|

|For lifeforms of Established and Ancient Immensity, the Dreams and Nightmares inside them would grow greatly from each one.|

...!

It would take eggs in numbers he could hardly imagine to raise a single Branch by a single Level, and every Level after that would cost more. Noah turned the egg over in his fingers and found that he did not mind at all. He had not built the coop for himself.

He turned toward the gate, where Henry and the others were still standing exactly where they had been when the chickens appeared. Then he tossed the egg underhand across the pen. Henry caught it against his chest out of pure reflex, and looked down at it, and then up at his father, his wing-eyes wide.

"The fruits of our labor are already starting to show," Noah said, and he smiled at them. "If you all go and catch more Nightmares, we’ll have more chickens, and more chickens will give us more Narrative, and more Narrative will make all of you stronger..." He spread his hands a little. "And on and on."

...!

Henry looked down at the egg again. He could feel what was inside it now, clean and warm and clear, and he could feel exactly how much it would do for him, which was a great deal!

He looked at Thalia, and Thalia looked at Kazuhiko, and Kazuhiko looked at Barbatos, and then all of them looked out toward the grey gaps at the edge of the farm, where more Nightmares were still waiting in the soft Fallow light.

Henry nodded slowly, and then more firmly, and tucked the egg into his existence with great care. The others were already turning, and a moment later all five of them were moving across the field again, faster than before, with THE Emperor Penguin in the lead this time, waddling at full speed toward the gaps with his crowned head lowered and every black-glass plate ringing!

RAA! RAA! RAA!

Noah watched them go, and then he turned toward the rivers, where the Verdant Regard was still pressing loose soil back into place with her boots. "You too," he called. "Go help them. We need more chickens."

The Verdant Regard straightened. She brushed the soil from her apron, adjusted the sleeves of her linen shirt, and without any expression on her face whatsoever, she began to walk toward the edge of the farm, her Ancient Immensity rolling calmly out ahead of her into the grey.

---

When they were all gone, Noah sat back down in the doorway of the shell house with the hoe across his knees, and for the first time in a long while, he simply looked at himself. The prompts came up quietly in front of him, one after another, everything he had become since the Chrysalis laid out in the snowing light.

|THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree. Flowers: 8.|

|Branch of Dreams: Level 7.|

|Branch of Nightmares: Level 8.|

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Level 7.|

|Branch of THE Unstriving Current: Level 8.|

|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 6. Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 12.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 7. Sub-Branch of THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 4.|

|VERITAS, PROVENANCE, PONDUS, OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: True Order IV.3.|

|POTENTIA: Infinite. True.|

...!

Above his head, the bar had grown into something tall and layered, twenty-one walls of obsidian-gold light stacked one on top of another, each of them a little thicker and more tightly woven than the walls he had first built, and all of them burning steadily in the falling snow. The label above them read |Narrative Wall- 21/21x(100%)|.

|Narrative Walls: 21|

|Equal to the whole Narrative of about 31 average Unfathomable Immense Ones.|

|Equal to about one third of the Narrative of an average Excedere Unfathomable Immense One with no Essara of Existence.|

|THE Endless Retelling: 12 hundredths of a wall per second. 18 Narrative per second.|

|A broken wall returns in about 8 seconds. All 21 walls return in about 3 minutes.|

...!

Noah read the numbers through twice. An average Unfathomable, pouring out the whole of its Narrative in a single blow, would not be able to break even one of his walls, and whatever it did manage to crack would be whole again in a few seconds. It would take more than thirty of them pouring out everything they had at once to break through all of it, and even then, every wall would begin rising again behind them.

An Excedere was another matter entirely, because the one who had sent two of his walls flying with a single swing carried three times everything Noah had.

But an Unfathomable...

He turned the thought over slowly, his thumb moving along the worn handle of the hoe. Could he stand in front of one now, he wondered, and simply let it hit him, as many times as it liked, and not have to worry at all?

Hmm. Hmm!!!

As he was thinking this...

The rows were ready. Noah could feel it before he even stood up from the doorway, a soft fullness humming up out of the soil all along the long lines of mounds where he had planted the dead of the Shepherd’s Legion from the Undefined Gaps, and beside them, the newer rows where the Covenant’s lesser cultists had come to rest after the Ashfall Reaches. He took the hoe from across his knees, walked out into the snow, and began to harvest.

From every mound, a single slender stalk had pushed up through the black-gold soil, and at the top of every stalk hung one fruit. Most of them were small and pale gold, faintly warm in the cold air, with a soft light moving inside them. Some were larger and deeper in color, amber shading toward bronze, with tiny points of starlight turning slowly at their centers, and those came from the Ancients.

Noah walked down the rows one by one and picked them all, laying each fruit gently in the crook of his arm, and when his arms were full, the Hoe hummed and the soil itself lifted the rest up to him.

|Harvest complete.|

|Bodies of the Shepherd’s Legion (Undefined Gaps) and remaining Ancient Gu: 46.|

|Bodies of the Covenant of the Inverted Peak (Ashfall Reaches): 23.|

|Common Narrative Fruits: 44.|

|Uncommon Narrative Fruits: 25.|

...!

He stood at the end of the last row with sixty-nine fruits gathered around him in the snow, and he thought about where to put them. The Branches would barely notice this much now, and the walls were already full. But there was one part of him that grew cheaply and grew fast, and every Level it gained changed everything about how long he could stand under a blow.

He opened himself, and the sixty-nine fruits came apart into soft gold light and poured into him together, and he sent all of it down into his Dreaming Human Origin, along the Branch of THE Narrative Wall, and into the thin shoot that grew from it.

|All Narrative directed to the Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling.|

|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 12 to Level 20.|

|Regeneration: 20 hundredths of a Narrative Wall per second.|

|Regeneration: 30 Narrative per second.|

|A broken wall returns in about 5 seconds. All 21 walls return in under 2 minutes.|

...!

Oh!

On the sapling, the thin shoot of THE Endless Retelling thickened and lengthened and put out a second pale leaf, then a third, glowing with the same three colors as before. Above Noah’s head, the tall stack of twenty-one walls pulsed once, deep and slow, and the light running through every one of them moved a little faster than before.

Thirty Narrative every secnd! Noah stood among the empty stalks and worked it through in his head. An average Unfathomable, pouring out everything it had, would have to do it again every three or four seconds, without ever stopping, just to keep pace with how fast his walls came back, never mind breaking through them. He looked down at the bare rows, already softening back into plain dark soil ready for planting, and he felt the beginning of a slow, quiet, tyrannical smile!