Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (WN) -
Chapter 5359: Instability I
Then the being’s gaze moved past her, to Noah, and to the small girl on his shoulder, and openly considered the both of them with interest.
"Though I confess, when we sent word to THE Hallowed Demesne asking for help with what is happening here, we did not imagine the answer would arrive in the form of a new Sword. I literally had to do a double take when you sent that message that you were escorting the potential solution over..." The gaze lingered, assessing.
"And a child. You will forgive our curiosity. Arkethys is not where one brings the newly sworn"
"You will forgive mine in turn if I keep the reasoning to myself for now, Andro" Dame Seraphine said evenly.
"The Order came from above. From THE Domicile. I assume that answers more than my explanation would."
That shifted the attention in the three Fifth Scale beings!
The foremost one’s eyes sharpened, and the courtesy in his bearing deepened into something closer to gravity.
"From THE Domicile..."
He gestured around at the citadel and the drifting region beyond it.
"You understand why. THE Domicile of THE Queen Regnant counts Arkethys among the important holdings of the forces under Her Majesty. Through this place, through the Ore in its strata, we produce Fourth Scale Source Lifeforms in numbers, and we elevate beings toward the Fifth who would otherwise never reach it. Haha, Arkethys is a forge! A glorious forge! It makes the strong that the rest of Her Majesty’s purposes require. So when the forge begins to crack, the matter rises very quickly to the top."
He turned, the obsidian glow sliding across his features. "Hmm, which is why I will not waste your time with hospitality you did not come for. Why don’t we take you to one of the regions showing the greatest instability? You can see for yourselves what we are dealing with."
Dame Seraphine nodded once. "Lead on, big guy."
The three Fifth Scale beings turned and moved deeper into the citadel, and the party followed, out of the relative shelter of the structure’s heart and back toward the open shafts where the drifting crystal hung in the lethal blue dark.
Noah observed and analyzed everything very closely!
The environment pressed in again the moment they left the citadel’s core, the bound Infinity and Primordial Source grinding at every existence that passed through it, and the Swords held their defenses steady as they walked.
Richard kept up a low running commentary to no one in particular, his bright eyes cataloguing the strata they passed.
Botswana walked in grim silence, one hand never far from where his Armament rested. Lianna gave nothing away, her composed gaze moving across the citadel’s workers and the drifting landmasses.
Noah walked through it all with Seo-yeon riding easy on his shoulder, the killing air of Arkethys landing on the two of them like nothing at all, and let his perception spread out across the region ahead.
They crossed gigaparsecs worth of distance before ultimately...they arrived where they needed to be!
The region showing the most instability was a massive, endless stretching Mine!
The entrance to the mine waited for them like the open mouth of something that ate.
It was a cluster vast enough to measure in light years, a wound carved into a drifting crystalline continent.
Jagged crystal teeth of obsidian blue framed the opening, the throat of it descending into a dark that the ambient glow of Arkethys did not reach, and the whole thing sat there with the patient hunger of a beast that had already eaten a great many things and was prepared to eat a great many more.
Only a scattering of Source Lifeforms remained near it, a handful of Fourth Scale beings and two of the Fifth, and even they kept a careful distance from the mouth of the Mine!
Noah understood why the moment he turned his attention to the region itself.
It was...pulsing.
The whole cluster, the mine and the crystal around it and the drifting dark beyond, beat in a slow steady rhythm, in and out, like a heart that had no business being where it was. And the Pulse was not idle!
He could feel it reaching into the bound authorities of the place and pulling at them, working at the Infinity and the Primordial Source in the strata, loosening something that had been holding them in their unnatural balance. It was the source of the instability!
|Analysis: An Unstable Pulse of unknown origin is propagating through this region of Arkethys. The Pulse acts directly upon the foundational makeup of lifeforms and authorities present, destabilizing both Infinity and THE Primordial Source. Its mechanism is not depletion or damage in the ordinary sense. It changes the nature of each authority into something else, a foreign and unstable nature that belongs to neither.|
|Effect on lifeforms: Existences exposed to the Pulse for long enough undergo a breakdown in their own Source makeup. The authorities that compose them are converted toward this foreign nature, and as the conversion spreads, the identity of the existence is altered and then erased, leaving something unrecognizable and unstable in its place. Weaker existences are altered fastest. The deeper into the Pulse one travels, the faster the breakdown.|
|Assessment: This is not a natural instability. Something is doing this. Cause unconfirmed.|
Noah’s existence buzzed!
This was not the grinding environmental pressure of Arkethys, the simple weight that tried to wear an existence down. This was subtler and worse. The Pulse reached past his power and toward the thing underneath his power, toward what he was, and it tried to convert that into something foreign, something that was no longer him!
Even Seo-yeon frowned at it, her bright untroubled face creasing as she felt the Pulse working at the deep structure she saw so clearly in everything, including herself.
And Noah, turning his attention inward, found what was defending him.
It was not THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian, not primarily, though the Aura helped.
It was Osmontian Absolute Infinity. His Infinity, with his identity forged into its foundation rather than dissolved away from it, was the precise thing the Pulse could not get a grip on!
The Pulse worked by converting nature and erasing identity, and Noah had spent his everything making his identity the unbreakable core of his Infinity, putting himself first and the boundlessness second, refusing the version of Absolute Infinity that ate the self. Here, in a place that murdered beings by eating the self, that choice was the wall that kept him whole!
Seo-yeon was less protected. Her dual nature was extraordinary, but she was young, and the Pulse worked fastest on the young as her identity was not fully fleshed out. So he extended THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian over her, wrapping the obsidian gold of it around her small frame, and her identity steadied inside the shelter of his own.
She smiled at once, the frown gone, and hugged his head.
"Thank you!" she murmured against his hair, and went back to watching the terrible beautiful mine with her curiosity fully restored!
"This translation was made by our team, to read more translated novels please visite www.readernovel.net"