Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5705

Chapter 5705: Chrysalis II

Noah righted himself in the air and looked at what he had come out of.

It hung before him, vast and slow, and it was the strangest living thing he had ever laid eyes on, and he had laid eyes on a great many!

It should be...

A Dream Gu!

It was insect and microbe at once and neither, a bloated golden body the size of a small moon that was somehow also translucent, with the murky dream-clouds he had just been inside visible drifting through its interior like weather.

Segmented plates ran along its length, soft and overlapping, and from between them extended the pale siphoning tentacles, now curling back inward, and beneath its body hung dozens of thin jointed legs that did not touch anything and did not need to. Its whole surface shimmered with the quality of a thing half-remembered on waking, edges that would not hold still, colors that changed depending on whether he looked directly at them!

And it had eyes.

Many of them, scattered across its front in no particular arrangement, each one a slow golden orb, and every single one of them was pointed at him.

They looked at him the way a thing looks at an oddity. Not hostile or afraid. Simply confused that a meal had stopped being a meal.

Then its existence buzzed, and it vanished!

It moved so fast that Noah could barely follow it, the great translucent bulk of it shooting away into the distance and shrinking, and as it went he strained after it with everything he had and caught only the barest glimpse of its details before it was gone entirely!

|DREAM GU|

|Rarity: Common|

|VERITAS: 104 / PROVENANCE: 101 / POTENTIA: 107 / PONDUS: 102|

...!

Common?

That was a COMMON Gu?!

It had run from him, and every attribute it held was above a hundred, and it was COMMON.

Noah stood in the air and did not move for a moment, and then, since the thing had gone and nothing else was trying to eat him yet, he looked around!

Strands descended from above.

Multicolored, fine as silk, falling in slow unhurried drifts all around him, thousands of them, more, catching a light that came from nowhere he could locate. They floated down gently and did not land anywhere, since there was nowhere to land, and they touched his skin as they passed and each touch carried something.

A color that was also a mood. A texture that was also a memory of a thing that had never happened to him.

And beyond the strands, in every direction, all around and all around...

Nebulas!

Boundless, swirling, kaleidoscopic, filling the whole of the visible existence from horizon to horizon in every axis, gold and violet and a green he had never seen and a red that hurt to look at, all of it turning and folding and unfolding again, never repeating, layered so deep that the far ones showed through the near ones and the near ones showed through his own hands!

This was where the beings who exceeded had left their leavings.

Noah stood very still inside a chrysalis older than Records, with silk falling around him and nebulas turning past him, and he breathed once, slowly, and made very sure that he kept thinking his own thoughts.

|You did not get eaten?|

Atlas voice echoed out.

|This is good. Welcome to THE Chrysalis.|

|A dangerous place, where you may very well die before you accomplish anything at all. It is a place of immensity and wonder. The Gu Lifeforms are mostly doing things of their own nature and will leave you be, but if you attack them, or try to capture particularly powerful ones, they may kill you before you even know it has happened.|

|Oh, and some particularly unique Immense Ones may be moving around here. So. Death from all sides is possible.|

|But hey. Is this not a fun place?|

Noah’s eye twitched.

|This is where I made some of my grandest designs. Haha!|

|Let us get you familiar with the different types of Gu, and then we can see whether you can locate a decent one to try forming your first Gu Elsedimension Ring.|

|It will not be anywhere near as grand in quality as mine was. But hey.|

|We all have to start somewhere. Right?|

Noah listened to the crazy Engineer inside thr illusory ring as he kept thinking!

That was the first rule of this place! He moved slowly through the falling silk with his own thoughts running loud and deliberate in his head, refusing the surrounding existence every soft invitation to simply stop being a separate thing and join it!

Because it WAS inviting. The nebulas turned past him in colors that had never existed anywhere else, and the strands brushed his skin and left moods behind, and every part of the Chrysalis whispered that it would be so easy to loosen a little. Just a little. Just enough to see what it felt like.

Noah did not loosen!

The ring on his finger went warm.

|Are you still you? Alright. Before you go blundering into something that eats you properly this time, let me tell you what lives here.|

Golden light spilled out of the ring and unfolded in the air before him!

It drew itself into shapes, thin bright lines hanging against the kaleidoscope, holographic and turning slowly, and the first shape it made was an insect Noah recognized, bloated and translucent and many-eyed, rendered small enough to sit in his palm.

|There are three rarities of Gu. I will give them to you in the order you will meet them, which is also the order in which they will kill you.|

|First. COMMON GU.|

The golden insect pulsed!

|These are what happens when loose existence sits sealed in one place long enough to condense. Nothing more. No one made them. No one meant them. A concept drifted here after the Sundering, found nothing to hold it, and slowly folded itself into a shape with legs.|

|One concept each. Total purity. A Common Gu is a hundred of one thing and nothing at all of anything else. No will beyond hunger. No cognizance beyond appetite.|

|There may be hundreds of thousands of them in the Chrysalis. They flee from anything that is not food.|

|Uses: everything. Engines, rings, weapons, locks, the foundation of any serious design. Cheap. Plentiful. Do not get sentimental about them.|

The golden insect faded, and a second shape drew itself in its place, and this one was different!

It was longer, sleeker, plated in overlapping gold that caught light from angles the light was not coming from, and at its head, where the first shape had scattered many eyes, this one held only two. The lines that drew them were very careful.

|Second. RARE GU.|

|A Rare Gu does not condense out of loose existence. It condenses AROUND something.|

|The beings who exceeded and departed shed pieces of themselves. A memory too heavy to carry through. An ambition that would not fit. A grudge. A grief. A single decision they refused to be defined by any longer. Those shed pieces fell here, and existence condensed around them the way pearl condenses around grit.|

|A Rare Gu carries an ECHO of whatever it grew around. Not the being. The being is gone. But a preference. A leaning. Sometimes a grudge that outlived the one who held it by an age.|

|A Rare Gu will look at you and decide whether you are worth the effort of noticing, and if it decides yes, that is not necessarily good news.|

|Their depth is a full Fold above the Common ones, which I will explain shortly. Immense Ones may fight you for a Rare Gu if you come across them.|

|My ring, the one you gave back, was built around a Rare Chance Gu that I spent three hundred years earning the attention of. So. That is what you gave away.|

Noah did not react to that!

|Third.|

|THE FIRST GU.|

|And here we return to my favorite argument, since you are a captive audience and cannot leave.|

|Provenance Lifeforms call themselves THE First Lifeforms. I have told you what I think of that. When we arose, THESE were already here. They did not condense out of the Sundering. They predate it. They were in the Chrysalis before the Chrysalis was a chrysalis, when it was simply the first sealed pocket of existence there had ever been, and loose reality had nothing to do in there for an age but fold itself into life.|

|One per concept. Time. Dream. Death. Chance. The rest. One each, and none of them has ever left, and every Gu of that weaving of existence of that concept in existence descends from them.|

|They are not captured. They are not fought. You do not bait a First Gu with anything, because they are not hungry in any way you would recognize. Their depth sits at the same Fold as the Immense Ones, and their power matches them or even exceeds them at times, and unlike the Immense Ones they have never once wanted anything from anybody.|

|And they hold Existential Narrative of their own.|

...!

|Have I met one? Maybe. Maybe. Ah...|

|Now. Since I have taught without explaining things too well, I should probably teach you how everything is ranked on the weavings and constraints of Dimensionality.|

|Which is only part of the equation, by the way.|

|Existence is a sheet. It has been folded. Every fold hides what is beneath it from what is above it, and every fold is a place where beings can sit. Dimensionality is nothing more than which fold you occupy. Not how strong you are. How DEEP you are.|

|THE SURFACE. The first fold. Mortal existence. A being here perceives one Observable Existence, its own, and nothing beyond. Most life that has ever lived has lived here and died here without ever knowing there was a second fold to stand on.|

"..."

|THE CREASE. Here sit varieties of powerful True Lifeforms, Descendants, Primeval Ones, everything youmay have spent your early life fighting. They perceive and act across Dimensions. The frameworks live here.|

|THE SEAM. The fold where where many things are Unperceivable. Provenance Lifeforms sit here at their base. Powerful Descendants and other lifeforms could theoretically arrive here. Elsedimensions are folded into the Seam, which is why the Crease frameworks cannot find them. And this, O Author of Probability, is where you are currently nearing or sitting.|

Ineffable Verse!

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