Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 3818: Foldless One! I

Above the crimson-gold sea of drained lives, amidst the trembling folds of a dying Omniverse, Aetheron stood motionless.

His pale hands, now stained with the remnants of a Prime Source Entity’s lifeblood, fell to his side as he slowly raised his eyes to the obsidian-gold being whose face alone loomed larger than a Wheel of Existence.

The air itself seemed to still around him, folding unnaturally as if bowing before the being’s presence.

His voice was cold. Judgment layered over indifference.

The obsidian halos behind him spun slowly, glinting with unknown inscriptions.

Wings of crystallized Living Paradoxical authority folded neatly behind his towering form. He had no visible mouth, but his voice spoke directly into existence, bypassing sound entirely.

Aetheron looked up with no visible fear. Only amusement, and the faint glint of mischief in his blood-red eyes. His white robes fluttered gently, blood still staining the hem as if it were embroidered crimson. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and tilted his head.

”I don’t need help, Oryzarakh,” he said, letting the Foldless One’s true name slide from his tongue like honey. ”I am merely setting bait...bait for someone just like me.”

WAA!

The massive entity was still for a long moment.

The entire True Frequency of Life trembled under the weight of his silence before he asked!

”You’re setting bait for one like you?” Oryzarakh’s voice came at last, a few decibels more curious. ”Bait for whom? I have overseen this region. No new Young Paradox has been born under my jurisdiction.”

Aetheron’s lips twitched. ”Then perhaps your jurisdiction isn’t as complete as you assume.”

There was no change in the Foldless One’s face, but the folding light around his halos pulsed ever so slightly.

”You mean to say another Young Paradox has emerged... and I have not sensed it?”

”I didn’t say they emerged here,” Aetheron replied, his tone playful, almost bored. ”But yes. I’m certain one exists in these folds.”

...!

Oryzarakh’s eyes narrowed. ”Aetheron, you know the guidelines I gave you. You cannot consume a Young Paradox if one has risen. Unbound Living Paradoxes are all granted a chance to see if they might join us.”

Aetheron’s gaze sharpened. The smile remained, but his voice lowered. ”You say that as if I have forgotten. But tell me, Oryzarakh, what happens when the very nature of something cannot be changed? When a Paradox refuses your hand?”

”That is not for you to decide.”

”Oh, but it is for you?” Aetheron took a single step forward. The blood sea below him rippled, as if even the collected dead dared not stain his feet. ”You come to me as if I were a rogue beast that needs shepherding. Have you forgotten? I am what I am because I was allowed to be. Your Weavings permitted it. Your weavings are reason I am here, and my lineage...is not one you can dismiss lightly.”

HUUUM!

Oryzarakh’s silence was oppressive.

The titanic Foldless One stood like a celestial judgment given form, but Aetheron’s words had weight. His was a special case.

Oryzarakh shifted slightly.

”You are here because your lineage grants leniency. But you are still bound, Aetheron. Still beholden to the Foldless Weavings. You devour too much. You stray too far. That leniency can be revoked.”

Aetheron’s eyes darkened.

The playful tone vanished from his voice as he looked up and said, ”Then revoke it. If I cannot devour the Young Paradox, what is the point of this charade? I might as well achieve Mastery of Existence now and be done with it. There is nothing in Nullity or Origin that interests me anymore.”

Oryzarakh’s wings extended.

The motion was slow, deliberate.

A cascade of paradox halos rotated behind him like dying Omniverses.

”No,” Oryzarakh said. ”Lead me to this Young Paradox. That is your next duty.”

The disdain on Aetheron’s face was clear. ”His name is Noah Osmont,” he said with a bored drawl, as if merely stating it cost him effort. ”And no, I do not know where he is. I’ve tried. His story is not yet clear, but he is like me. That much I can feel.”

”...”

There was a pause.

Then...

Oryzarakh’s entire body flashed.

For the first time, the Foldless One moved.

”...Noah Osmont,” he repeated. ”This is the one you believe is a Young Paradox?”

”I know it.”

WAA!

”You presume too much.”

”I see too much,” Aetheron whispered.

Oryzarakh’s colossal eyes closed.

He did not summon a sigil, nor a rune. He simply willed.

And across the layers of creation, past Wheels of Existence, he began to search.

For a name.

A weaving.

A distortion.

...For Noah Osmont.

Aetheron watched him carefully, folding his arms as the blood sea behind him churned and boiled in response to the mere passive resonance of a Foldless One extending his will.

Oryzarakh remained still.

The moment Oryzarakh, the Foldless One, closed his eyes, the entire True Frequency of Life seemed to hold its breath. It was not a gesture of effort, nor necessity. It was merely an act of will, of attention. And in a span of a single second, that attention became absolute.

Then, the eyes of the celestial entity opened again.

After just a second passed...since he began looking for Osmont!

Obsidian-gold radiance blazed across the skies of the Omniverse, coiling like judgment around every layer of Existence. The halos behind his head spun faster. The wings that folded behind his back shimmered with a deeper hue of finality. When he spoke again, it was like the murmurs of ancient weavings being rewritten.

”Yes... how interesting,” he intoned.

His voice caused the very blood sea beneath Aetheron to ripple backwards as if retreating from the weight of revelation.

”From the weavings of the Folds, there is... and there was, mention of one who once stood within a Wonder and invited a Living Collapse over. The Folds witnessed it. Only one entity, in all this region, should align with such a feat. It must be the same one you speak of.”

...!

Aetheron tilted his head ever so slightly, his crimson eyes narrowing. ”And yet, you only see it now?”

A Young Paradox.

It was something far too important as it should have been sensed as soon as it rose!

Oryzarakh remained motionless. For a Foldless One, admission of fault was impossible. But even now, there was something like a pause in the skies. A hesitation born of deeper reflection.

”Curious indeed,” the Foldless One said, voice low. ”I was not able to gain any information about this being until I looked now.”

Heavy silence followed. An oppressive, thinking quiet.

The white-robed Aetheron, draped in blood and contempt, gave a subtle nod. ”With your inclusion in this matter, there is now no suspense regarding the existence of this other Living Paradox.”

He tapped his fingers against the folds of his robes, and then asked, ”So then, have you found where he is now?”

Oryzarakh did not speak immediately. The obsidian halos behind his head spun one rotation slower.

”The Folds tell me he was taken by the Dwellers of the Veiled Sunfolds,” the Foldless One said at last, the words etched with weight. ”But everything after that grows murky. A haze lies beyond their reach.”

The space around Aetheron grew colder, the blood sea stilling. He frowned lightly. ”But surely, no one escapes your gaze.”

”No entity can hide from me in this region of the Folds,” Oryzarakh said with chilling certainty. ”And so, I followed another weaving of his... in another region entirely.”

...!

He turned his gaze downward, and though there was no movement on his face, the implication was clear.

”I have found him.”

WAA!

Aetheron simply nodded, as if this was always inevitable. As if everything was proceeding as it should.

Then he sighed.

With the weariness of someone far too powerful for his surroundings.

”Fine,” he said, voice detached. ”I’ll make my breakthrough to become a Master of Existence. I will return afterward.”

Oryzarakh gave no approval.

He did not have to.

Aetheron looked up once more, eyes gleaming with that perpetual hue of mockery, half-veiled hate, and amusement. ”Since I have helped the Foldless Ones uncover another Living Paradox, do I get anything out of it? A reward, perhaps?”

Oryzarakh’s reply was slow. Measured. Cruel.

”You get the pleasure of having contributed to the legions of your father. Your father who in a a moment of weakness laid down with a whore from the Folds of the Living Origins.”

BOOOM!

Aetheron’s fingers stilled.

The blood sea boiled.

But he did not move.

The Foldless One’s voice, unflinching, continued.

”You are fortunate you were not labeled an abomination. I shielded you. Protected you. The others would not have. I will introduce you as if you were a newly born Living Paradox soon enough. ”

The air turned frigid.

So cold the Omniverse began to groan.

Aetheron’s form pulsed with restrained rage, though his face remained blank. His body did not tremble. His hands did not twitch. But everything around him did. The entire blood sea began to tremble with unspoken fury, the dead rising in form but not spirit, the pain of millions echoing as if to voice his thoughts!

He said nothing.

He simply looked away.

Into the crimson tides of silence.

And he thought of his mother.

Of the one the Foldless One had just called a whore.

And the things he would one day do, even to those too large to kneel.

But for now, he said nothing.

Oryzarakh, hovering above like a titan without pity, gave a final word. ”I will return for you the moment you attain Mastery. I am proceeding now to inspect the other Living Paradox who has risen in my region.”

...!

WAP!

Then, he was gone.

No light. No sound.

Just a void where unbearable presence had been.

Aetheron stood alone, a white-clad predator among a sea of the dead, the fires of his silence speaking louder than the howls of any Primarch.

He closed his eyes, and thought only of blood.

—

Far away in the Nullvein Gravewake Folds.

The region was scarred.

Blackened shattered spokes hung low in skies of bleeding gray, where entire foldspaces had been devoured by entropy.

Broken frequencies floated like corpses, bleeding their dust into rivers of silent ruin.

The Wheel of Existence here was not living. It had long since died, its remnants nothing more than a cracked shell inhabited by wayward Dead Things- each flickering with unstable True Sources, their authorities twitching violently like muscle spasms of rotting horrors.

They had abysmal Low Purity as their Weavings of Existence were not stable at all.

Only a few had Moderate Purity to help their minds!

And within this place walked Ozymandias.

Another body of Noah that was forged from obsidian and silence and death!

Entirely humanoid in shape, yet more star-born than flesh-made.

His form glinted with the glimmering sheen of stellar obsidian, limbs painted in the matte void of collapsed Omniverses.

Behind him, wings pulsed and curled- massive appendages of void-dark tentacles, glimmering with distant memories of Outerversal wonder.

Every footstep left behind trails of decay and lightless judgment, each imprint on the decaying Existence a signature of True Sources of Death, Apocalypse, and Cataclysm.

He looked down below.

Clutched in one hand was a tiny thing. An obsidian stone, no larger than a miniature heart, gifted by Thauron himself. It pulsed irregularly, a heartbeat formed from forgotten equations.

Then, his eyes lit.

Information streamed into him, not from this domain, but from the one who had freely released the weavings of the Protagonist from the Infiniverse Crucible. From himself!

And the moment these waves of information came, everything changed.

Existence froze.

The authorities stopped.

Like flickering candles extinguished by an unseen hand, the bursts of power, the ambient roars of authority, the distant screams of half-sentient frequencies- all of it was silenced.

Even Ozymandias, for all his nature, had not sensed anything.

Then came the voice.

A booming thing made of command and weight.

”I did not expect the other newly risen Living Paradox in this region of the Folds to also be one who thrives near dead things.”

It came from behind him.

Ozymandias turned, but even before he moved, the entire dead Wheel of Existence froze.

Literally.

From the lowest husks who had never reached a Source, to the Converged Architects...all stopped.

Their motions paused, their Authorities sealed. Even Time here dared not move.

Only he was allowed to move!

He turned fully.

There stood an entity of such scale that distance failed to express it. A being far taller than any Wheel of Existence, its feet invisible in layers of dead spokes!

It floated and existed in supremacy!

Obsidian gold light coiled around its colossal form. Its face, expressionless, carved into something that resembled humanoid geometry, but held the pressure of judgment itself.

And he was known.

Ozymandias, or truly Noah, the Unbound Living Paradox, knew him!

Oryzarakh.

The Foldless One who had just spoken with Aetheron.

Ozymandias had seen a glimpse of the fable through Absolute Fictional Transcendence!

When he had allowed the weavings of the Protagonist to unfold, he saw more than just power. He saw immensity.

The Fable of Aetheron was a horrid one.

Sentances of billions dead.

Something done daily.

Mentions of a Foldless One who would come to investigate a newly risen Paradox.

But that was the brilliance and glory.

His main body had never been found in the Infiniverse Wheel of Existence!

The Living Origin Labyrinth had buried his threads.

Only the Ozymandias Identity had surfaced.

So now, this terrifying being had come.

Traversing uncountable distances with no reverberation. Appearing in the span of a thought.

Oryzarakh gazed upon him with only judgment and finality.

And then, he spoke.

”It is always curious what form a Young Paradox takes. Undeveloped. Unknown yet. But it is more curious still what they seek. Do you seek to know, or to be known? Do you walk among the dead because you command them, or because you feel most at home?”

He paused.

”In the end, all Living Paradoxes must choose what they want to be. So, what do you want to be? What do you seek?”

The weight of it pressed down on the entire Dead Wheel.

And Ozymandias...was silent while coming face to face with a Foldless One!

And the blood-black tentacles behind his back curled as the crimson obsidian stone in his palm pulsed once.