Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 4090: The Illusion of Control! I

Back in the Early Veiled Shore, Noah felt the shreds of resonance of these distant events through his Absolute Fictional Transcendence.

He only read bits and pieces, but he got the idea!

Threads of narrative connected him to happenings across existence, though most remained too complex to fully grasp.

But this...Schrodinger’s transformation, rang clear as a bell through the fable of Existence itself.

As Noah thought about the glimpses he read, he closed his eyes.

An Inevitability thay Sigrid gave her Disorder to.

Schrodinger excavating such a thing and it paving way to the potential of becoming...THE Living Chaos!

The potential.

”...”

It was...an error on his part.

He did not know enough regarding Inevitabilities. Whether they digested Everythings they were given, or whether those Everythings could be used again.

How could he even have imagined that a force like Schrodinger would be able to do something as complex as extract a part of Everything from an Inevitability and take it into himself?

But still, it was his oversight.

His mistake. He would own up to it as he could now work to make sure that it would not be...a costly mistake!

Two possible THE Living Existences potentially rising simultaneously. Order and Chaos. Structure and Entropy.

He rose from the waters, his newly forged resistance making each movement feel more deliberate, more costly for reality to oppose.

Around him, his companions continued their preparations...Moiraine absorbing the Essence Gems, Sigrid organizing her growing power, the Shore itself humming with accumulated potential!

—

Control.

That most seductive of illusions.

Some beings genuinely command existence, bending reality to their will through power that transcends comprehension.

Others possess absolutely no control whatsoever, yet believe with fervent certainty that they orchestrate existence!

Between genuine authority and complete delusion lies the vast spectrum of existence, each being convinced their grip on reality is exactly as firm as they need it to be.

In the Earliest Folds, it was said that...

THE Living Emotive had grown concerned with the rising chaos across existence.

Emotions ran unchecked...rage sparked wars that unmade dimensions, love created obsessions that warped time, fear generated voids that swallowed certainty itself.

In response, THE Living Emotive attempted something ambitious: to regulate the emotional spectrum of all existence, to bring order through feeling.

At that time...

THE Living Elemental and THE Living Dimensional observed these efforts with amusement and mockery.

”Do you truly believe,” THE Living Elemental said, its form shifting between states of matter, ”that your flimsy emotions can affect all of existence? You, who changes mood with the winds of existence?”

...!

THE Living Dimensional’s laughter existed in many dimensions simultaneously, creating weavings that made space question its own structure.

”Out of all ten of us,” it said, its voice coming from directions that didn’t exist, ”you have the least control over existence. We command fundamental forces...I can fold space like origami, Elemental makes matter dance to primordial songs. Even Paradox, chaotic as it is, maintains consistency in its inconsistency.”

THE Living Elemental continued the philosophical assault: ”Emotions are ephemeral, temporary, as substantial as morning mist. What someone feels in one moment contradicts what they feel in the next. You cannot even maintain consistency within a single being, yet you presume to regulate all beings?”

”Look at the others,” THE Living Dimensional added. ”Law establishes precedent that lasts eons. Concept creates ideas that become more real than matter. Spirit touches the essence of existence itself. But emotions? They’re just... reactions. Secondary effects. The foam on the ocean, not the ocean itself.”

THE Living Elemental’s form solidified into something resembling contempt: ”You should simply sit back and let the rest of us do the actual work. We shape existence. You just... feel about it afterward.”

THE Living Emotive listened to this brutalization in complete silence, neither defending nor acknowledging, simply absorbing each word like rain on stone. THE Living Emotive...showed no emotions in the face of all this!

It all ended with a question that echoes through the Earliest Folds: Was THE Living Emotive truly one of those who only possessed an illusion of control?

Or was there something about emotion, about the power to make beings feel...that the others had failed to understand?

Perhaps the answer lay in the fact that eons later, beings still remembered how this conversation made them feel, while the specific dimensional manipulations and elemental transformations of that era...had been forgotten entirely.

—

In the Transcendent Paradoxical Folds.

Diviticus fled from the cluster of paradoxical rivers with the desperate haste of someone who had witnessed glory being born and realized they were standing too close to the delivery room.

Her face remained shrouded with an expression that mixed awe and primal fear.

She had watched Schrodinger transcend, had felt the weight of someone becoming something she did not even understand, had understood in her bones that she was witnessing history that would reshape existence itself.

The proximity to such transformation had left her feeling small, insignificant, like a candle flame next to a star going supernova.

To escape this suffocation of inadequacy, she went to the one place only she could access.

She took a single step that carried her through more than distance. Reality folded around her will, recognizing her authority to be elsewhere.

She appeared in a region that shouldn’t exist...a space filled with reflecting obsidian mirrors that showed not images but possibilities, not reflections but refractions of what might be.

She passed through millions of these mirrors, each one showing a different version of herself...stronger, weaker, triumphant, destroyed, ascending, falling.

None of them were real. All of them were true.

Finally, she entered a vast domain where the obsidian mirrors formed cathedral walls around something that made even paradox nervous...the Corpse of an Early Creature.

It lay there in terrible grandeur, eyes closed in death that might have been sleep.

Where its heart should have been, an obsidian illusory organ pulsed with borrowed life. The massive gash across its body...the wound that had killed something that shouldn’t have been killable, was healing.

Not quickly, but visibly, flesh knitting together through will rather than biology.

Authority accumulated around it like sediment, each layer making it easier to control, more responsive to her will.

Diviticus stood before it with the relief of someone who had found their anchor in a storm.

”I know I don’t have the talent,” she said, speaking to herself but addressing the corpse as if it could hear. ”Not like Schrodinger with his natural paradox, not like the others with their inherited advantages. To get where I want to be, I have to work harder and smarter than anyone else!”

...!