Infinite Mana in the Apocalypse - Chapter 4149

Chapter 4149: Who Is He?! IV

The words landed like hammers made from crystallized impossibility!

Duke Whisker was shocked.

A dozen Early Creatures. Dead. Killed by a single Living Existence!

“The Fold Dwellers were astonished at this scene,” Khor continued, seemingly oblivious to the paradigm-shattering implications of what she was describing.

“They looked toward the Living Quantum and asked it…how was it possible for it to do this? Why did it do this? What could possibly motivate such impossible violence?”

Her voice softened then, carrying something that might have been sympathy across the eons.

“The Living Quantum had a look of immense sorrow. Without even turning back, without acknowledging the Fold Dwellers as anything more than incidental witnesses, he said that these Early Creatures had taken his daughter. They had their way with her, used her for their amusement, and then collapsed her existence just for fun. Just to see if they could, just to hear what sound a Living Quantum would make when it ceased.”

…!

The amphitheater around them continued its elaborate dance of arrival and positioning, but within their bubble of conversation, the weight of the story created its own gravity.

“For such actions,” Khor continued, her voice now carrying an edge that suggested even she found some things unforgivable, “they had to die. So the Living Quantum said, ‘I simply obtained the power to kill them.’ As if obtaining the power to kill Early Creatures was something one could simply decide to do.”

She smiled then, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression.

“They tried to run, of course. Early Creatures who had lived since the beginning of structured existence, who had shaped reality through will alone, they tried to flee from a single Living Quantum. But as he explained to the Fold Dwellers…Living Quantum Authority flows through him as it truly should, as it was always meant to. Distance means nothing. The distance of light-years or the distance of time is but a step. So he hunted them in the past, in the present, and in the future, across the Folds…collapsing all their existences into that single moment of ending. Just like they had collapsed the existence of his daughter.”

HUUM!

Duke Whisker’s form trembled on Noah’s shoulder, his stellar eyes wide.

A Living Existence hunting Early Creatures through time itself, killing them in past and future simultaneously, gathering all their deaths into a single moment of absolute judgment!

“The Fold Dwellers were astonished at the actions of the Living Quantum,” Khor said, her tone returning to something more conversational.

“When they looked him up and down, seeing him standing victorious but hollow over his revenge, one took pity on him and said, ‘If you have nothing else to live for in these Folds, we can always invite you somewhere else. Someplace in the Wandering Territories. The First Farmer does not discriminate and accepts all.'”

…!

She ended the story there, her gaze sweeping once more across the assembled powers of existence, these Dukes and Royals and Honored beings who thought themselves mighty.

“Who knows if that Living Quantum took their offer,” she said with a shrug that dismissed entire categories of possibility.

“But that was a true Living Existence. Someone who could even collapse Early Creatures when sufficiently motivated. Maybe he truly went to the Wandering Territories with the Fold Dwellers. Maybe others like him did the same, drawn by the promise of purpose beyond mere accumulation of power. Maybe that’s why all those who remain here… are so weak. Or maybe its something else entirely.”

BOOM!

The word ‘weak’ echoed through Duke Whisker’s consciousness like a bell being rung inside his skull.

His entire understanding of power structures, carefully cultivated across eons of existence, churned tumultuously.

These beings he had spent his existence categorizing, understanding, respecting…they were the weak ones? The ones left behind when true power chose to go elsewhere?

Noah listened with a calm gaze that seemed to emanate unfathomable waves of Tyranny.

His seated posture hadn’t changed, but something about his presence had shifted, as if Khor’s story had confirmed something he had been mulling over.

The weak remnants of what power used to mean, playing elaborate games of hierarchy while true strength existed elsewhere, in places like the Earliest Folds where he had just walked, in territories that wandered between definitions.

At that precise moment, as if Existence had decided the timing was too perfect to be coincidence, existence flickered on the side of the Living Paradoxes.

Duke Elagabalus had been seated there with various unique Royal Living Paradoxes and Honored Living Paradoxes arranged around him like a court of impossibilities.

The space had seemed complete, settled, established in its configuration.

Yet in the next heartbeat, existence pulsed with uncertainty behind Duke Elagabalus’s throne.

Reality seemed to argue with itself about what was true, what had been true, what would be true. The air itself became paradoxical, simultaneously too thick and too thin, too present and too absent.

And then, as if they had always been there and had never been there until this moment, Living Paradoxes began to appear en masse.

More than twenty Dukes of Paradox materialized simultaneously, their arrival neither gradual nor sudden but something that transcended the concept of arrival itself!

They simply were, and had been.

Leading them was a Duke that commanded attention not through elaborate display but through sheer, overwhelming presence.

It had not bothered to take human form, perhaps considering such accommodations beneath its dignity or simply irrelevant to its nature.

Instead, a massive white serpent crashed across dozens of thrones, its form so vast that it redefined the geography of that section of the amphitheater.

Its scales weren’t merely white but contained within them every possible interpretation of whiteness…the white of absolute beginning, the white of final ending, the white of light before it learned to be bright, the white of void that had forgotten it was supposed to be dark!

Each scale was itself a paradox, existing and not existing, present and absent, there and not there, all simultaneously.

Duke Whisker’s attention immediately snapped to this new arrival, his earlier shock momentarily forgotten in the face of recognizing something genuinely dangerous.

His tiny form straightened on Noah’s shoulder as he began to speak.

“There are many fearsome Living Paradoxes we keep tabs on,” he began, his stellar eyes fixed on the massive serpent.

“Entities who have led all Living Paradoxes over the years, beings whose very existence makes reality question its own rules. That… is Goliath. One of the most powerful Living Paradoxes we know of to date.”

The name carried weight that made even the air around them grow denser.

Goliath!

Not named for size, though the size was certainly impressive, but for the impossible nature of being simultaneously victor and vanquished, small and large, all at once!

“Goliath once stood against all the Dukes of Living Concepts,” Duke Whisker continued, his voice dropping to something approaching reverence and somberness.

“He wanted something they had…nobody knows what, or perhaps everyone knows and the knowledge itself is paradoxical. But he stood in The Heart of Concepts itself to fight all their Living Concepts at once. The battle lasted seventeen seconds and seventeen eons simultaneously. Reality itself couldn’t decide who was winning because victory and defeat had become the same thing in his presence.”

The mouse paused, seeming to gather himself for the next part.

“He was only forced to retreat when other Living Existences came…not defeated, never defeated, because defeat would require him to not also be victorious. That incident was part of the reason for the formation of the Coalition of Living Existences against Paradoxes. They called him The Immovable Paradox, Goliath….immovable because he was always moving, moving because he never moved, present in his absence and absent in his presence.”

…!

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