Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 4209: The Architects of Survival! III

Existence held its breath, a silent, cosmic inhale before the final, devastating exhale!

In the ruined skies of the Transcendent Origin Folds, two impossibilities clashed in a ballet of fundamental forces.

Nysteria, the Dead Early Creature, was a maelstrom of innocent, absolute endings, her obsidian club a punctuation mark intended to end the very sentence of existence!

Opposing her was the Origin Ancestral Turtle, a living bastion of genesis, its nine heads a choir singing the symphony of creation!

For a time, they were a perfect, terrible equilibrium. Nysteria’s Haki, a force of dozens of quadrillions, would smash against the turtle’s defenses, only to be met by a wave of pure Origin that did not block, but simply unwrote the concept of her attack.

The turtle’s beams of white-gold light, each a different facet of what it meant to begin, would surge towards her, only to be devoured by the profound, cheerful nothingness that was her Dead Existential Authority.

But the scales had tipped.

Noah stood in his titanic form, a silent, colossal observer wreathed in the bloody purple flames of his Heart of Tyranny.

He was a terror of a forgotten age, his very presence a weight on the fabric of reality. His Haki had selected to empower even the fat turtle!

Now, Nysteria was fighting not just the turtle, but the very atmosphere, an environment that was now tyrannically aligned against her.

And then there was Order. Sigrid, a blazing white sun of pure, conceptual law, had unleashed her authority. The Glyph of Order had bloomed on the turtle’s nine heads, and its once-wild, chaotic expressions of Origin had become focused, precise, and lethally efficient!

Nysteria roared, a sound of childlike frustration and boundless rage. She could feel her authority being rejected, her joyful chaos being constrained by a structure she could not comprehend.

She was a storm being told it had to blow in straight lines, a fire being commanded to burn without consuming. It was anathema to her very being!

Fuck!

The nine heads of the Ancestral Turtle moved as one. This was not nine separate attacks, but a single, unified declaration. A genesis cascade.

From one head, a beam of pure creation shot forth, seeking to imbue Nysteria’s dead form with a life it could not contain.

From another, a wave of protective Origin formed a cage of absolute beginning around her, a prison from which no ending could escape!

From a third, the very concept of growth was weaponized, a torrent of evolution that sought to force her to become something other than what she was.

All nine aspects of Origin struck her simultaneously.

For the first time since her arrival, the innocent smile on Nysteria’s face vanished. It was replaced by a look of profound, primal rage.

Her authority of death, the very essence of her being, was not just being defeated; it was being systematically unwritten. Existence was telling her, with a voice of nine harmonious roars, that she was a mistake, an error that was now being corrected.

It was telling her to fucking rest!

Well, until she returned in a day anyways.

She roared one last time, a bellow of defiant, childlike fury that shook the Folds. And then, her form, that beautiful, terrible monument to an ancient tragedy, was consumed in the maelstorm of Origin of the fat turtle!

BOOM!

A blinding storm of obsidian light erupted from her, an explosion of pure, unadulterated ending. It was not a light that illuminated, but one that revealed the absolute darkness that lay behind the illusion of existence.

It was beautiful, in the way a dying Wheel of Existence is beautiful...a final, magnificent, and utterly catastrophic statement.

The light pulsed once, a silent heartbeat of cessation, and then it was gone.

And so was she.

...!

When the light cleared, the space where the Dead Early Creature had been was empty. Not a trace remained. No scattered fragments of bone, no lingering wisps of deathly authority, not even a memory in the fabric of spacetime.

It was a perfect, clinical absence.

For a moment, there was silence. The surviving Dukes, the newly arrived reinforcements, the swarming legions of The Dead...all were frozen in a weaving of stunned disbelief.

Where the hell was the treasured corpse of that Early Creature?!

The nine heads of the Ancestral Turtle turned, their eighteen golden eyes scanning the empty space with a dawning, terrible comprehension. The triumph of their victory was instantly consumed by the horror of their loss.

This was not what was supposed to happen!

They had won, but their prize, the unfathomably valuable corpse of an Early Creature, was gone!

Their collective roar was not one of victory, but of pure, incandescent rage.

"WHO?!"

The question was not a word, but a physical force, a shockwave of fury that ripped through the Folds.

Who had dared? Who had stolen from the very jaws of the Living Origins?!

The assembled Dukes of Origin looked around, their gazes filled with a murderous suspicion.

Their eyes fell upon the newly arrived Paradoxes, the obvious culprits.

It was always those darn Paradoxes!

Duke Elagabalus and others blinked with a light of heavy offense.

In the midst of the rising chaos, Noah’s titanic form began to shrink, the bloody purple flames receding back into his heart.

He returned to his normal size, his expression a perfect mirror of the confusion around him.

He looked at the empty space where Nysteria had been, then at the enraged turtle, and shook his head with what looked like profound disappointment.

Khor materialized beside him, her tiny hand flying to her mouth in a flawless imitation of shock.

Noah maintained his mask of bewilderment, but inwardly, a cold, triumphant satisfaction was blooming!

For in the Radiant Shore, in a place beyond the reach of their senses, beyond the grasp of their fury, a new mountain had just appeared.

A silent, almost gentle tear in reality had opened above the golden sands, and from it, the massive, beautiful, and now-perfectly-still corpse of Nysteria had been carefully deposited onto the beach.

It was laid down with a reverence that was almost tender, as if placed there by an invisible, appreciative hand!