Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 4095: The Return of the First Hunger! I

Khor continued looking around with mounting confusion, her miniature form trembling slightly as existence itself seemed uncertain about her presence.

When she had proclaimed she shouldn’t exist, the words carried weight that made the Shore’s light flicker.

Noah’s expression grew heavy as he studied her.

She represented far too many things...power that predated power, hunger that could never be satisfied. Her very presence raised questions that might not have safe answers!

His first action was to check the bond he felt with what had emerged from the Seed of Inevitability.

The connection thrummed through his existence like a second heartbeat...unshakable, irreversible, absolute.

Through it, he could feel her confusion, her fragmented memories, her struggle to understand her own existence.

If he wished, he could impose his will through this bond, command her as completely as he commanded his own limbs. And yet...he also felt like he could not truly command her!

Was even an unshakable bond truly unshakable when it came to someone like Khor? Someone who had made impossibility her domain?

She took tentative steps across the plot she had just emerged from, each footfall leaving impressions that seemed deeper than they should be, as if her tiny form carried weight that existence could not truly bear.

”What do you mean you should not exist?” Noah asked, keeping his voice steady despite the implications racing through his mind.

Khor looked up at him, and even in her diminished form, her eyes remained as he remembered...deep as an abyss, containing depths that suggested falling forever might be preferable to reaching the bottom.

Those eyes now struggled to piece together fragments of memory that didn’t quite align.

”Yes, Outsider, I should not exist.” Her voice carried certainty despite her confusion. ”After all, THE Living Paradox deemed it so. It sought and enacted the cessation of my existence. The unmaking of everything I was, am, or could be.”

BOOM!

The words resonated through the Shore with force that made Noah’s entire existence buzz.

”THE Living Paradox?” Noah’s voice sharpened with sudden understanding.

Khor clutched her head suddenly, dropping to her knees on the golden sand as if mentioning this had triggered something.

Her small form shook with the effort of trying to reconcile memories that spanned eons with a present that shouldn’t include her.

”It seems my memory and being are fractured,” she said through gritted teeth that were somehow still sharp enough to bite through concepts. ”Tell me, Outsider...what age are we in? What time is this?”

She paused, her expression growing more troubled.

”Everything feels... murky. Complicated in ways that existence wasn’t when I knew it. The fundamental forces have multiplied, divided, specialized. It’s like looking at a simple painting that’s been copied and recopied until it’s become a library. What is this?”

Noah’s gaze grew somber as he considered how to explain eons of change to someone who shouldn’t have survived to see them.

”This point in time is eons after the Earliest Folds,” he said carefully. ”In the current era, nobody has seen Early Creatures. They’ve become myth, legend, cautionary tales. Nobody knows where THE Creature is, or even if it still exists. THE Living Existences are known but not seen, their direct intervention so rare that some doubt they’re real.”

Khor rose slowly from the sand, her movements suggesting she was testing whether physics still worked the way she remembered.

She looked at him with a slight smile that contained layers of meaning.

”Aren’t you walking the path of Early Creatures? Are you a cautionary tale?” Her gaze swept across their surroundings with recognition dawning. ”And is this not... an Early Veiled Shore? Seems like someone knows something of Early Creatures after all...”

Noah remained silent, neither confirming nor denying. Some truths were dangerous to speak aloud, especially to beings who had existed when those truths were first established.

He observed her closely as she took steadier steps, seeming to gain confidence in her continued existence with each movement.

”What is this?” he finally asked. ”How is it possible for you to be here right now?”

Khor stepped fully out of the plot where the Seed of Inevitability had been cultivated, her tiny feet touching the golden sands with the particular care of someone relearning sensation.

She felt the Early Veiled Shore properly for the first time, her awareness expanding to encompass the impossible ecosystem that had developed here.

The Shore’s inhabitants had all turned toward her with expressions that mixed curiosity and instinctive unease.

Even beings who didn’t understand what she was could feel that something fundamental had changed!

She smiled at their attention with the particular pleasure of someone who had been alone for so long that any acknowledgment was...unique.

”My very existence back then made impossibilities the norm,” she said, her voice carrying the weight of remembered power. ”What one person considers impossible is simply breathing for another. The impossible and the inevitable are often the same thing, just viewed from different temporal positions.”

She paused, seeming to taste the air itself.

”But yes, even for me, this is new. Death I understood...I dealt it often enough. Cessation I experienced...THE Living Paradox made certain of that. But return? Rebirth through inevitability itself? This wasn’t in anyone’s calculations.”

She turned to Noah with eyes that saw through more than space.

”I gave you A Seed of Inevitability,” she said, the singular article carrying special weight.

”Not just any seed, but one I had cultivated personally. Of course it contained threads of my weavings...all Inevitabilities that were part of my Way of Existence contain my mark. But for my collapsed weavings to arise from it...”

She shook her head with genuine bewilderment.

”Even I’m stumped. It should have been just a seed. Powerful, yes. Capable of growing into something magnificent, certainly. But capable of reconstituting me from absolute cessation? That’s not how seeds work. That’s not how anything works.”

She looked around the radiant Shore once more, taking in the Sacred Trees, the Aquarium teeming with impossible life, the Tenders working with mechanical devotion. Her smile grew more genuine, less performative.

”But since I am here...” She closed her eyes and drew in a breath that seemed to pull in more than air. ”Existence is unfathomable and has ways to balance all things. Patterns emerge from chaos. Order crystallizes from entropy. The impossible becomes inevitable given sufficient time.”

Her eyes opened, blazing with certainty that transcended her diminutive form.

”Even if I cannot explain why, Outsider... can I not enjoy existence once more?” She spread her tiny arms wide, addressing not just Noah but the Shore itself, perhaps existence beyond.

”Before those here, before Existence itself, I, Khor, proclaim that I exist. I am. I hunger. I continue. I inevitably return!”

BOOM!