Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5515

Chapter 5515: Existential Intermission- Lifeforms

<Existential Intermission>

From the private records of THE Recorder of Wilds, kept across ages, read by no one.

—

I have been asked, exactly once in all my long wandering, what it is I actually do.

The asker was a mountain that had learned to speak, and I told it the truth. I study lifeforms and how they interact with space and time. That is all. Existence is a wilderness beyond any measuring, and wildernesses are made of the things that live in them, and someone ought to be writing it all down.

So. Today’s entry. Let us take stock of the great varieties, for my own amusement if nothing else.

—

Beginning with the Gilded Ones, since they insist on being noticed.

A Gilded Lifeform is what happens when a species decides that the self is a resource to be mined. Their entire civilization is built upon the Ego, amplified, refined, layered, and hammered into brilliance. Superbius, Ira, Invidia, Avaritia, all the grand flavors of self, worn like plumage. And I will say this clearly, because my records are honest even when the wilds are not. It actually works. Who would’ve thought?

A Gilded One’s amplified Ego is a genuine architecture of power, and the finest of them burn brighter than nearly anything on Vakochev’s Scales.

Their weakness is the same as their gift. An Ego amplified is an Ego exposed. I once watched a Gilded hierarch of the Superbius line refuse to retreat from a collapsing Dimension because retreating contradicted his self-image, and the Dimension closed over him like water over a dropped coin. All because he was trying his best to stay true to his pride. Magnificent. Foolish. The two are neighbors more often than not. I actually don’t like Gilded Lifeforms too much.

Then the Infinite Lifeforms, the children of boundlessness.

Where the Gilded mine the self, the Infinite mine the endless. Their Sources run on Infinity itself, that wild grammar of never-finishing, and it shapes them into creatures of escalation. An Infinite Lifeform does not ask what am I, it asks what more am I, and the answer never stops arriving. I have watched infant Infinite Ones lose fights they should have won because they were too busy growing mid-battle to bother defending, and I have watched elder Infinite Ones stack themselves upward through sheer accumulated more until Scales stopped describing them.

They too have Egos, and this is where matters become interesting, for an Infinite Ego does not amplify like a Gilded one. It compounds. Quietly. Endlessly. The most dangerous beings I have ever recorded were not the loud ones. They were Infinite Ones who had been compounding in silence for an age as many lean towards the calmer Egos.

Humility, Charity, Kindness...you know the ones.

The Source Lifeforms, next. The deep-rooted.

These draw their existence from THE Primordial Source, the oldest water in the oldest well, and it makes them dense in a way no other variety matches. A Source Lifeform of middling rank can often simply outlast a superior enemy, their weavings anchored so deep into the primordial that unraveling them is like trying to dig up a mountain’s roots with a spoon. They are slow to rise, slow to anger, slow to die. Patience, given a body.

Then, we continue on with the ones that fit nowhere. My favorite entries in the Dimension of Existence I am currently visiting.

The Steeds. Living Observable Existences, bred as beasts by hands that predate my records, carrying First Causes the way other creatures carry hearts. No category holds them. They are Observable Existences that walk, and those here are dying, and that is a separate entry I have not yet had the stomach to finish.

But...this is one Dimension. There are many Dimensions as are there no Steeds that are not cursed? That move grandly even now?

There are THE Descendants of Those Who Remain, those whose blood is mixed with pure wonder as these fuckers...man oh man. Some are weak, some are powerful. But even the weak ones could do wonders.

And there are more. Oh, more. I have glimpsed things in the far folds that I have no shelf for. A lifeform that existed only as a debt passed between other lifeforms. A herd that was a single memory wearing ten thousand bodies. Something at the bottom of a drowned Dimension that I am fairly certain was a question, alive, and waiting to be asked. The Sealed One...eh, something that could be considered a big deal, and also not a big deal. It is all...relative.

There are a countless number of unique beings, scattered across Existence and its endless Dimensions. That is the true census, and it humbles every category I have ever drawn.

Existence is far too vast. Those within it are abundant beyond any recording.

Which is, of course, precisely why one records.