Chapter 5956: Devourer

Above his head, the bar now read |Narrative Wall- 8/8x(100%)|, eight walls burning one above another, and a broken one would now come back in about eleven seconds instead of nearly two minutes. Noah let out a long breath, because the Sub-Branch had climbed exactly as fast as his existence had promised, while the four great Branches had only managed two Levels each.

Then a second set of prompts arrived, and these were the ones he had been waiting for.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare: first result.|

|Target: Diomande, Excedere Unfathomable Immense Lifeform of THE Covenant of the Inverted Peak.|

|The Nightmare built from his fear still buds inside him.|

|Narrative bled from Diomande so far: enough to fill one Narrative Wall.|

|THE Bleeding Nightmare is persistent. It will keep bleeding him for as long as it holds.|

|Diomande has begun pressing against it. A target with power this great may tear it out and destroy it.|

|To hook into a target and bind to it irreversibly, THE Bleeding Nightmare must become more complex and more intricate.|

…!

Diomande. Noah turned the name over slowly, and he could still feel the Excedere through the faint thread of the Nightmare, far away in the ruins of the Ashfall Reaches, furious and searching and already pushing at the thing inside him. He had hooked a very big fish, and the hook was small and simple, and a fish that big would not stay on a simple hook for long.

So how did he make it hold? A Nightmare that only sat inside someone could be found and pulled out, but a Nightmare that had grown into the target’s own Narrative, threading itself through every part of their story until removing it meant tearing out pieces of themselves, would be much harder to lose.

He did not know how to make it do that yet, and he stood in the snow thinkng about it, unwilling to let a single drop of Diomande’s Narrative go to waste!

The farm began to buzz under his feet. It was a low, uneasey sound, rising up out of the soil from somewhere deep beneath the field, and a moment later a new prompt appeared.

|The core Narrative of Astarothael cannot be fully broken down.|

|It is too dangerous to keep as it is.|

|Should it be ejected from your farm, or destroyed?|

…!

Noah closed his eyes and felt down into the ground. He and the existence beneath the farm had already broken down most of what Astarothael had been, and in the very center of all that refining, held apart and isolated, there was one piece they could not touch. It was a Narrative, murky and obsidian and white, turbid and vile and very hungry, and even held still in the deep soil, it was reaching out for anything it could eat.

He looked at it for a long time, and he found that he did not want to destroy it, or throw it away. It was vile and hungry and dangerous, a hunger so strong that it had survived falling off the Mountain and burning into its stones for Ages, and that was exactly the thing he had just been wishing his Nightmare had. Why not put it into THE Bleeding Nightmare?

|Warning.|

|The core Narrative of Astarothael is hunger that survived its own death. Placed into THE Bleeding Nightmare as it is, it will try to eat the Nightmare, and then you.|

|There is only one way to remove this danger: raise the Nightmare of Astarothael and bring her under your control.|

|As a Risen Nightmare bound to you, her foul Narrative could flow into THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree, to be refined like everything else.|

|Estimate: if her Narrative can be purified, it could tremendously elevate the capabilities of THE Bleeding Nightmare.|

Noah knelt in the snow, set both palms flat on the black-gold soil, and reached down to the hungry thing at the bottom of his farm. Up close, it was not one Narrative but two, tangled so tightly together that they had nearly become one, and his Shinjitsu pulled them gently apart so he could see what each of them was.

|The core within Astarothael is not hers alone.|

|It is the Narrative of Ammit, THE Devourer, which Astarothael swallowed on her climb up THE Mountain at the Center of Everything and could never digest.|

|Ammit’s hunger is what kept her alive when she fell. It is also what made her vile.|

…!

Noah’s eyes pulsed.

He began to purify it. He did not burn the hunger away or try to crush it, because it would only have fought him, but he and the existence beneath the farm wrapped around it together and held it and let it soften, drawing the rot out of it one layer at a time and letting the rot sink away into the deep soil, where existence could take it apart.

It took a long whlie, and it did not want to be cleaned. Every layer he peeled away tried to bite him on its way out, and twice he felt its hunger reach up through the soil toward his Dream and turn back only when it met his walls. But layer by layer, the turbid obsidian-white murk thinned and cleared, until what lay in his hands was a hunger with nothing vile left in it, still enormous and still endless, but clean.

With the hunger pulled out of her, Astarothael was only a shred again, small and exhausted and very angry, and Noah wrapped her existence inside his own and drew her up out of the ground. She came out of his Dream in the shape of the small white cat, sitting on the snowing soil beside the sapling with her tail lashing, and she glared up at him with eyes that could no longer hurt anything.

|Unique Risen Nightmare: Astarothael.|

|Her existence is now wrapped within yours. She cannot act against you.|

|Without Ammit’s hunger, she is only what she was before her climb.|

|What remains of her own Narrative is yours to raise, or to keep small.|

…!

Noah took the purified bundle of Ammit’s Narrative, a clean and enormous hunger, and carried it down into his Dreaming Human Origin and into the Tree. He did not give it to the Branches or the walls. He gave it to THE Bleeding Nightmare, and the Nightmare drank it in and began to break it down, threading Ammit’s endless hunger through every part of itself until the two could no longer be told apart.

The sapling shook. A fifth Branch pushed out of its glass bark, dark and obsidian-gold, and beside it a sixth rose as well, pale and banded with slowly turning light, while the swirling barriers of his walls turned once around Noah’s body and settled into that sixth Branch, and the thin shoot of THE Endless Retelling bent over and joined it.

On the dark Branch, a bud opened into a single flower, deep red at its heart and obsidian-gold at its edges, and the whole farm went quiet as it bloomed.

|THE Bleeding Nightmare has become a Branch of THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree.|

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 5.|

|Your Narrative Walls have grown into a Branch of their own: Branch of THE Narrative Wall, Level 5.|

|THE Endless Retelling is now a Sub-Branch of THE Narrative Wall.|

|Each Level of THE Narrative Wall makes your walls more complex, and harder to break.|

…!

|A Sub-Branch has grown from THE Bleeding Nightmare: THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage.|

|Every act bleeds: each time a being afflicted by THE Bleeding Nightmare acts, the truth of its own story and history bleeds out of it. Every drop flows to you, feeding your existence and repairing your walls.|

|The Nightmare spreads: it passes on through every being entangled with its victim, whoever loves them, serves them, fights beside them, or heals them. The deeper the entanglement, the faster it spreads.|

|It grows outside: the spreading Nightmares grow beyond the structure of Dimensionality, patiently, reading and copying the records of those they live in.|

|It subsumes the weak: beings weaker than you that it touches are slowly replaced by their own dreams, which become yours, while their existence remains as an anchor.|

|It stays true: through your Shinjitsu, these Nightmares remain real even while the beings they live in remain.|

|It is fed by roads not taken: every victim’s dreams, and every possibility it never walked, feed the Nightmares inside them.|

|It cannot be pulled free: grown through the hunger of Ammit, THE Bleeding Nightmare now roots into its victim’s Narrative. Tearing it out means tearing out the story it has grown through.|

|In your tended existence, enemies resist your Nightmares less. Any being that strikes you, or those under your protection, within it is marked with a Nightmare seed, and each seed erodes its resistance further.|

…!

Noah read the prompts slowly, every line of them! It was not a hook anymore. It was a root, and a root with Ammit’s hunger in it, and anything it grew into would bleed every time it moved, and pass the bleeding on to everything that cared for it, and keep growing quietly outside the reach of anything that tried to find it.

He thought of Diomande, far away in the ruins of the Ashfall Reaches, furious and searching and pressing against the small, simple Nightmare he still carried. The thread between them was thin, and the Excedere had very nearly torn it loose. Noah’s existence pulsed once, deep and slow, and down the thin thread of the Nightmare, out of the snowing farm and across all of existence toward the Ashfall Reaches, the new hunger began to travel toward his big fish!

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