Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 3771

As a silence hung in the air, my own weavings buzzed as a certain prophecy became clearer.

My eyes glazed over it.

[…The Black Monarch will offer choice, but not freedom. The Sentinels of Reversal will ask for the Keys that should not exist.

One will walk away empty. One will walk away whole. One will not walk away.

Beware the day when Death sings in living tongues. On that day, the Foldless Ones shall stir, those neither bound by Life nor caged by Death.

Their names will not be remembered, for they were never written. Their weavings cannot be unspun. Their will cannot be undone….]

Previously, the name Foldless Ones had been filled with incomprehensible symbols as Ozymandias was not able to utter or know their identity.

But now… it was clear.

And the Prophecy of the Black Monarch was also clear.

The Black Monarch will offer choice, but not freedom.

He offered a choice, and it was shockingly imprisonment. Imprisonment… in a place where the Foldless Ones sent those they deemed to have crossed a certain line.

And Thauron stated that it was a Wonder even grander than the Null Cradle of Fold-Breaking Ascension.

So when it came to this choice…

I smiled.

From the distance, Thauron's voice came, steady and assured.

"This is a choice," he said. "To go where few dare. To a place older than memory, crueler than finality."

His clawed hand lifted, slow and deliberate.

Upon his palm, an obsidian stone floated, no chains, no weavings binding it. It hovered freely, a perfect tear of shadow polished to a gleam, impossibly dense, impossibly still. Impossibly final.

"If you wish it," Thauron continued, "you simply have to crush it."

The stone did not move, but the air around it trembled.

As if it was not meant to exist.

As if the Folds themselves recoiled from it.

Thauron smiled, a slow, weary thing.

He extended his hand slightly, leaving the stone to hover closer to me.

"I will not force you," Thauron said. "Take it, or don't. Crush it, or don't."

His smile turned sharper, a whisper of inevitability.

"But if you do… if you choose to tread that path… your vision will be expanded beyond what you now know. Beyond even this Crucible of collapse."

He tilted his head, almost amused.

"And eventually, you will come find me."

He did not wait for my answer.

Did not press further.

He simply turned, descending the mountain with the slow, steady pace of inevitability, heading back toward where Bob still waited at the foot of the Votharion Mountain.

Leaving behind that obsidian stone, hovering, glowing faintly, ominously, as it floated a few feet away from me.

I did not move toward it.

Did not lift my hand.

Did not decide.

I only watched.

Promising myself once more, no entanglements.

I had enough for now.

The Folds were vast. The Chronosect stirred. The Hollow Concord whispered of me. The Foldless Ones, those Living Paradoxes who oversaw all, were out there.

If I achieved what I needed, soon…

I could always choose, then.

For now?

For now, I would finish what I started.

I turned, moving away from the floating stone, letting it linger in the corner of my vision like an unmade choice, a question not yet asked.

I focused inward.

Four more.

Four more Completed True Source Sigils.