Chapter 6001: A Glorious, Quintessential Dream II

The pillar folded inward!

All that many-colored light drew down out of the canopy and wrapped around him, layer on layer, warm and close, and he felt it reach the Tree. He felt it in two places at once. In his chest, where the Tree had always stood, and far away, on a farm in the Undefined Gaps, where his other body lay against a dark-gold trunk with THE Infiniverse awake beside it and every color in her hair burning.

The Tree was growing. It went up past its meters without slowing, the trunk thickening, the writing on its bark beginning to move, the roots driving down and down until they touched the seed in his chest and went on past it. Gold leaves poured off it in a storm. Then the Branches began to turn toward one another.

|Branch of Dreams (Level 18) and Branch of Nightmares (Level 20) have grown together.|

|Branch of THE Whole Dream: Level 50.|

|A dream that holds its own night. What you dream, and what you dread for others, now draw on one root.|

The eastern bough and the western bough bent across the crown of the Tree and wound into each other, blue-gold blossom against black flower, until one great bough stood where two had been. Its blossoms opened blue-gold at the edges and black at the heart.

|Branch of THE Unstriving Current (Level 15) and Branch of THE Quintessential Pulse of Existence (Level 1) have grown together.|

|Branch of THE Unstriving Quintessential Pulse of Existence: Level 30.|

|The Pulse no longer needs to be held. It runs in you without effort, and its reach is the reach of your field.|

|The Pulse now carries what is still as well as what moves.|

The low bent branch with its ever-moving leaves rose and closed around the newest shoot on the Tree, and the two became a single limb that swayed to the beat under everything. He felt the change at once. The slowness he loved came over the forest and stayed, easy as breathing, and the waves ran out from him, and kept going.

|Branch of THE Narrative Wall (Level 16) and Branch of THE Endless Retelling (Level 300) have grown together.|

|Branch of THE Wall Retold Without End: Level 350.|

|Narrative Walls: 100. Each wall is retold in the instant it breaks.|

On the north side of the Tree, the overlapping plates climbed into the highest bough, and the rain of gold leaves became part of them. A hundred walls stood around him, he could feel every one, and each was already telling itself again before anything had touched it.

|Branch of THE Bleeding Nightmare: Level 13 to Level 20. THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: Level 10 to Level 15.|

|Branch of Shinjitsu: Unquantified change occuring|

...!

From the very top of the trunk, where nothing had ever grown, a new Branch opened. It came up golden-brown, the color of turned soil in evening light, and it grew straight toward a sky the Tree could not see. Its leaves were small green blades, row on row. Under each row, a line of light ran back down the bark and into the roots, and through the roots into him.

|New Branch: THE Field Without End. Level 1.|

|Your farm is no longer a place. It is part of your Existence, and it is wherever you are.|

|You may impose your field on any ground, in any region, at any distance and in any number. There is no limit.|

|Within an imposed field, the ground is your soil, your walls stand over it, and your Powers act as they do at home. Whatever is planted there is planted in you.|

|Your infinity is the soil. It cannot be exhausted, and a season in it lasts exactly as long as you decide.|

|Whatever you dream can be planted as seed: a crop, a Narrative, a lifeform, and in time, an Existence.|

|Every harvest is given to existence and comes home to you, without end.|

...!

Noah went through it slowly, and then he let out a breath that shook. He had folded his whole farm into existence once and carried it across the Undefined Gaps to keep it safe. He would never have to carry it again. It was part of him now, the soil and the rows and the rivers, the same as an arm!

Any ground. Any region. Any number!

And the last lines were the ones the path had promised. His infinity as soil that never emptied. His Dreams as seed. A season as long as he decided, so a harvest could take an Age or a breath. He thought of a single faint knot of color that had taken his giving most of an hour to gather in the sea below. What would that sea grow for him when it was his own field?

The light let go of him. Noah stood up, and it took longer than it should have, because there was more of him to raise.

He was taller. A head and shoulders taller at least, and broad through the chest, and Elpis, who had filled his lap, now fit along one forearm. His coat had grown with him. It hung long and dark as fresh-turned soil, and its hem left a faint line of gold wherever it brushed the ground. His straw hat sat wider on his head, the straw gone to pale gold, and under its brim small lights turned slowly, a whole night sky kept in the shade of a hat.

Under the skin of his hands, lines of blue-gold light ran from wrist to fingertip, straight and even, furrows laid by a steady hand. Gold leaves drifted down around his shoulders out of the empty air and went out before they touched the moss. When he breathed, the dust in every beam across the clearing moved with him.

He looked at his own hand for a moment, turning it over. It was a farmer’s hand, though it was also...something different.

|Lifeform: THE Osmontian, THE Infinite Dreaming Farmer of Existence.|

|Evolution count: 2.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin Tree is now THE Infinite Dreaming Tree.|

|Kin Evolution: begun.|

...!

Kin Evolution! His family slept in the warm places inside THE Infiniverse, and every one of them would probably wake as more than they had been. He smiled at that longer than he smiled at anything else. Then the place, THE Schema, spoke level and exact as ever.

|Condition of Evolution: met. The self that was measured at the curtain has been exceeded.|

Noah looked at this lightly as it faded, and he decided to test things out. Noah set one foot forward, and he imposed his field.

It went out from his heel in a ring. The moss turned to black-gold soil, rich and deep and warm, and the soil ran outward over the broken gold of the crater and between the black-glass trunks, two hundred meters, five hundred, further. Starlit obsidian-gold grass came up along its edges, and a furrow line opened in front of him, long and perfectly straight.

|A field has been imposed on THE Root Forest.|

|It is measured as your own power.|

It seemed to have cost him nothing. He looked for the cost and found none, because the soil was his infinity and his infinity had no bottom.

Then he thought of the farm itself. It sat in the old forest of the Undefined Gaps. He had left it there because this place would have torn it apart at the door. But it was no longer a place. It was part of him, and it would probably be safest wherever he could put his hand on it.

So he called it!

The field in front of him rose. Soil lifted in a long slow swell, and out of the swell came the things he knew: the shell house with its porch step, the rivers, the long rows with their young trees, the walled plot at the far edge. Through his other body he felt the old forest of the Undefined Gaps close over bare ground, and for one breath he saw that forest and this one at the same time. Then there was only black glass, and gold beams, and his farm standing under them.

A warm gold curve of wall settled over it. Over the wall, a second skin of blue-gold light closed from edge to edge, so faint that he saw it only where the drifting gold dust slid away from it.

|THE Field Without End: your farm has been called.|

|It has left the Undefined Gaps. Nothing of it remains there.|

|It stands within the field imposed on THE Root Forest.|

|A barrier of your Existence covers its walls. Within it, the pressure of THE Central Mountain does not reach.|

|A place has entered THE Root Forest inside your Existence. It is measured as your own power.|

|The lifeforms within the barrier are not designated while it stands.|

...!

Undesignated. So nothing inside would be counted, or hunted for a return, or given a month to rise, for as long as he kept that barrier whole. But if it broke, the place would measure every one of them...maybe!

At the center of the farm stood the Tree.

He had felt it change, and now he saw it. It had been a few meters tall when he left. It stood far above the roof of the shell house now, a hundred meters of dark-gold trunk with the writing on its bark moving slowly upward. One great bough spread from its crown, heavy with blossoms that were blue-gold at the edges and black at the heart. A long limb swayed beside it to a beat he could feel in his feet. Gold leaves rained from plates of gold on its northern side, the silver-grey Branch rose straight and unmarked through all of it, and at the very top, small and golden-brown, the newest Branch held its rows of green.

It was the one thing in this whole forest that owed nothing to black glass.

At its foot, his other body was getting up. It rose from the roots where it had been lying, a head and shoulders taller than when it had sat down, in the same long dark coat and the same pale-gold hat, and it looked across the field at him.

He looked back. It was a strange thing, to see himself from both sides at once, and both sides agreed on what they saw.

THE Infiniverse stood beside that body with one hand still on her sleeve. Every color in her long hair was turning as she looked up at the black-glass trunks and the constellations inside them. On the far side of the Tree, Ruination had risen too, crimson-gold and very still, and her gaze went over the forest once, slowly. Countless probabilities could bloom from a single gaze of hers!

He walked through the barrier without feeling it and crossed his own rows to the foot of the Tree. There he held out the sleeping child, and his other body took her from him and settled her against its shoulder. Elpis stirred, found the coat with one hand, and slept on.

That left the last measure, and it was the one that mattered most.

A farm standing in the open would be seen. The whale had looked down through a gap in the canopy and found two insects, and it would certainly find this. So he stepped back out onto the open field. The Branch let him decide how long a season lasted. Perhaps it would let him decide how large a field was, too!

It did. He chose how much room the farm should take within his own soil, and it took exactly that much. The walls drew in. The rivers, the rows, the house, the hundred meters of the Tree, all of it folded down smoothly and without harm, until what lay in the furrow at his feet was a single grain, one speck of black-gold among countless specks of black-gold. Inside it, he could feel everything exactly as it had been. THE Infiniverse was still looking up, though from where she stood, the sky had only moved further away.

Then he laid a Dream over it. THE Whole Dream answered at once, and the grain became a grain in every way that could be checked, to the eye and to the Pulse and to anything that reached for it.

|Within your field, size is yours to set.|

|Your farm has been set to the size of one grain of soil. Within its walls, nothing has changed.|

|THE Whole Dream covers it. To any perception beneath and close to your own, it is one grain among countless others.|

|Warning: a lifeform that stands far, far above you in Dimensionality may still see through a Dream.|

...!

It was hidden from nearly everything. From the few things that mattered most, it was only well disguised. He would have to grow past those few, and until then he would keep it close and keep it small.

He bent and pressed the grain into the furrow with his thumb, and closed the soil over it.

Noah straightened and looked out past the edge of his grass, into the dark between the trunks.

He needed...to test and explore many things while understanding exactly what Elpis meant to this place. For her to have done what she did...did IT stem from this place?