Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5375: Quasi! I

There is a story the Infinite Lifeforms tell about a student who knew everything and could do nothing.

He was, by every account, the most learned being of his generation. He had read the records of his elders and the records of their elders and the records that predated records, until there was no question one could put to him that he could not answer at once and completely.

Ask him the depth of an ocean of an entire Observable Existence and he gave you the number. Ask him the nature of a Cause and he gave you its history back to its first stirring. He held more knowledge than any being alive, and he was very proud of it, and his elders were proud of him too, for a while.

Then an existential flood came to his Observable Existence.

He stood at the edge of the rising water and he knew everything about it. He knew the volume of it and the rate of it and the precise moment it would reach the domains below. He knew which structures would hold and which would fail. He knew the names of all who would drown. He recited these things, perfectly, while the water rose, and the people around him begged him to do something, and he could not, because knowing the hour a person will drown is not the same as pulling them from the water, and he had spent his whole existence on the first thing and none of it on the second.

The domains drowned on the schedule he had calculated. He had been right about all of it. It saved no one.

When his eldest came to him afterward, the student wept, and asked what good all his knowledge had been?!

Information is everything. This is true. Existence runs on it; there is no power that is not, underneath, a thing known and applied. But the knowing is only half of it, and it is the lesser half. A being who holds all the information in existence and does not know how to apply it is a being who will recite the depth of the water perfectly while it closes over his head. The flood does not care what you know. It cares only what you do with it.

Hold knowledge, the elders teach. But hold it the way you hold a blade, by the handle, ready to use. Never the way you hold a treasure, behind glass, admired and useless.

The student who knew everything is remembered. But he is remembered as a warning, not a master. And the masters who came after him are remembered for one thing only: not for what they knew, but for the single right moment in which they finally knew how to use it.

<From the parables of the Infinite Lifeforms, teller unrecorded>

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In THE Lower Observable Existence of THE Braneworld, within Helheim, the paradox went on.

It had been going on since the Acedia Ordnances fell, the impact of two paradoxes pressing against each other without end, teacher and student locked in a thing that looked like combat and was something stranger. THE Primordial Paradox, the master, a vast humanoid titan standing in the ruin. THE Living Paradox, the student, Erwin, a great circular mass of obsidian tentacles wriggling and folding against the titan’s hold.

The teacher had help. Noah’s Infinity ran through THE Primordial Paradox, threaded into his existence, and where the Infinity ran, the Acedia Dredge infection found no foothold. The conversion that had swept the lower realm, that had turned trillions into mindless will-less Dredges, could not take the master, because the master carried a piece of a being whose identity could not be converted. So THE Primordial Paradox stood whole, and he had taken on the only role the situation left him.

He held his student back.

Because the infection had found a foothold in Erwin. It had taken root in THE Living Paradox where it could not take root in the master, and so the teacher held the student, contained him, kept the writhing obsidian mass from doing harm while the conversion worked at him, and waited, grimly, for whatever end was coming.

And the teacher did not know. He did not know that his student had been fighting a battle of his own this entire time, a battle of profound significance, beneath the surface of the thing that looked like simple infection.

Because Erwin was THE Living Paradox, yes.

But Erwin was also THE Information Paradox.

Boundless weavings of information flooded into him constantly, always had, the nature of what he was. And information, for him, did not arrive and vanish. He fed on it. He grew from it. Everything that reached him became part of him, and nothing that reached him was ever truly lost.

The transformation into an Acedia Dredge was information too.

This was the thing the Gilded Ones had not accounted for, because they had built their Ordnances to convert ordinary Lifeforms, and Erwin was not ordinary.

There is a rule called Unitarity. Information is never lost. It can be scrambled, scattered, transformed past recognition, but it is never destroyed, never truly gone. And Erwin, THE Information Paradox, had never once lost the information of himself.

So when the attack came, when the conversion reached into him to scramble all of him into a mindless Dredge, it did not erase him. It could not!

It forced him instead to do the one thing that fought it hardest. It forced him to focus, completely, on all the paradoxical information of what he was, to gather every scattered weaving of himself against the thing trying to overwrite him, and in the gathering, something happened that no one had planned.

He became pure.

Paradoxically pure. The pressure of the conversion, by forcing him to hold every piece of his own information at once, refined him, concentrated him, until his existence reached a purity it had never touched before. And as it did, even Paradox itself seemed to step back, to take a lesser place, because the information of who Erwin was and the truth of Paradox were becoming almost the same thing. His identity and his Paradox, synonymous. All of it, all of him, folding into one.

His struggles against THE Creature and against all the rest. His time in the Infinite Unfurling. His time in THE Earliest Folds. His time in THE Loom. THE Fallout, and everything before it and after. Every adversity, every record, every weaving of information he had ever fed on and grown from.

All of it was HIM.

HUUM!