Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5126

Chapter 5126: Neutrality Is Fake!

THE Living Paradox laughed softly, a sound that held no offense.

"That is the nature of what I am."

He inclined his head as if acknowledging a compliment.

"As THE Information Paradox, very little of my weavings will ever be received or found out by others. Information enters me and is conserved within me, and yet that same information is lost forever in ways that should be impossible. My signature does not propagate the way other signatures do. My trail does not exist where other trails would be carved into the substrate of reality. To be unrankable is not a weakness in my case, Osmont. It is the architecture I have engineered across eons of cultivation."

His smile softened into something almost intimate.

"Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to why I owe you my thanks."

Noah’s gaze sharpened slightly, but he said nothing.

"I have made many plans here and there across the eons," THE Living Paradox continued. "Most of them slow plans, the kind that compound across timescales most beings cannot sustain attention across. And whatever you did, whatever decision you made in the period after our last conversation, has allowed me to advance all of those plans tremendously. So I want to thank THE Youngest properly before things between us become whatever they are about to become."

He drifted slightly closer, the weavings of paradox swirling around his beggar’s form in slow eddies.

"Allow me to explain, since you enjoy understanding the things you fight against."

His eyes grew distant for a moment, then refocused with a fanatic gleam Noah had seen before.

"Due to my nature as THE Information Paradox, I can select someone to siphon off the terrifying weavings of information and causality that they generate as they move through Observable Existence. The being I select must be generating enough disturbance in the substrate of reality that their information-shedding becomes worth the attention I devote to consuming it. For a long time, my selection was THE Creature. He fit the criteria. His every action sent ripples through information that I could harvest at my leisure."

His smile widened.

"After our talk, I switched my selection over to you."

The words settled into the borrowed space with the quiet finality of a decision long since made.

"And then, sometime ago, I do not know exactly what you did. But the weavings of paradox surrounding you and your power through THE Scales of Existence went haywire. The information that should have flowed steadily into me began arriving in configurations I had never encountered before. The substrate of how you exist in relation to The Scales shifted in ways my perception struggled to track in real time."

Noah listened without expression.

He knew what he had done. He had pioneered THE Infinite Scales of Existence, deviated from Vakochev’s framework entirely, established his own measurement of ascension!

Erwin didn’t know about that yet, and Noah saw no reason to fill in the gap.

"For some unknown reason," THE Living Paradox continued, "that change cascaded through my own nature. I was not prepared for it. I am rarely surprised by the consequences of consuming information, but this surprised me in ways I am still mapping out internally."

His hands rose, palms upward, as if showing Noah something invisible held between his fingers.

"It has caused me to perceive all the information within the Scale that I currently occupy simultaneously. All of its weavings. Rhyacian, Calymmian, Ediacaran, every gradation between them, every transition that other beings move through sequentially. I see it all at once now. I receive the information of an entire Scale of Existence as if it were a single unified field that I can pull from at will."

He laughed quietly, almost in disbelief at his own circumstances.

"This has made things extremely unique for me. I have been amassing power at an unfathomable scale. Plans that would have required millennia of careful consumption have completed themselves within hours. Configurations of authority that I had only theorized about have manifested in my existence without my needing to construct them piece by piece."

His eyes locked onto Noah’s with renewed intensity.

"But the biggest thing I wonder, Osmont, is exactly what did you do? What action did you take that caused the information surrounding you to allow for such a terrifying change in my own nature? I have replayed the moment endlessly within myself, and I cannot identify the trigger. Only the consequence."

Noah listened to all of this calmly until the words ran their course.

When he finally spoke, his voice held the steady weight he reserved for matters he had already decided.

"Everyone has their dreams and goals."

His gaze held THE Living Paradox without wavering.

"But the things we do toward our dreams and goals matter. They matter more than the dreams themselves, because the methodology becomes the foundation that everything else rests on. Toward my goals, I have never willingly planned and massacred or enslaved those who did nothing to me. I have never reached for advancement by carving it out of beings whose only crime was existing within reach of my ambition."

His tone hardened slightly.

"You, on the other hand, are interesting. I’ll grant you that. But you tried to kill me in the past. You mutilated countless Inevitabilities. You mutilated Khor eons ago. You worked your eons-long methodology by consuming and discarding beings whose information happened to be useful to your Cause, and you did all of this with the calm satisfaction of someone balancing accounts that only you got to define."

He took one slow step forward.

"In these past few hours, I’ve begun thinking about all the debts out there. About how many beings owe something to me, and how many beings I owe something to in return. I’ve decided I need to begin collecting them. Not all at once. But the ones that are within reach, the ones whose ledgers are already open in front of me, those...I’m going to settle now."

His voice settled into something almost gentle.

"So whether you are powerful or not, we’ll know very soon. Because I’m going to make a move against you now. Are you ready?"

...!

BOOM!

The shock that crossed THE Living Paradox’s face was brief but real. This was not how he had calculated this conversation ending. He had come to thank, perhaps to bargain, perhaps to extend the strange paradoxical entanglement between them into another phase of mutual benefit. He had not come to be attacked.

But he was not entirely unprepared.

He recovered swiftly, the calm arrogance returning to his features even as paradox began to swirl around him in terrifying configurations. The weavings of his existence pulsed brighter. His beggar’s robes rippled with authority that had been hidden a moment before, and his eyes held the fanatic gleam of someone who refused to let surprise become defeat.

He nodded slowly.

"The next time we meet, perhaps it will be under extremely different circumstances."

"If we meet again. This could be it for you."

BOOM!

The Pillar bloomed, towered, and smashed downward toward Erwin.

BOOM!

"There shall be no fighting in Nakatsukuni!"

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