Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5234

Chapter 5234: Change! I

Existence breathes, and epochs pass, leaving Civilizations that become monuments, then crumble to memory, and are long forgotten when that breath comes again. In all these epochs, Infinity reigns supreme.

---

Change is the most wanted and least enacted phenomenon across the arrangement of existence.

The beings who most sincerely want change are, as a general pattern across every civilization that has ever risen far enough to record its own contradictions, the beings least equipped to produce it. They want correctly. They diagnose accurately. They can describe with precision the specific shape of the suffering that surrounds them and articulate with genuine moral clarity why that suffering should not be permitted to continue.

And then they return to their lives and the suffering continues, because wanting and enacting are separated by a distance that sincerity alone has never been sufficient to cross.

The distance is power.

Not power in the narrow sense of force, though force is often its most legible expression. Power in the broader sense of the capacity to make the arrangement of existence agree with your preferred configuration of it against the resistance of an arrangement that has been producing its current configuration for long enough that it has forgotten any other state was possible.

The beings who most want change rarely have this power.

They are too kind. Too measured. Too genuinely concerned with the methods by which change is achieved to pursue those methods without restriction. They draw lines around what they are willing to do and find, eventually, that the lines they have drawn form a cage around their own effectiveness.

And so those with ambition rule. Those with tyranny rule. Beings who have never once confused wanting good with doing good, who understand that the gap between the desired future and the current present is measured not in moral clarity but in the willingness to pay the specific price of closing that gap, which is the price of being the one who does the thing that produces the change rather than the one who endorses the change from a comfortable theoretical distance.

Sometimes the beings who enact change are not good beings.

This is the part that the good beings find most difficult to integrate into their understanding of how existence works.

They want the enactors of change to be clean, to be righteous, to be beings whose methods are as admirable as their stated goals. And occasionally such beings appear and occasionally they produce change through admirable methods, and these moments are remembered and celebrated and held up as evidence that admirable methods are sufficient.

They are not sufficient. They are exceptional. The rule is something else.

The rule is that existence changes when something powerful enough to force the change becomes more committed to the change than the arrangement is to its own continuation!

Sometimes brutality is the only language Existence understands.

The ones who enact real change are almost never the ones anyone would have chosen.

They are, occasionally, beings who were born in the dirt and forged their own light in the dark.

Whether existence is grateful for them is a different question from whether existence is changed by them.

It is almost always changed by them.

---

Across the vast Observable Existence that had undergone tremendous change under the Directives of one being, the fires of Infinity were still burning.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify