Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5375

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.

But Erwin was also THE Information Paradox.

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