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 complint.
"As THE Information Paradox, very little of my weavings will ever be received or found out by others. Information enters and is conserved within , and yet that sa 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 sothing almost intimate.
"Which brings , 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 tiscales most beings cannot sustain attention across. And whatever you did, whatever decision you made in the period after our last conversation, has allowed to advance all of those plans trendously. So I want to thank THE Youngest properly before things between us beco whatever they are about to beco."
He drifted slightly closer, the weavings of paradox swirling around his beggar’s form in slow eddies.
"Allow to explain, since you enjoy understanding the things you fight against."
His eyes grew distant for a mont, then refocused with a fanatic gleam Noah had seen before.
"Due to my nature as THE Information Paradox, I can select soone 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 becos worth the attention I devote to consuming it. For a long ti, 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, soti 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 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 ti."
Noah listened without expression.
He knew what he had done. He had pioneered THE Infinite Scales of Existence, deviated from Vakochev’s frawork entirely, established his own asurent of ascension!
Erwin didn’t know about that yet, and Noah saw no reason to fill in the gap.
"For so 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 in ways I am still mapping out internally."
His hands rose, palms upward, as if showing Noah sothing invisible held between his fingers.
"It has caused 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 extrely unique for . 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 mont 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 thodology becos the foundation that everything else rests on. Toward my goals, I have never willingly planned and massacred or enslaved those who did nothing to . I have never reached for advancent by carving it out of beings whose only cri 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 in the past. You mutilated countless Inevitabilities. You mutilated Khor eons ago. You worked your eons-long thodology 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 soone 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 sothing to , and how many beings I owe sothing 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 , those...I’m going to settle now."
His voice settled into sothing 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 co to thank, perhaps to bargain, perhaps to extend the strange paradoxical entanglent between them into another phase of mutual benefit. He had not co 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 mont before, and his eyes held the fanatic gleam of soone who refused to let surprise beco defeat.
He nodded slowly.
"The next ti we et, perhaps it will be under extrely different circumstances."
Noah’s reply ca without hesitation.
"If we et again. This could be it for you."
BOOM!
All of existence shook.
The borrowed space within Nakatsukuni couldn’t contain what blood above Noah, because what blood above Noah was never ant to be contained by spaces of any kind. THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity erged from the air itself, rising from Noah’s very being into a structure that pierced upward through every layer of reality the hidden domain touched. Crystalline blue trees of THE First Tongue ford its base. Multicolored flas of Existence licked along its mid-sections. Infinite mirrors of Paradox reflected impossibilities at every angle. The eternal storm of Chaos swirled at its apex.
The Pillar blood, towered, and smashed downward toward Erwin.
THE Living Paradox looked up at the descending light of Infinity with a sombreness that briefly cracked his calm composure. His body shone and didn’t shine paradoxically, his Proterozoic Bones and Organs flickering between states of being and not being as his existence tried to brace for what was coming. His hand rose. His fingers began moving through the somatic weavings of a Pulse, the gestures precise and ancient, conjuring whatever defense his nature could muster.
And then...
The Pillar thundered down and crashed into him with the totality of everything Noah had built within himself across his unconventional ascension!
BOOM!
Soon after, the booming voice of Sadakar echoed out across Nakatsukuni with authority that shook the borders of the hidden domain itself!
"There shall be no fighting in Nakatsukuni!"
But it was already too late.
Existence in the borrowed space tore in half. The structure within Nakatsukuni that Noah had been standing within split down its center, the soft geotries cleaving apart with a finality that could not be unmade. Lanterns shattered. Paths crumbled. The very air carried the aftertaste of sothing fundantal having been violated, the kind of devastation that didn’t apologize for itself because it knew it had been chosen deliberately.
When the Pillar faded, Noah floated alone in an area of trembling destruction.
A scorch mark remained where Erwin had stood.
Nothing else of him was left behind. No body. No robes. No trace of the beggar grandeur that had drifted opposite him monts before.
And yet Noah frowned.
Because he could feel, paradoxically, that Erwin had perished and had not perished at the sa ti. The information of his death existed. The information of his survival existed alongside it. Both states held themselves in superposition within the substrate of what had just occurred, and Noah knew without certainty that the second state was the more likely truth.
Erwin probably wasn’t dead.
But he had been hit.
The peaceful Primordial Architects, Undivided Ones, and Formless Terrors of Nakatsukuni began to gather at the edges of the devastation. They erged from their domains and structures with expressions that held shock, because when the Pillar had appeared, every single one of their existences had felt shaken to its foundation. They had felt the threat of collapse. They had felt, for the briefest mont, what it would an to encounter that light without warning!
Among them, Moloch roared.
The Singular Cognizance who had co with Erwin let his rage erupt across the trembling space, his voice carrying the fury of soone who had just watched his arrangent burn.
"So you had chosen a side already, Sadakar?!"
His existence pulsed with barely contained violence.
"Okay! Okay!"
And then Moloch disappeared.
He believed himself outnumbered, and he removed himself from Nakatsukuni before that assessnt beca a fatal one!
Sadakar appeared near the devastation soon after, his vast consciousness condensing into a presence that could be looked at directly. His ancient features held anger, the kind of restrained anger that ca from soone whose carefully cultivated peace had just been violated within his own sanctuary.
Before he could speak, Noah turned to face him.
"Neutrality...doesn’t really work."
Noah’s voice held no apology, only the calm logic he had been turning over within himself before any of this began. So what if a Singular Cognizance was angry?
rely a Singular Cognizance!
"Those who try to play neutral are eventually eradicated by whichever side wins, because winners have no use for fence-sitters. Your peace, Sadakar, has been protecting beings like Erwin for a long ti as they ushered THE Loom and THE Fallout. Your refusal to choose has been a choice all along. You just didn’t have to look at it because nobody forced you to see what your sanctuary actually sheltered."
He let the words settle into the trembling air.
"You can reach anyti you wish through Infinity. Should you stop playing the ga of neutrality. Until then..."
Noah took a single step.
His gaze passed once over the scorch mark where Erwin had stood, registering the paradoxical signature one last ti, and then he disappeared from Nakatsukuni without further ceremony.
The hidden domain held its silence after he was gone.
Nakatsukuni remained torn in the area where the Pillar had co down, the structures cleaved, the ground refusing to knit itself back together. And then, slowly, multicolored rain began to fall on every structure within the sanctuary. It fell on the intact buildings and on the broken ones. It fell on the gathered Primordial Architects and Undivided Ones and Formless Terrors, who stood in that rain and rembered, each of them, what they had felt when that Pillar had co down.
Each of them had felt their own collapse.
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