Chapter 5376: Quasi! II

And there was one more thing.

Erwin had changed his target a while ago.

For a long time, his hunger for information had fixed on THE Creature, the ancient rival, the richest source of Adversity he knew. But at some point he had let THE Creature go and selected another. Osmont!

And here he had met a wall, because he could obtain no internal information on Osmont himself, none, the man’s existence closed to him in a way nothing else ever had been. But Erwin was THE Information Paradox, and where he could not read the being, he could read the existence around the being. He fed on the external information instead. How existence reacted to Osmont. How the surroundings bent and answered wherever Osmont moved. The volume of even that was grand, far beyond what most sources offered.

And in the last few minutes, it had become unfathomable.

Something had changed around Osmont. Erwin could not place what. He had no window into the man to tell him. He knew only the shape of it from the outside, the way the existence around Osmont had begun, suddenly and completely, to be overwhelmed by a single thing.

Osmont’s existence was declaring its identity. Fully, totally, onto all of its surroundings, branding everything near it with the unmistakable truth of who he was, and the information of that declaration flooded toward Erwin in a torrent, more than he had ever received from anything.

A being declaring its identity onto all of existence!

Erwin held that information, and he understood, in the way only THE Information Paradox could understand, that he had just been handed the exact thing he needed. Not knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge with a use. The blade by the handle!

Because Erwin’s own identity had become synonymous with his Paradox. And here was a flood of information showing him precisely how a being takes its identity and imposes it, completely, onto everything around it. He had the method now. He had watched it done, from the outside, in unfathomable detail!

So he used it. He emulated it. He did to himself and his surroundings what Osmont’s existence was doing to its own.

And he reached for his master.

The great obsidian mass of tentacles surged against THE Primordial Paradox’s hold, but not to break it, not to harm him. To hold him. Erwin wrapped himself around the titan and held him tight, and into that contact he poured everything at once. His master’s Paradox. His own Paradox. The boundless unfathomable information drawn from around Osmont. And his identity, which had become one with Paradox itself, declared now onto everything, the way he had learned to declare it.

All of it folded together. The two paradoxes, the borrowed method, the refined pure identity, the flood of external information, layering and combining and culminating, and out of the combination something bloomed that should not have been possible for either of them.

An Intent.

An Intent built on identity and Paradox both, the master’s and the student’s fused, and it reached toward the highest thing, toward the foundational rarity, toward Primordial!

It did not quite arrive. It bloomed instead as a Quasi-Primordial Intent, and it was quasi for a single reason: it had needed the aid of another’s information to form.

Without the flood from around Osmont, without that borrowed method, it could not have come into being at all. The two of them had reached a height by standing on knowledge and some records that were not entirely their own.

But the question hung there, in the blooming of it, the question the story had been pointing at the whole time.

Could the Intent have arisen without that other’s information? No. It could not have. And yet, was that a flaw, or was it simply the truth of how knowledge works, that a being holds what it has fed on and grows from it, and that growing from what others gave you is not weakness but the entire nature of information itself?

Erwin had not stolen the method. He had received it, the way he received everything, and he had known, in the one right moment, exactly how to use it.

The Quasi-Primordial Intent blazed between teacher and student.

And Erwin transformed.

The great circular mass of obsidian tentacles drew inward, folded, condensed, and took on a humanoid form, and a face, a calm and curious and knowing face, the face of a being who held all the information of himself and had finally learned the using of it.

THE Living Paradox, THE Information Paradox, Erwin, standing in humanoid shape once more, every weaving of his existence declared and present in him at once.

His master radiated alongside him, THE Primordial Paradox blazing with an aura that should not have belonged to him, the Quasi-Primordial Intent lifting them both.

And the two of them, teacher and student, in the ruin of Helheim, had done a thing that the framework forbade. They had jumped to a power they should not have been able to reach, by a road that did not exist, on knowledge half their own and half a gift, and in doing it they had shockingly, flagrantly, violated Vakochev’s Scales of Existence!

WAA!

Erwin looked at his teacher, and his teacher looked at him, and between them the shared power hummed.

They could both feel it. The Quasi-Primordial Intent blazing across the two of them, the thing they had made together out of two paradoxes and a borrowed flood of information and an identity declared whole. It connected them now, master and student, in a way that went past many things.

THE Primordial Paradox spoke first, and he spoke the way teachers speak, by asking.

"Tell me, then," the great humanoid titan said, gazing at the student who had betrayed him before. "Since we stand here as something new. What is information, my dear disciple? You are THE Information Paradox. You have fed on it your whole existence. You betrayed me for information. So tell me what it is."

Erwin considered the question, and his Intent shone a little grander as he answered it. He knew his teacher was trying to affirm his identity!

"Information is the record of a thing being itself," he said. "That is all it ever was. Not facts. Not knowledge stored in a vault. Every thing in existence, by existing, leaves a trace of having existed exactly as it did and not otherwise, and that trace is information. It cannot be destroyed because to destroy it you would have to make a thing never have been itself, and the past does not bend that way. So information is permanence. It is the one thing existence is not allowed to take back. A being can be killed, scattered, converted, but the information that it was, the record of its having been itself, persists, because unitarity does not bargain."

His face was calm, certain.

"I never lost myself to the Ordnances because I am made of that permanence. They tried to overwrite my record. But a record cannot be overwritten. It can only be added to. And so they did not erase me. They made me larger."

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