Chapter 493

I was at the center of a storm of tears.

Elias thought. Unlike the refreshing wind of divine power that wrapped around his entire body before disappearing, the air surrounding the earth dragged his limbs down with hundreds of times the force of gravity. Faint outlines wavered across a world turned white.

Ah. Elias opened his mouth as divine power pierced through his entire body.

Do you know what I learned while you were gone? A low voice he had never heard before flowed through his mind. His face, from his ears to his cheekbones, felt as though it were about to split apart.

Information and sensations as vast as an ocean began to form his body. Countless thoughts he could never hope to keep up with brushed past the tissue of his brain and vanished—like a black steel train, like the smoke billowing from it, like raindrops falling to the ground and sinking in within the blink of an eye, like lightning crashing down to burn a forest…

For an instant, I knew the names of every light. I knew the names of every wind. The moment he faced the universe spread across the night sky, fear shot down his spine.

You’re right. But I’m right, too. A young voice spoke. He couldn’t tell whose it was. And yet, now that he heard it, it felt unquestionably like his own. The feeling rose in an instant, like the level of a flash flood, until he began to believe he had possessed that voice his entire life. No. Was that really a delusion?

Elias barely managed to withstand the gusts of wind as he traced his own face with his fingertips. The torrent of information and the voice flowing between it like a stream made him forget who he had been. He didn’t even know what kind of being he could call himself.

I knew everything, but I knew nothing. An approximation of omniscience. My eyes felt as though they were about to burst. I dreamed a dream, but I didn’t even know if it was a dream. Reality is the dream, and the dream is reality.

I was a butterfly, and all the days I thought I was human scattered into the air like steam. I had a dream of a wondrous world that understood me. And at the same time, a dream of a world racing toward the end of humanity.

The world’s reason, like glasswork on the verge of shattering, was in disarray. There was no world of absolute affirmation anywhere. It was impossible to escape the genealogy of morality, impossible to cross over to the other side of good and evil. But then again, if there was something I feared, Zhuangzi knew that he had dreamed of being a butterfly.

In that sense, a lack of skill is no different from being dead for an artist. If life is art, and every human being is an artist in his own life, then I had failed completely. It was only after coming to this Matrix, where I could no longer tell dream from reality, that I seemed to understand what art was.

In front of those cold lenses emitting a dark inner light that seemed ready to swallow me whole, in front of those black eyes drenched in emotion, I understood what I had never known in my entire life. Art, my foot. I’m…

I… I think I know who I am now. Why didn’t I know back then? If there had been more people like you around me back then, like there are now… would I have known then, too…?

The confession struck him with the clarity of an arrow amid the flood of information, snapping him back to his senses. The light pouring into those vivid blue irises stung. His heart was melting beneath the cold wind.

Now and then. He couldn’t tell. The voice of the friend he remembered was gone—the child’s voice, still slightly youthful, revealing his age exactly as it was unless he deliberately tensed the muscles in his throat. All that remained was the calm voice of a young adult he didn’t know.

Why did it feel so familiar? Well, it wasn’t familiar to him. It was familiar to the owner of this world. Why? Who was Zhuangzi? He dreamed he was a butterfly? A world of absolute affirmation? The bond between neoliberalism and capitalism, mana, the nature of homogeneity, the new class theory, market theory, and the sense of indebtedness, disillusionment—why?

He could follow the thoughts, but he couldn’t. And yet, he truly knew who Zhuangzi was. He knew what it meant that he had dreamed of being a butterfly. He knew that saying it was impossible to escape the genealogy of morality or cross over to the other side of good and evil was nothing more than wordplay. He knew the class structure of a society he had never known. He understood his class and the debt that could never be erased. The fleeting bloom of the flower means ‘to not last long.’¹

He had no ability to take in the information crashing over him like waves. It all passed through his trembling self, and he would soon forget it. Realizing that he had become a single reed in a field of reeds battered by the bitter wind, Elias clenched his fist before he could forget.

He thought. Information flowed like blood from every part of his mind, yet the thread of his thoughts still managed to catch hold of one of his friend’s thoughts. Even as he moved between inside and outside, between the field of vision of the ‘I’ and that of the air.

If there had been more people like you around me back then…

Elias stood alone in the wilderness and looked up at the sky. He acknowledged the distant roar, as though he had heard it thousands of years ago.

He thought he knew nothing about his friend.

No. Even as all the knowledge in the world continued to pass through his body, he knew none of it. But there was one thing he knew for certain. He knew that he didn’t know. There was a memory deep within his friend’s heart that he did not know.

There was no way someone who had spent his entire life confined to the Askanien estate in Dessau could have such a thing. Wasn’t that how it had been? And yet, it was undoubtedly here. The steady voice of someone well past adulthood was here.

Divine power pierced through the center of his entire body.

So… I’ll apologize in advance. I was never trying to deceive you.

A stone fell onto the surface of the water. Ripples spread outward. What was he supposed to think? Unlike the elder, he couldn’t think of anything at all. Maybe it was because, apart from a vague sense of something being out of place, he knew nothing. He couldn’t even come up with a plausible guess right now. But why?

He wanted to ask himself that too. Maybe it was because the information carried by the wind, appearing and disappearing in his mind, was leaving his head numb. But for no reason he could explain, his chest ached with a cold feeling.

Maybe one day everything will return to where it began. Wouldn’t that be the natural order? I believe it is.

Elias couldn’t remember what his friend’s expression had been like that night at the observatory, when he drank his blood. The air in Munich had pressed down on his heart, stealing away the warmth from his blood, and he had been dying. His entire body had been scattering back to wherever it had come from. So he didn’t remember. He was relieved that he didn’t know what expression his friend had worn. If he had known, by now it would have been etched deep into his retinas. And…

No matter what happened, he didn’t want to see that face for himself. The thought that he wanted to know the truth couldn’t hold him back anymore. He kicked his foot through the mud, pulling the roots buried beneath the swamp loose. Where are you? He shouted.

The wind brushing past his ears told him to admit that he didn’t know. It told him to admit it and learn what betrayal was. It told him to let the storm of unknown truths and knowledge show him that he was an agent of the end. It told him to willingly acknowledge that he had truly been overwhelmed, to acknowledge his awe, to acknowledge the fear rising from the abyss when faced with the possibility of omniscience. It told him to do all of that while leaving him in the middle of his tears!

Yes. Elias was afraid, and he was no different from a primitive human standing naked in the wilderness on the day lightning struck. He was no different from a priest who read the wrath of God in the heavens on the day the shadow of the earth covered the sun. If his world was a pond, then this world was an ocean. If his world was an ocean, then this world was the universe. The only reason he hadn’t known that until now was simply because his friend…

Because he had turned away from it. Because he didn’t believe it. Or perhaps because he had intended it. Because he didn’t want to accept it. Because he was trying to spare them. Or perhaps because he didn’t know himself.

Then, at this moment, Elias thinks of his friend.

If a non-standard human is supposed to be something other than human, then how far can a human still be human? It didn’t matter whether that non-standard nature came from above or below. From the day humans began tearing themselves apart and rebuilding their bodies with the power of science and mana, throwing away their organs in pursuit of a longer life, were they still able to be human?

Of course they were. The New Humans who struggle desperately to become gods are human precisely because of that.

Elias remembered Columbus’s voyage. He remembered the number of hearts pierced by arrows and guns. He remembered the white phosphorus matches and the faces of workers whose jaws had melted. He remembered the erased names of commoner mages. He remembered the flags of the great powers fluttering over foreign lands along the equator, where the blue sea shone like platinum beneath the sun.

Throughout history, humans had always rushed toward their ideals with whatever power they possessed. Taking the fire of technology into their hands and tearing themselves apart to reshape their own forms in the image of a god was something only humans did. It was a desire unique to humans. Despairingly enough, perhaps it was the most human thing of all. And so humans created things that were not human.

In an age when being human, and the inability to become human, were determined by human hands, those who stood at either extreme could no longer remain human in some sense or another. They became beasts with little birds living in their heads, or they became gods…

Ah. Elias understood the elder’s conclusion. His friend was not merely the ideal of Pleroma. He was the ideal of the New Humans. The elder wanted to kill anyone he believed could reach the heavens, so that humanity would never build another Tower of Babel and climb toward the sky. The elder could not understand any of this as belonging to the realm of humanity.

But just because they had encountered the ideal of the New Humans did not mean that ideal had to be inhuman. He had no right to arbitrarily decide that this person was no longer human. He was human nonetheless, and all the thoughts of his that flowed through the earth beneath Elias’s feet were a story of humans, by humans. And now, they would be for humanity. At least, they had been for Elias.

Elias swept his hand through the air. Blue mana slowly spread through the air before fading away. Information came at a speed too fast to comprehend, turning into a wind that snuffed out his mana. The elder’s divine power was strong, proving that all those years he had spent honing it had not been in vain. His whole body ached as though every bone were about to be shattered.

Even after rubbing his hands together again, the blue light faintly forming in his mind could not hold out and flickered away. An immature voice, one he did not want to know the owner of right now, flowed through his mind. He closed his eyes because he did not want to hear anything. He stomped his foot, making a sound.

Crack. The mana that sputtered out blocked the information forcing its way in against his will. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t keep batting away the incoming information forever. He had to kill the source that was forcing all of it into his mind. Feeling dizzy, Elias drew mana from his heart.

God will judge those outside. Expel the wicked person from among you. So he said to them, Why do you do such things? I hear from all the people about these wicked deeds of yours. The LORD detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished.

The mana was consumed tearing apart the divine power that had seeped into his body, unable to make it beyond his hands. He couldn’t even tell where the elder was.

Damn these people who used divine power. For all his bold words, a different kind of fear began to grow inside him. There was no way he could overcome the gap between the elder’s years of experience and his innate talent.

His head felt like it was about to split open.

Perhaps the elder had noticed that he was trying to break free of the confusion in his mind. Dark clouds gathered across the vast sky. Before he could even predict what that was going to do to him, he thought of the safety of the friend who was lying somewhere, unconscious. His heart pounded violently. It almost felt as though he could hear that voice shouting at him, Do you understand now?

He had to find a way out. Elias clutched his head. In his mind, burning as though it were about to explode, he had to find something to hold on to. It wasn’t long before the memory of dawn came to mind. Maybe it had been before the dark clouds appeared.

We sailed successfully for about four versts. The monotonous sound of the oars incited in me a  doziness, and my languid gaze barely came to life at the passing shimmer of drops of water as they fell from the tips of the oars.

‘Do you understand now,’ you say? It didn’t matter whether he knew the world before Babel or not. Even if he really were capable of knowing everything, it didn’t matter.

But the wind, as it gradually strengthened, compelled me to think about reaching the shore.

Even if he had the ability to speak every language simply by learning it, it didn’t matter. From the birth of the earth to this very day in 1898—even if his mind contained knowledge that had perhaps been laid out by the universe itself… Even if he were a living encyclopedia, even if that much knowledge breathed within him, none of it mattered to Elias!

The sky became completely dark from the thickening of somber clouds. Involuntarily going with the flow of the wind we were borne along randomly. That was when we began to dread even the shore.

What mattered was that the elder was trying to cut the bud before he could learn to speak every language. Finding and killing anyone who knew the world before Babel, erasing the chaos of the world—as if that were the elder’s duty.

Cold drops of water falling from the boat on Lake Constance ran over Elias’s head. The sensation of the little boat rocking beneath him was still vivid.

And then what might have comforted us on a successful voyage began to drive us into despair. Nature at that hour looked mean to us, and we now grew angry with her for not displaying her awesome majesty by flashing lightning bolts and disturbing our hearing with peals of thunder. But hope, which accompanies man into extremes, fortified us, and…

The gusts beneath the clouds were draining the strength from Elias’s legs. In the imagination inside his head, deep-blue mana was rising into the sky without the slightest wavering. He closed his eyes, and the elder’s figure appeared vividly in his mind. The slow mind that was ‘Concentration’ aimed for the elder’s throat.

“You have to know.”

Elias stretched a hand toward the sky. Mana the color of seawater gathered together, forming a long, solid shape. On a white surface where it was impossible to tell whether it belonged to the elder or his friend, Elias drew in the air. The wind flowed along his hand. Power gathered along Neptune’s trident.

“You have to know that anything can remain human. Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. I…”

The mass of mana slammed into the ground. With a deafening roar, Elias opened his eyes. Light flared from the blue staff in his hand. The sky, filled with dark clouds, was collapsing.

“I will say that I have found that nothing has reached the end!”

Translator Note

1. The raw was ‘담화일현Nicht von Dauer sein이다,’ which combines the German phrase Nicht von Dauer sein, meaning ‘to not last’ or ‘to be temporary’ with the Korean idiom 담화일현 (曇花一現). Literally, 담화일현 means ‘an epiphyllum blooming once,’ referring to something that appears briefly and disappears just as quickly. Since the two expressions convey basically the same idea, I translated the line as ‘The fleeting bloom of the flower means ‘to not last long.’’ ↩︎