A scholar was not a title someone like him could steal.
Before the chaotic shadow from the starry depths of space, the Scholar of Original Sin became an Apprentice of Original Sin, lowering himself to an exceedingly humble position. That was only natural. Amid the mountains and seas of knowledge, Chaos reached out to him from cliffs piled high with books. He merely skimmed the surface, yet even so, he sensed an intoxicating vastness.
Life had limits, but knowledge had none.
Surging greed instantly rose like a tide, swallowing every other emotion. When the brief contact ended, the sense of his own finite narrowness flooded over him. For the first time, such intense emotion churned across his tree-bark face. He reached upward, his arm withered yet steady.
"Don't... leave me behind."
The Scholar of Original Sin was so old, yet he murmured like a child dreaming.
"I need endless life."
Chaos gave him a response. It was some obscure ideographic script, and the voice resounded directly within his mind. Strangely, he could understand its meaning.
"..."
"What must I give?"
Chaos did not answer. It smiled, looking down on and mocking such arrogance—an ignorance of one's own place, believing that everything one offered held meaning in another's eyes.
To trade meaningless things for eternal life—how arrogant.
Chaos gave its answer.
"Everything."
"Then I offer everything."
So answered the Scholar of Original Sin, and immediately afterward, he understood what everything meant.
It was a dissolution of the self. Everything that had once been remained, yet it all became meaningless. Like a drop of water flowing into the sea, the sea itself did not change, but the drop vanished without a trace.
He lowered his head and discovered that his body had disappeared.
His body collapsed into a sphere of Chaos. Lobster-like