The Tesseract Library was not a building of stone and mortar, but a dynamic, living structure of solidified information and crystalline logic. Its corridors were built from syllogisms, its archives from proven axioms, and light within it was the pure glow of understanding. Or it should have been.
As Kairo entered, he immediately perceived the wrongness. A whole wing of the library, dedicated to the "Grand Unified Theory of Metaphysical Momentum," was… crumpled. The glowing corridors, which should have stretched to infinity in perfect, logical progression, instead twisted back on themselves in impossible, Möbius-like loops. Knowledge was trapped inside, the light of understanding dimmed to a confused flicker. It was a place where 2 + 2 no longer equaled 4, but rather, the concept of "equality" itself had become ambiguous.
The problem was a single, flawed foundational theorem. A proposition that had been accepted as true but contained a subtle, recursive paradox. Like a corrupted file, this one error was causing a cascade of logical failures, folding the information space in on itself.
This was not a break he could fix with a memory of emotion or a story. This required a memory of irrefutable truth.
He walked to the heart of the collapsed wing, to the source of the error. It manifested as a shimmering, fractured crystal, pulsing with contradictory statements. To look at it directly was to feel one's own reason begin to fray.
Kairo closed his eyes. He searched his vast experience for a truth so simple, so fundamental, that no paradox could touch it. He bypassed the complex philosophies of Vesper, the cosmic laws he had mended, even the nature of his own existence.
He found it in a memory from his first life. A memory of sitting in a university library, long before his reincarnation, studying physics. His professor had written a single, elegant equation on the board. It was the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.
It was not just a law; it was a bedrock principle upon which a universe of understanding could be built. It was a perfect, closed, and irrefutable loop of logic that admitted no paradox. The total energy of a system was a constant. It was a truth he had built upon, lived by, and used to save civilizations.
He held this memory, the absolute, elegant certainty of that conservation law. He focused its pure, logical essence through his key. He did not attack the flawed theorem. He did not argue with it. He simply presented this perfect, stable logical structure as a counterpoint, a reference for what "truth" should feel like in this realm of pure information.
Then, he turned the key.
There was no sound, but a wave of pure, coherent certainty radiated out from him. The fractured crystal at the heart of the paradox shuddered. Its contradictory pulses faltered, its internal logic confronting an external standard of perfection it could not refute.
With a soft, chime-like sound, the crystal reformed. Its fractures sealed, its light shifting from a confused flicker to a steady, brilliant white. The flawed theorem was not erased, but corrected, its paradox smoothed into a harmonious, non-contradictory lemma.
The effect was immediate. The folded, impossible corridors of the library began to smooth out, unknotting themselves. The Möbius loops straightened into vast, luminous halls. The trapped knowledge within was released, its light flooding the wing with the pure radiance of comprehended truth. The Grand Unified Theory of Metaphysical Momentum was once again accessible, its equations flowing in perfect, logical streams.
The library was whole. The book of knowledge was open.
Kairo stood in the now-orderly glow, the repaired theorem humming with stable energy. It was a repair of pure reason, a mending of the very framework of thought.
As the last logical knot untangled itself, a new call reached him. It was a soft, mournful pull. Not from a universe or a library, but from the space between them. A "wound" in the inter-dimensional void, a place where raw, unformed chaos was leaking into the ordered multiverse, not as a destructive force, but as a disorienting, creative madness that threatened to unravel the sanity of any nearby dimension.
A repair not of a thing, but of the boundary itself.
The Forever Repairman acknowledged the call. He had mended logic; now he would mend the wall between logic and chaos. He stepped out of the pristine light of the library, and towards the beautiful, terrifying, and unstructured song of the void.