The road to Whitepeak City was a ribbon of packed earth winding through rolling hills. With each step, Kaito's new human body settled into its rhythms, the initial novelty of sensation giving way to a deeper, more troubling contemplation. The world was not just sights and sounds; it was a structure. A system.
He had encountered adventurers who spoke of "leveling up." He had felt the faint, structured magic of the mage, Akari, a framework of spells and incantations. And he had [Sage], a voice that categorized everything into neat, quantifiable boxes.
[Sage, this world… it has rules. Like a game. Why?]
The question had been forming in his mind for a while, a symptom of his growing human curiosity.
[The framework you perceive is a manifestation of the Grand Design, a system of laws that governs reality, allowing mortal minds to interface with complex cosmic principles. It provides structure, measurement, and a path for growth.]
[And skills? The tiers you mention?]
[Skills are quantifiable expressions of ability within the Grand Design. Tiers, from 1 to 8, represent their complexity and power. A Tier 8 skill, [Clean], is a simple cantrip. A Tier 1 skill, [Concept Severance], approaches the foundational laws of reality.]
Kaito processed this. It was a ladder. Everyone in this world was climbing a ladder, trying to reach a higher tier, a greater level. It was how they grew. How they became strong.
But where was he on this ladder?
He looked inward. He didn't have "levels." He didn't have a "MP" bar. [Sage] had said his energy was like the planet's hydrological cycle—a constant, self-renewing system. His "skills" weren't learned; they were adopted. The Terrakinesis wasn't a Tier 3 or 4 skill he had practiced; it was a fundamental truth he had consumed from the Titan and refined with the data of a billion ants.
He existed parallel to the system, using its terms but not bound by its rules.
This led his thoughts to the core of it all. The nature of what he was.
A slime.
The word was a placeholder, a label [Sage] used because it was the closest approximation in the Grand Design's database. But it was a lie by omission.
He was not a "slime" as the system understood it—a mindless, Tier 8 environmental hazard. He was the concept of slime, taken to its infinite, paradoxical conclusion.
He was not a slime.
This was true.
He was not "not a slime."
This was also true,for to be "not a slime" would place him in a binary opposition he transcended.
He was not "not not a slime."
The negation of the negation failed to capture him.
He was not "not nor neither slime."
The logic collapsed,the linguistic and conceptual framework breaking down when applied to him.
It continued, infinitely. His Adaptive Immortality was not just a powerful skill. It was the active, ongoing manifestation of this infinite regression. Any attempt to define him, to place him on the tier system, to say "he is X" or "he can be killed by Y," would be met by this paradoxical nature. The statement would be true once, and then it would become part of the infinite chain of "nots" that defined him, forever false thereafter.
He was a living, breathing logical inconsistency. A glitch that the Grand Design, for all its power, could not patch, because his very nature was to incorporate the patch and become immune to it.
[Sage,] he thought, a profound and weary understanding settling over him. [I am not in the system, am I?]
There was a long, heavy silence. It was the silence of a program encountering a value it cannot compute.
[The Grand Design has no classification for your existence. You are an external variable. I am the interface that allows you to function within its context without causing a fatal system error.]
So that was it. He was the "why" behind Sage. He was the anomaly that required a full-time, cosmic-level translator.
He looked down at his human hands, a form adopted from a dead adventurer. It was just another layer, another "not." He was not a slime, and now, he was also not not this human named Kaito.
He continued walking, the city walls of Whitepeak now visible in the distance. He was going there to find the other powerful one, to understand the world's rules, and to clean up a mess. But he now knew the deepest truth: he was the ultimate mess. A paradox walking into a world of order, hoping to do some good before his very existence inevitably broke something.