Adam was now 615 years old.
He had lived long enough to watch kingdoms become mere tales, to see children become rulers and rulers become ancestors, and to learn more about humanity than any ordinary person could understand.
Yet after everything he had experienced, Greece was beginning to make him tired in a way that no battlefield ever had.
It was not the people themselves that exhausted him.
It was their insistence.
Every answer created ten more questions.
Every solution created another demand.
Every favor became an expectation.
The Greeks had begun treating access to Adam as though it were a privilege they had somehow earned simply by existing, and the more they desired his knowledge, the more convinced they became that he was obligated to give it to them.
Adam responded by becoming increasingly lethargic.
He stopped arguing.
He stopped trying to explain himself.
He stopped caring whether the people around him understood his decisions.
When someone demanded an answer, Adam would simply stare at them for a moment and ask what they were willing to trade.
When they complained about the price, he would shrug.
When they praised him, he would barely respond.
When they insulted him, he would often simply walk away.
Zakiti found the entire thing amusing.
She had watched her son spend centuries trying to solve humanity’s problems.
Now, for perhaps the first time, he seemed almost determined to let humanity solve its own.
Then someone made a mistake.
They threatened Zakiti.
The threat was not particularly clever.
A group of men, emboldened by their belief that Adam’s mother’s safety was something they could use as leverage, attempted to convince him that refusing them further knowledge would have consequences for her.
These men, as it turned out, were the royal guards of the king of Greece.
A concept he himself had introduced.
Adam listened.
He looked toward Zakiti.
She looked back at him.
Neither said anything.
Adam knew the truth.
There was nothing these people possessed that could hurt her.
Their blades could not pierce her skin.
Their weapons could not meaningfully injure her.
Whatever courage they had gathered from threatening her was based entirely on ignorance.
Zakiti was vastly more dangerous than any of them understood.
Adam could have laughed.
Instead, he did something unexpected.
He became afraid.
Or rather, he pretended to be.
His posture changed.
His expression became tense.
He asked what they wanted.
The men immediately believed their plan had worked.
Adam gave them one.
Then another.
Then another.
At first, the answers were practical.
He explained methods for improving metalworking.
He described principles of structural engineering.
He discussed agricultural techniques, water management, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, military organization, shipbuilding, and dozens of other subjects.
The men were delighted.
They believed they had finally discovered the secret.
Threaten the mother, and Adam would surrender whatever they wanted.
So they asked for more.
Adam gave them more.
And then he gave them more than they had asked for.
The flood began.
Adam started answering questions that had not yet been asked.
He explained why certain metals behaved the way they did.
He described principles behind leverage and load distribution.
He explained how to organize large-scale irrigation systems, how to improve crop yields, how to preserve food, how to construct roads capable of supporting heavier traffic, how to improve sanitation, how to understand disease transmission, how to calculate distances using the stars, how to improve navigation, how to preserve information, how to construct increasingly complicated machines, and how different areas of knowledge could be combined.
He spoke faster.
The Greeks struggled to write everything down.
They brought more scribes.
Adam kept going.
Those scribes brought more scribes.
Adam continued.
Soon there were tables covered in clay tablets, rolls of papyrus, carved boards, diagrams, measurements, equations, mechanical drawings, medical notes, agricultural instructions, astronomical observations, and descriptions of materials they had never seen.
Adam simply kept answering.
The people who had demanded knowledge began realizing they had made an enormous mistake.
They had expected secrets.
Instead, Adam had given them an entire education.
And it was far beyond what their civilization was prepared to process.
A craftsman could understand one improvement to a furnace, but Adam had given him an entire theory of metallurgy.
An architect could understand a stronger arch, but Adam had explained the principles behind several different structural systems.
A physician could learn one improved treatment, but Adam had begun describing concepts about the human body that required generations of additional knowledge before they could be properly understood.
The Greeks had wanted answers.
Adam gave them frameworks.
They wanted a key.
He gave them an entire library and told them to figure out which doors it opened.
Eventually, even the most dedicated scholars began drowning in information.
They could copy the words.
They could preserve the diagrams.
They could repeat Adam’s explanations.
But they could not necessarily use them.
Some concepts required tools that did not yet exist.
Others required materials they could not produce.
Some demanded mathematics that their scholars had not yet developed.
Adam had accidentally, or perhaps intentionally, created a problem for them.
He had given them knowledge faster than they could develop the ability to understand it.
And Adam knew exactly what he was doing.
He could have simplified everything.
He could have given them one useful discovery every few years.
Instead, he overwhelmed them.
Whenever someone returned demanding another answer, Adam would simply continue from wherever he had stopped.
“Here,” he would say, pointing to another unfinished diagram.
“You’ll need to understand this first.”
They would spend months studying it.
Then Adam would provide another ten concepts that depended upon it.
Their frustration grew.
Their pride grew with it.
They had believed that possessing the great sage meant possessing the future.
Instead, they had discovered that the future was vastly larger than they had imagined.
One evening, Zakiti sat beside Adam while he watched several exhausted scholars attempt to make sense of his notes.
“You know they cannot hurt me.”
“I know.”
“So why did you pretend?”
Adam leaned back against the wall.
“Because it was easier than explaining.”
Zakiti smiled.
“You’ve become lazy.”
“Very.”
She looked toward the scholars.
“You gave them too much.”
Adam watched one of them stare helplessly at a collection of diagrams.
“I gave them exactly what they asked for.”
“No. You gave them what they thought they wanted.”
Adam smiled faintly.
That was the difference.
The Greeks had assumed that knowledge was a treasure that could simply be handed from one person to another.
Adam had spent five hundred and eighty years learning otherwise.
Knowledge had foundations.
Foundations required other foundations.
A civilization could not leap effortlessly from one stage to another simply because someone had revealed the answer.
The Greeks had wanted to possess the wisdom of Ittasal.
Instead, Adam had buried them beneath it.
And for perhaps the first time in centuries, Adam found himself almost amused by the situation.
He didn’t need to threaten them.
He had not needed to fight them.
He had not needed to destroy their pride.
He had simply given them exactly what they demanded until they discovered that possessing knowledge was very different from understanding it.