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r/worldbuilding • … • u/Elegant_Isopod0

Who's the best scholar in your fictional world that might've took inspiration from real paramount of academic figures?

**Ichiban Hachizen** >!is probably one of the most absurdly overqualified scholars in my setting, having over 3,450+ years of experience and somehow accumulating knowledge across basically every academic field imaginable—mathematics, physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, biology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, engineering, computer science, linguistics, philology, anthropology, archaeology, history, historiography, philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, ethics, theology, law, economics, political science, sociology, military science, architecture, literature, rhetoric, logic, theology, comparative religion, and basically every interdisciplinary field you can think of—while also having mastery over ancient and modern languages, extinct languages, dialects, scripts, grammatical systems, sacred languages, legal terminology, philosophical vocabularies, and apparently hundreds of thousands of languages since he was around 3–5 years old, to the point where entire councils of grammarians, scholars, elders, theologians, historians, and philosophers would probably need a group project just to keep up with his vocabulary; on top of that, his mastery of time manipulation lets him interact with the past, present, and future, revert events, alter present outcomes, accelerate or slow down current actions and motion, fast-forward temporal processes, examine possible outcomes, and basically treat causality like an editable document, which he then combines with countless contingency plans that can rival the Batman archetype of “I already prepared for that,” except Ichiban can potentially prepare across timelines and multiversal circumstances, while his reforms have contributed to a ridiculously extensive modernization and reformation system intended to operate on a multiversal scale within the empire of \[REDACTED\]; and despite possessing an intellect that can rival what would normally be considered near-omniscient knowledge, he deliberately refuses godhood because he argues that becoming omnipotent or divine doesn't automatically make someone morally perfect, immutable, or objectively good, and more importantly, absolute knowledge would destroy one of the most interesting things about existence—the ability to discover something you genuinely didn't know—because if you already know literally everything that can ever be known, then curiosity, surprise, uncertainty, exploration, and even the feeling of learning something new basically become pointless, so after 3,450+ years of knowing an absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff, Ichiban's conclusion is basically: “I could become a god, but where's the fun in already knowing everything?” 😭!<

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