I do not fear death; rather, I fear living a life which is not worth dying for.

In every fleeting moment, there seems to be an infinite number of possibilities presented to us. Yet we are unable to scrutinise each and every decision we create to its fullest; we do not possess the time to thoroughly think through everything that we act upon. It is precisely from this predicament, that the problem of decision arises; opportunity cost. 

There will exist instances where we indeed possess the time to deduce and calculate decisions we deem satisfactory, but the overwhelming majority of decisions– they are decided by chance. There will be a time where our hand will be forced to choose with no light on the matter.

This fact of reality Entoine could never come to terms with. He could not accept the fate of uncertainty; that destiny could not be reduced to a series of logic gates of which he could manipulate to produce desired outcomes. Often during these episodes of mental disarray, he remained in bed awake for multiple days; as if asleep; his mind eating away at itself as he sought to free himself from the shackles of chance and luck. 

One tempestuous night, where the windows battered with soft hail and the howls of the night roared in the blazing wind, Entoine came to a decision. A decision which he had scrutinised to its fullest over the course of five sleepless nights, with full confidence in his mental faculties despite the severe medical ordeal he had undergone. He would search for a way to defy the inevitability of chance.

When he had returned from his mind’s realm of scrutiny he had awoken to his servants pondering if their master had passed during sleep. They shuffled across his room; silhouettes wandering about behind the thin curtains which lined his velvet and regal mattress. 

“Order! What is all this commotion? I shall have none of it. All of you return to your posts at once!” He commanded in his voice, surprisingly fierce as a lion upon waking from a sleep by disturbance. Each maid and butler left the room, for they dared not to trifle with him.

Time is fleeting- every second not lived to full potential is a waste. 

And this truth had gripped its claw around Entoine with increasing strength every day, every minute- every moment which he perceived himself as not fully maximising his time in pursuit of enriching himself. And all he could do was watch the ornate clock on the wall as its finely smithed arms danced away the ballet which recounted his finite life. 

He would have it no more. From the moment he awakened from his deep meditation in the confines of his chambers, he would forge himself anew. No more was Entoine Heatherfield the Fool of Mercury Hill. If death possessed no strength to part him from his ambition, then nothing would. His destiny was certain to him now. He would enhance his mind’s capabilities of thought to a point where merely miniscule and negligible increments of time was spent on the act of deciding. 

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In mere hours, he had regained control of his hands, with which he rang a servant to haul the contents of his study to be transported to his room. Despite the butler’s audibly shaken voice at the sight and demeanour of his master, he obliged, and undertook his duties at the utmost haste to not linger within the strange and otherworldly confines of that accursed room.

If ghosts and spirits, demons and devils, and all the supernatural beings which purportedly walk among us in the shadows are products of a higher, spiritual force, then whatever malignant energy which so heavily festered the air of the Heatherfield Manor’s study so thoroughly as if a miasma of a pure heartless being, must be one birthed of a scientific power. 

The room lay at the distant end of an unlit and creaky corridor. As the butler entered the room, the sense that he was alone dissipated, and not in a preferable sense. A thousand, distant eyes were observing him. Hidden in the shadows and glaring from every nook and cranny. They observed him. They deconstructed his every fear and began creeping into his psyche. Whispers began to waft in the silence,

Everything will be gone. Nothing matters. Not you, not this world.

The butler returned to Entoine’s quarters, wheeling along a desk which housed all of the Master’s studies. He stood up from under the untidy sheets of his velvet bedding and gestured his hands for the table to be drawn closer to his bedside. The butler continued wordlessly, unusual to be sure, but Entoine was oblivious to it all. Dismissed in an instant, little did he know that the butler which had served him at that instant was never to be heard from again.

And from that moment, Entoine began to realise his plans. In all pursuits of the scientific method, one's first step was observation; the gathering of information, of values and data. But before such, one must deduce: what information is being sought? Entoine however, had come to the realisation of this fact too, for it was a pointless endeavour otherwise.

His time- his decisions; how much time did it take him to scrutinise each decision and choice he took? In this question however rose another; what defines a decision? He had then compiled three categories of his decisions: one which required little thought and decided the most trite of matters- what he desired for dinner, what clothes he wore, and matters of the sort; another which required a degree higher of thought but did not determine much significance- which leisures he fancied on certain occasions, what matters he would attend to concerning the estate on a particular day, and so forth; and the last form of decisions- ones which concerned matters of the utmost importance, concerning the trajectory of his life, the pursuit of his studies, and all that ails the minds of those who buried themselves in mountains of knowledge and vast libraries.

In each of his decisions, Entoine sought to deduce the increments of time he required to undertake them. The first category required him an average of eleven seconds to scrutinise, while the second category required him an average of four minutes and seventeen seconds. The final and third category, being of an illusive nature, required much more time to properly calculate based from his lived experiences. Once he is able to deduce them, he mused, he shall control fate itself.