The Quest by Eliora Shpirtizi explores spirituality as a vital function, a cosmic instinct unique to humanity: that of exploring, surpassing oneself, conceiving God not as origin but as culmination. For Eliora, Lagos becomes the launching pad of life toward infinity, and The Quest, not a bible, but the chaotic logbook of a God in gestation, a work written with the paradoxical materials of humanity: forgetting as fuel, error as compass, the unconscious as combustion chamber.

At the heart of this work unfolds a foundational encounter: that of Eliora and her student, Fouzi Koha, a young thinker haunted by the Great Disconnection that took his entire family. Their intellectual and emotional dialogue permeates the entire structure of The Quest. It is Fouzi who leads Eliora to invert the traditional relation to the sacred, to read the history of religions in a mirror. At the end of classes, Eliora often found small bouquets of flowers on Fouzi’s desk. Later, Fouzi confessed that he picked these flowers from his mother’s grave, who died during the Great Disconnection. Fouzi had a heart, and it beat for Eliora. It was in 2163 that Eliora wrote her first chapter, Germination, and her formula: God is a flower born on a grave. The idyll they share (between a married professor and a student scarred by loss) becomes the very allegory of a passionate and impossible bond between memory and fracture. Eliora seeks to understand what still connects the layers of human history, while Fouzi strives to understand temporal fissures as so many original wounds, convinced that in this abyss lies the true face of human transformation. Where Eliora seeks continuity, Fouzi seeks breaks. The text carries a subtle tension between two poles: faith and loss, union and disjunction. From this tension emerges the chapter The One, the pivot of The Quest, where love, grief, and metaphysics intermingle. Eliora sublimates suffering by showing that every era, every religion, is rooted in an original rupture.

Fouzi gradually locks himself into his obsession with broken time, losing all bearings. In June 2164, an altercation at a Refoundation factory lands Fouzi in prison. Eliora, then mother to the young Agmaar, continues writing The Quest alone. Their epistolary exchanges become the matrix of an inner renewal. The chapter Faith reflects this period of elevation and distance: the bars become symbols of purification, of a creative separation where Eliora’s mind emancipates from desire to embrace thought. Clémence de Longeville notes that one can feel "the hope of intellectual liberation" and the breath of a humanity still capable of believing in tomorrow. Fouzi’s incarceration becomes a parable: that of desire as the engine of knowledge, but also of separation as the condition of creation.

While Fouzi consumes himself in the violence and madness of prison, the Second Men approach him. Eliora, meanwhile, experiences a fruitful period. Isolated in the Manor of the Coffee Trees, surrounded by free artists and thinkers, she completes the chapter Invocation while Lagos retreats behind the Wall, a bastion of progress without memory. Eliora expresses the joy of a regained humanity, but also the tragic awareness of the ephemeral. Fouzi’s shadow, ever present, permeates these pages: every prayer seems to call him, every sentence tries to forget him. Around her emerges a community of minds (musicians, philosophers, poets) convinced that another world can be invented far from the dogmas of the Second Age and the resurgent power of the Second Men.

In January 2169, Fouzi Koha, interned after a violent crisis, fills notebooks with formulas and visions. His writings announce the gestation of his future work, The Djinn of Time, and the transformation of a man into myth. His phrases: I am the dream that belongs to itself or God belongs to us, to no one else testify to a ravaged lucidity. Informed, Eliora responds from a distance with the chapter Dream, written as a poetic and metaphysical counterattack. There she confronts, in the language of symbols, the disfigured face of her own thought. It is no longer a tale of redemption, but a struggle between two irreconcilable forces: memory seeking to understand, and time seeking to become by destroying.