"How long do you think Qi will last, then, Master?"
"Will the number of Emperors keep shrinking?"
"When will the new cycle start?"
... I am very happy you all are so engaged with the topic, but how the heck should I know anyof that?! I feel like crying, to be honest, as my little 'lecture' had nothing to do with Qi! I don't even know if Qi actually does behave like other energies; maybe it explicitly doesn't, and is always perfectly repurposed, and the reason for decreasing number of Emperors has nothing to do with it.
The only reason I even brought Qi up was to liken the whole concept the best I knew how, to bring the ideas closer to their own understanding. Welp, it sure as shit backfired--because now I've got a room full of expectant eyes and literally 0 answers.
"I don't know," I replied honestly. There are times to bullshit, and there are times to just be straight with them. "Though you might think your Master all-knowing for some reason, I cannot peer into Dao's secrets any more than you can."
"..." there was a noted shift in the way they looked at me for a moment, as though they were collectively saying, 'Yeah... that's bullshit'.
"I may have jumped quite a few explanation as I was hurried to give you the big picture of it all, but, in truth, none of what I said matters much. It won't necessarily alter the way you live, the way you behave, or the way you fight. I just wanted to share the unknowable mysteries of the cosmos that transcend our best comprehension, and to bridge towards something you will loathe me for saying."
"That the universe is more complex than Dao?" Shufen said, though the atmosphere didn't shift that much when she brought it up. It's likely that they all seemed to have 'realized' that.
"No," I shook my head. "I cannot make a claim either way about their complexities. Without Dao, there would be no life. But..."
"Without cosmos, there would be no Dao?" Lao Shun tossed in.
"To the best of my knowledge," I nodded, continuing. "Cosmos is... unimaginably old. So, so, so old that the word for that number does not exist. Dao is immensely old, too--but think of it like this. If the span of Dao is a mortal's lifetime, then the span of cosmos is--"
"--an immortal's lifetime?" Xiu interjected, excited to have seemingly gotten something right.
"All of lifetimes all people, mortal and otherwise, have experienced in totality," gasps rang out as I once again wondered just how true that actually is. Is it possible that Dao existed back when I was on Earth, and it was isolated in some corner of the universe, with us being none the wiser? Sure, I mean, anything is possible.
I'm making a lot of sweeping assumptions based on the couple of glimpses I've gotten outside, and the few conversations I've had with entities that seemed to be quite confident in what they were saying.
The biggest issue with all of this, ultimately, is actually me. Even if I could accept the notion that a few specks of who I 'am' somehow survived and Dao had the ability to effectively rebuild me as I was at the moment of my death, question is... how in the ever-loving-fuck did those few 'specs' survive what is likely, like, what? Ten to the power of fifty? Sixty? A freakin' hundred years?
Haah.
"No, we're straying again," I said. "Let's rethread for a moment to something singular: what is the fastest thing in the world?" I asked. They all paused for a moment, mulling over it before Rayce tossed in an answer.
"... light?"
"That's right," I nodded. "Light is the fastest thing in the world. Nothing and no one can travel faster than it. The only way to circumvent it is through the teleportation arrays--however, the simple truth is that you are not traveling the total distance between two points. The teleportation array physically shrinks a distance between the two of them, building a tunnel of sorts, allowing us to traverse massive distances so quickly.
"On a physical scale itself, nothing, however, can travel faster than the speed of light. Why?" I posited, and after waiting for a bit and getting no answers, continued. "Think of how we experience the world. For example: when you start bleeding from a cut. That is the effect--what we need now is a cause. Like the sword cutting it," I took out the small dagger and demonstrated it on my palm. "This order is always maintained: cause followed by an effect.
"If, somehow, you could travel faster than light, you create a paradox where an effect precedes a cause. I'd bleed before I were cut--which is impossible. Which brings me to time. Do you think it is possible to travel back in time?" I asked, and quite a few wistful looks appeared in their eyes.
They dreamed, undoubtedly. Wondered. Hoped.
"Master, is there a reason you specified backin time?" Little Feng asked.
"There is," I nodded, smiling faintly. "But before we get there--none of you think it is possible to travel back in time?"
"Is it, then?"
"No."
"Ugh."
"Because you'd run into the same paradox as with cause and effect--say that you want to go back in time to prevent an Ancestor's death," I said. "But if you prevent it, you would have lost a reason to go back in time in the first place. Now back to little Feng's clever observation," the boy chuckled bashfully. "Is it possible to travel into future? Well, we kind of do it every day, believe it or not.
"Time... time is relative. It does not tick at the exact same pace everywhere across the world and across the cosmos. It bends. Stretches. And two things warp it: aforementioned speed and something I have already told you about, immense gravity."
"Any time we use movement arts, we move incredibly quickly. In a way, we are traveling into future. However, if we could go extremely fast--the length of this entire world in the span of a few breaths, for example--our relativetime would start differing from everyone else's. To us, it'd appear as though three breaths of time had passed, but to the world outside, it would have been three hundred years. You traveled into their future.
"And the second part, gravity. Gravity is a force that can create that relative feeling of time's passage. If you light an incense stick near a massive gravity well, it will burn out to ash in an hour. To you, it would feel like a normal hour. But to someone watching you from far, far away, that incense stick would take a hundred years to burn out.
"Depending on how truly immense that well of gravity is, if you sat at its edge for an afternoon, drinking tea, it is entirely possible that trillions of years will have passed at some distant point away from you. Entire stars will have ignited, burned out, and collapsed, turning to cold dust... all in the span of time that it took you to drink a cup of tea."
... huh?
Wait.
Didn't... didn't I kind of stumble into an answer to everything myself? We are very much sitting on the edge of two giga-omega-supremely massive black holes. I cannot even begin to physically quantify just how much time is being 'bent' here. I mean, the theory is still wonky, but if, if, this system was somehow in place a few 'billion' years ago from itsperspective, it stands to reason that everything else will have just died out around it while it 'survived'.
It at least does kind of remove my little 'speck' of ancient DNA or whatever needing to survive for immeasurable number of years. Maybe Earth got blown up by something and that spec was 'kicked out' into the vast cosmos and, in a few billion years (somehow surviving them? whatever...) got pulled into this place. So, it's technically 'only' been a few billion years since I died, but we're also technically at the end of time.
Huh.
My brain hurts.
Oh, it hurts so bad.
Dai Xiu was seeing stars.
Or at least she thought she was. At the very least, her head was full of wisps of light, and they were all drifting away from her, no matter how desperately she tried to capture them. She tried really, really, really hard to follow her Master's teachings... but she couldn't. She got lost somewhere around the time Master started talking about energy... or something.
No, definitely energy. She did remember hearing the word energy, at the very least.
Looking around stealthily, she saw that everyone else had deep frowns on their faces, her heart feeling a bit lighter; even if she was stupid, at least she wasn't that stupid. If even little Feng and Brother Tao of all people were struggling to comprehend Master's words, then she was simply never meant to understand them on her own.
When the lecture finishes, and everyone leaves, she'll give little Feng a candy or two and get him to explain it all to her, slowly. Veryslowly.
**
Rayce was... confused.
No, that wasn't strong enough of a word for what he was feeling. He'd been confused many times before in his life, but this was well beyond that. Thanks to Master, he'd learned that light behaves quite differently from what he imagined, allowing him to see the world in a completely different way. By bending it, by manipulating it, he was able to create illusions that nobody was able to see through--because they were seeking to change Manaor Qi, for every other illusion in the world used those as the core.
Even with that, with a breadth of knowledge in regards to light, he could not make heads or tails of Master's lecture. Certain bits and pieces were understandable enough, but in totality, it felt as though Master skipped massive chunks of knowledge, all the links and gaps that would make all of it come together.
Very early on in the lecture, Master mentioned the word 'entropy', but never went on to elaborate on what it was, as he clearly did notuse it to mean what it meant to Rayce. Entropy was a means of cataloguing chaos--a state of complete and utter disarray, with no rhyme or reason to it. However, that was not how Master interpreted it.
Beyond that, Rayce recalled a very specific and particular sentence that just did not make any sense to him: 'You encode some abstract information both in that act as well as the product.
... what did 'encode' mean? It was the first time Rayce heard the word. And how would one encode information? Or, rather, what was abstract information? Was it simply a different word for 'energy'? No, Master didn't seem as though he intended it to be understood that way.
And thus, he mulled. He mulled until his head began to hurt, and then he mulled some more. Many things came unraveling in the way he saw the world, though he, just like the rest, never let it be known.
After all, if any of these things were said by literally anyone but Master--even Senior Brother Tao--none of them would have believed a word of it. But Master never engaged in hollow nonsense, and the few times in the past that he shared his esoteric knowledge, he was correct in every way. But Rayce was uncertain which was the scarier thought--that Master was wrong... or that he was right.
Just one sentence he uttered would have labeled him a heretic in the Shamanic Tribes, and among cultivators, Rayce assumed--the assertion that there was no such thing as 'perfection'. So many Nine-Circle Shamans prided themselves on being able to utilize every ounce of Mana they pour into the word, wasting none of it, and he was certain there were many, many, many martial artists out there who thought the same.
But Master, without a single ounce of hesitation or conflict, boldly announced that was impossible. That in every use of any kind of energy, some of it was bound to be wasted.
He was yet to even properly arrive at the point in the lecture when his Master started explaining time. He'd simply decided not to even bother with it, and either wait until the Master simplified everything a bit more, or someone else understood it. When would that day come?
He had absolutely no idea.
**
Xi Zhao felt his mind swell and contract, his eyes closed. There was darkness in front of him, and a stretch of light fading and coming back at perfect intervals.
Most of the Master's lecture went over his head; though he didn't consider himself particularly clever, he always believed his comprehension abilities weren't all that off from the rest of the group. Today, however, he recognized that just because he was partially smarter than Xiu didn't actually mean much.
However, in the whole assault on his mental fortitude, with words and concepts each more convoluted than the last slowly collapsing his sense of self, once Master arrived at the idea of time... Xi Zhao felt something in him slowly begin to give way, to curve, to bend, as though ready to break.
He'd already instinctively utilized parts of what Master taught them--he never understood any of it, of course, but merely instinctively knew how to 'seal' his blade in motion for a brief passage of time, faking out the enemy through that delay. It was one of his trump cards and something he didn't use often, in part becauseit was a trump card, but also because it would always exhaust him, mentally and physically.
But the expression, time is relative, rendered it clear. The way he experienced the world was different than everybody else; when he swung the sword, he'd see it unfold normally. Time did not slow down. It did not change.
Not to him, anyway.
But something in the way he applied the Law of Time caused it to be regarded as relativelydifferent to whomever he was attacking. If he could precisely figure out what, rather than just instinctively know how to use it, he felt like he could leapfrog comprehension of self and his Dao Path by a massive amount.
**
Lao Shun had given up.
He'd given up a few times before in his life as he was hardly much of a fighter, but today... he'd truly given up. Never before in his life had he felt this stupid. Even when he'd just entered the Tower and was given a tome that was a literal four-thousand-pages thick, containing the list of all 'common' and 'basic' herbs alongside the primary recipes they were used on, and was told he had to memorize all of it in just six months.
It was hard--torturous, even--but rather than making him feel stupid, he was empowered.
Today, however? Today... he felt stupid. Even if he could somehow latch onto a few things that weirdo was saying, once he tried to connect them all... his head hurt.
Traveling through time?
Finite Qi?
Factual inability to utilize energy to perfection? Wasn't that what every Alchemist who reached the pinnacle bragged about? That they were able to extract 100% of the medicinal value of all herbs, and create 100% perfect pills?
Even beyond that, he was outright saying that even Pure Pills, the same ones dubbed as 'Creations of Dao', still weren't absolutely perfect.
Were it anyone else saying this, Lao Shun had no doubt that every person in this room would immediately try and kill them for spreading heresy. But that man--no, that annoying monster... he wasn't the type to just randomly lie.
But how could most of it be true? Would that not mean that so many truths that were taken as fundamental by every martial artist were simply... wrong?
And thus, he gave up. True or not, it had nothing to do with him. His job was simply to concoct pills, enjoy the sights, and wait until his heart was completely consumed.