Long Tao was... struggling.
He who once comprehended a Divine-tier art in the span of a few hours was unable to fully grasp the extent of Master's words. In his defense, Master had clearly skipped quite a few steps in his 'lecture'--it'd have been akin to Long Tao teaching a Disciple about Sword Dao, but never teaching them how to hold a sword or swing it.
Some concepts could only be fully digested if their underpinning ideals were realized, and today, Master had failed to mention them. Whether it was because he didn't know himself, or couldn't organize it quite right, or simply let a stream of his consciousness guide where the lecture was going, Long Tao couldn't say.
What he could say was that nobody in this hall grasped most of it--some kids, like Xi Zhao and Xing Feng, understood tempered bits important to them, but on the whole... perhaps Light understood the most, he mused.
Time, light, speed, energy, entropy, information... Long Tao felt like the connection between them ran far deeper than Master taught them. And in the interwoven web of concepts, the truth to many questions he'd had over his life existed.
Slowly, he figured, he'd peel it all back--layer by layer.
There was one thing of certainty that Long Tao grasped that nobody else likely did--those two behemoths, the ones that he until recently believed were some sort of Outer Gods, were 'gravity wells' as Master called them, which meant that something about time in this place was wrong. Long Tao couldn't even imagine precisely what, but judging by Master's ever-shifting expression, as though he himself had realized something tremendous in that moment, he would learn.
"Master," Shufen suddenly raised her voice. "What did you mean when you said that stars will have ignited, burned out, and collapsed, turning to cold dust?"
Long Tao raised his eyebrows at the question as the recognition slowly sank into him.
... indeed, what did that mean?
"Hm," Master seemed to mull for a moment before replying. "Broadly, it's sort of describing cycles that stars undergo from their 'birth' to their 'deaths'. Ignited... yes, ignited simply refers to the cycle of them burning fu--energy over the course of countless years. Burned out means that they've run out of materials for that burning. Collapsed... hmm, collapsed means that they've died, in a way, as they collapse under their own gravity. And turning to cold dust... uh, I misspoke a bit, I suppose. Large chunks of them do become fine dust scattered in the cosmos, but their cores become unending corpses. Frozen eternally in the dark."
Though everyone fell silent, Long Tao presumed they all asked themselves the exact same thing at the exact same moment: Stars have a life cycle?
Best he understood them, stars were simply shimmering objects in the night sky--false, of course, as Long Tao had glimpsed beyond the said sky and at the reality. But all ancient texts described them as 'shimmering, distant objects that have been there since time immemorial and would be there when time itself ended'.
"How are stars born, then, Master?" Light asked the exact same question Long Tao wanted to.
"Uh," Master frowned for a moment, rubbing his chin. Either he didn't know himself, or was struggling to 'convey' the idea in a way they could understand. And undoubtedly fail, as he had with most of the lecture. "Stars aren't born. No, I mean, they are, it's just kind of a weird word to use--they are formed. As for how, we go back to gravity. If you have gravity, and cold cosmic clouds full of... stuff and such, given enough time, gravity will pull it all together towards the center until it becomes so dense and so hot that it ignites, forming a fi--energy core that pushes back against that gravity."
... Long Tao's eyes turned into slits as he stared at the man. Did he think he actually explained anything? Well, judging by the self-serving smug smile, he must have. But though he used the understandable words and phrases, it was once again the case of him clearly supposing they, too, understood some fundamental aspects of the whole thing as he did.
For starters: what were cold cosmic clouds? Like clouds in the sky, except... bigger? Furthermore, what were stuff and such they contained within that clouds above did not?
Long Tao, unlike others, understood whyMaster's words ultimately felt incomplete. The man was from a different time, after all; it was entirely possible that he simply could not reveal certain underpinning concepts without also revealing the fact he was neither of this time nor of this world. In fact, even sharing just these bits proved how much faith he had in everyone in this room not to disclose any of it.
As such, they'd all have to try and conceptualize all these things whilst missing a good chunk of the knowledge necessary.
"How do they die, then?" Light pressed, her eyes glimmering slightly. "Like people? We run out of lifespan and die. Are stars like that, too?"
"Hm, kind of, yes," Master nodded. "Except their deaths tend to be quite... violent."
"Violent?"
"They are not like a fire," Master said, conjuring some flames above his hand. "Fire, once it runs out of fu--energy simply fades. Stars--well, some of them, at least, depending on how big they are--explode in a burst of energy so massive and blindingly bright that they can be seen across the entire cosmos. Sometimes, in fact, if those stars are truly massive, it is possible that the star becomes a massive gravity well, too!"
While everyone else stared at him confoundedly, Long Tao frowned; a star... could become a gravity well? Did that mean that those two behemoths were former stars?
"Uh, sorry," he must have realized from everyone's expressions that barely anyone understood hardly anything. "There's a whole lot of things I wanted to teach you before we got to stars, believe it or not. But with some of these things, even Master doesn't trulyunderstand them. I know the words, the expressions, the roundabout explanation of it, but not what it truly means. Just like Dao, universe is... complex. It is made up of hundreds of thousands of interwoven webs, where cause and effect can be recognized in every aspect, but often stem from completely different directions.
"For example, there's a famous phrase that my grandfather used to say: Does the flap of a butterfly's wings set off a thunderstorm on the other side of the world? While they sound as though they have as much in common with one another as I do with apparently all the good teachers of this world, there is a possible, however minimal, link between them. While the flap itself could not cause such an event, it could, theoretically, cause the cascade of individual events that stack on top of each other which, ultimately, causes a thunderstorm down the line. I say that, but I have no way of proving it any more than I have a way of proving the life cycle of stars. Grandfather learned from others, and I learned from him, and in this causal cycle of knowledge... we trust what we are taught, and build on top of it the best we can.
"That is my hope for you all. That you will take these tidbits that I offer, however scatterbrained they may be, and over the course of your magnificent lives you will reach a level of understanding of at least some of them that I could never have. And, in some distant future, you will sit me down and explain to me all the things I got wrong all those years back when I tried teaching you some basics of the world, skipping them all and instead teaching you some of the most complex facets of reality, and doing so rather terribly."