Noldrei, with a somewhat innocent and sincere look on his face, said, "I just wanted to know what kind of conflicts and suffering you could endure. As it turns out, my expectations for the Xianzhou were a bit too high."
"If I had known from the start that you were this incompetent, I would have reported them when I was at the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus. Why would I have followed them and watched the situation develop? Besides, I didn't know Dan Shu was colluding with foreign enemies."
"She didn't even tell me as much as you did. Most of what I know, I read from the historical documents preserved in the Alchemy Commission."
Even if Noldrei had wanted to know, he had no way of finding out. Most of the time, he had focused his energy on writing new scriptures for the people of the Xianzhou.
If you were to really find fault with him, you couldn't simply describe it as inducement or bewitchment.
Fu Xuan was speechless. The Xianzhou truly had nothing on Noldrei.
Except for his bizarre appearance at the Matrix of Prescience, he had been under the Xianzhou's surveillance for most of the time.
Fu Xuan thought about what Noldrei had just said, about whether they could beseech the Abundance to create a new world where Aeons were separated from other life.
She really couldn't be sure if the Abundance would act upon hearing such a request.
Fu Xuan asked with some uncertainty, "What you said just now, about finding Yaoshi and beseeching It to do such a thing... is it possible for that to succeed?"
Noldrei said with a speechless expression, "How would I know? I've never had contact with the Aeon of Abundance. Whether It would do such a thing is not something I can control. You'll have to ask It yourself."
'You just want to send me to Yaoshi, don't you?'
Fu Xuan was beginning to suspect Noldrei's motives.
She had never considered this possibility before. How could someone ask the Abundance to fight other Aeons?
But then she recalled the characteristics of Yaoshi the Abundance and thought that such a possibility might actually exist.
"Would someone really make such a request to the Abundance? That's too absurd, isn't it?"
Fu Xuan was naturally aware of the struggles between the Aeons, but to use a human's identity to incite an Aeon to fight another Aeon...
Fu Xuan didn't even dare to think about it.
Noldrei also didn't know much about the Aeons of this world, but that didn't stop him from wanting to see what they were like.
"I can't be sure if there will be in the future. You should try it yourself. First, see if Yaoshi can create a world that separates the Aeons, and then see if Yaoshi can create a Pure Land-like world."
"It's just an experiment. It doesn't matter if it fails, and it's even better if it succeeds."
For a moment, Fu Xuan couldn't process the scene of her future self meeting Yaoshi, nor could she figure out if she could use Yaoshi's characteristics to stir up a fight between Yaoshi and other Aeons.
She had a rough idea of Noldrei's thinking: that these Aeons were essentially the same as life.
As long as they displayed the behavioral patterns of life, they would be bound by those patterns, which meant they would inevitably act in ways that deviated from their own Paths.
Noldrei's idea was simple: to confirm whether the Aeons still fell within the scope of life's thinking.
Given that Fu Xuan had actually seen an Aeon, Noldrei didn't mind helping her see them a few more times.
After discussing the issue of Aeon faith with Noldrei, Fu Xuan brought the topic back to the Xianzhou itself.
"What do you really think of Dan Shu? She did so many things, and even physically modified you. Are you really not angry at all?"
"If I were you, I certainly wouldn't forgive what Dan Shu did so easily."
It was just as Fu Xuan said. Dan Shu had clearly done many wrong things to Noldrei, yet Noldrei didn't seem to be too angry with her.
Noldrei didn't answer Fu Xuan's question directly. Instead, he asked, "Fu Xuan, do you think the Xianzhou people feel pain because of their long life, or because it's not the long life they wanted?"
Fu Xuan was taken aback, pondering the meaning behind Noldrei's words.
Long life? The long life they wanted?
"Do you remember the original reason humans pursued long life? It was definitely not as simple as greed. The attachments of life, the pain of loss, the differences in talent, and the pursuit of one's own ideals."
"These problems can all be solved by long life. Long life can give you more space to pursue and practice, more happy time with your loved ones, and in areas where you lack talent, you can improve through hard work and more opportunities for trial and error."
"At the very least, it won't let people continue to muddle along in that unchangeable pain of having to face the passage of time, eventually losing their sanity in the anxiety of loss and heading towards a dead end."
"The Xianzhou has suppressed people's pursuit of long life, so it must face the pain that long life could have originally solved. Therefore, long life itself is not the pain, not the curse. The pain is precisely that this is not the long life the Xianzhou people wanted."
"On the earliest path of pursuing long life, the Xianzhou people forgot the reality that long life itself is not the goal, but a means to solve humanity's own problems. It is precisely because of this forgetting that long life later became a source of pain for the Xianzhou people."
Noldrei had always been puzzled. He didn't understand why the people of this world would feel pain because of things like memory.
There was even the absurd situation where having too many memories could overwhelm the human brain.
It was too ridiculous. The human brain has the ability to forget; its ability to automatically clean up junk far exceeds that of a supercomputer.
Forgetting pain, forgetting loss, forgetting failure, and so on...
These were all essential functions for humans to protect their own ideological thought systems, just as humans would beautify their memories.
The suffering of learning in your memory and the suffering of learning you experience again firsthand are two completely different things.
Noldrei's confusion also lay in this. From what he had observed, the humans here were no different from the humans in his world physically.
But in the end, they had stumbled at the stage of biological genetic design.
Fu Xuan hadn't expected Noldrei to give such an answer. Only then did she realize how ridiculous and pathetic the past struggles of the Xianzhou were.
Not because of long life, but because they had forgotten the reason for seeking long life.
"I see. So... that's how you see the history of the Xianzhou."
Fu Xuan felt it was best not to continue to dwell on this issue. Asking any more would just be humiliating herself.
In Noldrei's eyes, the Xianzhou people seemed to be obsessed with acting around the topic of long life itself, without considering that human suffering originates from humanity's own creations.
Although he didn't want to look down on the Xianzhou, the first near-interstellar level civilization he had encountered, it had not displayed the level of internal civilization he had hoped for.