From the end of the world

Chapter 678 Little Bowl's Insight (Continued)
"Where does it not make sense?" I wondered.

Xiao Wan seemed to be thinking about how to explain it, and after two seconds, she seemed to have found a suitable entry point and said, "The most obvious contradiction lies in the natural will of the planet. Brother Zhuang Cheng, do you still remember how the Divination Master explained the cause of the natural will of the planet?"

"The natural will of a planet is a super soul formed at the Earth's core, a sedimentation of the countless souls of the dead accumulated throughout the planet's history of life evolution... Is there a problem with that?" I asked.

Xiao Wan said, "If there were originally two worlds, then it means there were originally two Earths, which means there were two planetary natural wills—is that so?"

I first considered it for a while and quickly found at least two negative angles, but judging from Xiaowan's tone, she seemed to want to analyze it from a positive angle first. I wanted to hear her subsequent reasoning first, so I said tentatively, "Let's assume it's like this for now, and then what?"

“Before the seal holder made the wish, neither world faced the threat of doomsday, and the divine seal had not split into the present world divine seal and the doomsday divine seal,” Xiaowan said. “The complete divine seal exists in one of the worlds, and we can also distinguish the two worlds as ‘the world with the divine seal’ and ‘the world without the divine seal’.”

"The afterlife was created by an ancient civilization that was destroyed 66 million years ago using the power of divine seals. Only a world with divine seals has an afterlife; a world without divine seals has no afterlife."

"The creation of the afterlife caused the accumulation of souls of the planet's natural will to cease, preventing the incubation of the doomsday god of decay, which the divination master foretold would destroy everything at birth... So what would a world without an afterlife be like?"

I tried to deduce: "If there is no afterlife, the planet's natural will will continue to develop until it becomes complete."

It's not certain that the afterlife will be fully developed by the time we live in the 21st century. Although we don't know exactly when the ancient civilization began building the afterlife, we should know that the growth history of a planet's natural will spans billions of years. Even if the afterlife was completed one or two hundred million years ago, it only occupies a portion of the evolutionary history of the planet's natural will. To say that it could definitely be fully developed within this timeframe is not very convincing.

However, it is said that after the afterlife was completed, it not only suspended the development of the planet's natural will, but also absorbed a portion of the souls that had settled underground. It is certain that the natural will of a planet without an afterlife is far more powerful than the natural will of the planet we know—the afterlife's Naraku Gospel.

Yes, the natural will of this planet must have originated from the afterlife. The afterlife is a product of the sedimentation of all dead beings. Although its original state is unknown, the current afterlife can be seen as a manifestation of the planet's natural will. The fact that "we can access the afterlife" is enough to determine the origin of the planet's natural will.

Thinking about this, I realized a contradiction—if that's the case, where did the "natural will of the planet that was not restrained by the afterlife" go?
Could it be that because the two worlds were merged together, the natural will of the two planets was also merged? But we all know very well that although it is called the natural will of the planets, this super soul is essentially the ultimate monster that uses the planet as an incubator. Even though it seems to have the stance of the world, it is not absolutely bound to this stance.

Could it be that the natural will of the planet has been superseded by the current natural will of the planet, for reasons such as "one planet cannot have two planetary wills"? That makes little sense, how could a stronger side be superseded by a weaker side?
The little bowl that was personally healing my spirit seemed to be able to read my thoughts. As if it were receiving my innermost thoughts, it continued: "Unless from the very beginning there was only one world, one planet, and one planet's natural will—"

“No, your reasoning also has flaws.” I pointed out the two opposing viewpoints I had previously considered: “It’s possible that of the two worlds that originally existed, only one of them possessed the natural will of the planet.”

According to Number Seven, there were originally two worlds: one was a world with monsters and witchers, and the other was a world of common sense that I was very familiar with in the past.

If we assume that there are no strange forces in the world of common sense, then there may not be any supernatural thing called "soul," let alone a natural will of the planet born from the souls of all living beings settling in the Earth's core.

Furthermore, the worldview of the strange world before the fusion might not have been a planetary worldview. It might have been a flat earth worldview, or like other myths, where the world is carried on the back of a giant tortoise... I know this kind of imagination is too far-fetched, but since it is a stage that can bear so many great impermanences, it would be hard to believe that it is also a place like Earth.

In such a world, the concept of a planet's natural will might not exist.

“Let’s follow Zhuang Cheng’s line of reasoning for now. These two perspectives of negation have something in common—they both argue that the two original worlds had fundamentally different underlying rules and orders,” Xiao Wan said. “Such different things must have had two completely different evolutionary histories from the very beginning, right?”

“I think so,” I said.

"So, when the two are combined, why is it that only human history presents a contradiction?" Xiao Wan pointed out incisively, "The planet we inhabit was formed more than four billion years ago, the first known traces of life appeared more than three billion years ago, and the accumulation of the planet's natural will also began at that time, while humans only appeared on the historical stage a mere million years ago. Even if we define humanity solely as Homo sapiens, then it only has a history of about three hundred thousand years..."

Why is it that only such a small, insignificant historical period has seen conflict? Does the history before that period not matter?
“Even in the last 300,000 years of history, it wasn’t just humans who were active. There’s the history of cats, the history of dogs, the history of fish… Although they, like strange creatures, don’t record their own past, their genetic material and instinctive consciousness are passed down, making them a different kind of historical record.”

Conversely, strange entities don't have a lineage of inherited genes. While they may evolve with the times—for example, the emergence of bizarre events in modern times spread through audiovisual materials and the internet—they seem more like reflections of changes in human social history, lacking their own accumulated history. Therefore, Number Seven once argued that strange entities have no history and therefore cannot present historical contradictions. And at this point, I completely understand Little Bowl's viewpoint.

The contradictions she raised can only be resolved by the idea that "there was only one world from the beginning."

"It was the divine seal that modified the original world into what it is now—concentrating on modifying parts of human history, causing it to become a malfunctioning lesion," Xiaowan continued. "Considering the planet's natural will's judgment that all demon hunters and strange beings are faulty factors, and its intention to eliminate them through Asaho's hands, I believe that the pure form of this world before it was modified should have been a worldview that, while having concepts such as the divine seal and ancient civilization, did not have demon hunters or strange beings."

"Because it was the Divine Seal that stitched together the subsequent contradictory concepts into our world, the fragments of the Divine Seal were also judged by the natural will of the planet as objects that needed to be eliminated. This is probably why Asaho's jinx power has a fate-level attraction to the fragments of the Divine Seal."

"...Compared to the original idea of ​​two worlds, this statement is indeed more concise. From the perspective of 'avoiding unnecessary entities,' this statement is also more convincing." I admit.

More importantly, I've now broken through the barrier of perception—from the perspective of the person who used the divine seal to make a wish, if they wanted to create a world that conformed to their wish, there was absolutely no need to use methods like "merging another world into it." The divine seal itself is a superior substitute for all other methods; couldn't they simply use the divine seal to modify their original world to conform to their wish?
Then, a new question arose in my mind: "But why didn't Number Seven arrive at the same reasoning? Instead, why did he add an extra step to make that more complex reasoning?"

I don't think Number Seven was lying at the time. In front of Xiao Wan, any lie is easily exposed.

“She may have unconsciously mixed her own expectations into the truth,” Xiaowan said. “Because if she were to accept my reasoning, it would be tantamount to admitting that the history of Witchers and the supernatural is just the Sealer’s daydream, only that he has turned this illusory dream into reality with the power of the Sealer’s Seal. Lady Seven may not want to admit this, which is why she wants to pursue another solution in a roundabout way.”

"Dream……"

I think I can somewhat understand Number Seven's feelings. If everything I've experienced was just someone's dream, that would be absolutely terrible. My adventures aren't that kind of frivolous thing.

The little bowl looked at me.

“However, I still want to say something above all that—I don’t believe that these things that were added later were simply figments of the imagination of the one who created the seal,” she said.

"Why?" I wanted to rely on the wisdom of the little bowl again.

Instead of offering another brilliant deduction, Xiao Wan said, "It's just my intuition... I just have this feeling."

"Is it just a feeling?" I asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry, Brother Zhuang Cheng, I don’t know how to analyze it either,” Xiao Wan said. “If I had to say, the current situation itself is a basis. Because ‘witch hunters and strange things’ are actually things that have exceeded the maker’s imagination, that’s why they have brought about an apocalypse that he did not expect… That’s about it.”

I pondered Xiao Wan's words repeatedly, and my heart gradually calmed down.

I believe in the small bowl.

Some time passed, and I felt my spirit was almost fully restored. It's hard to believe that not long ago, I was practically half-dead. Without the little bowl, I really don't know what I would have done next.

During the treatment, she also made some minor adjustments to my blessing status, which enabled me to digest and absorb Xuanming's vast experience more efficiently and safely afterward.

Meanwhile, in the distance, the "Wall Beyond the World" also underwent new changes.

(End of this chapter)