From the end of the world

Chapter 722 Fantasy and Reality

The reason the one who holds the seal may not have found the reason for the divine seal in the mortal world is actually because of global warming, and the culprit behind global warming is me...

I don't even know where to begin complaining. The most crucial point is that what the Lord of the Divine Seal, Tai Sui, said seems quite reasonable.

Of course, considering the strong connection between the Seal Bearer and the Divine Seal of the Present World, even if the Divine Seal of the Present World accidentally sank into the Arctic Ocean along with the ancient ruins, it is possible that it could be regained through a series of coincidences. Moreover, the melting of the Arctic glaciers is a gradual process, and it is possible that the Seal Bearer arrived at the ancient ruins and retrieved the Divine Seal of the Present World before it sank into the sea. These are all uncertainties, so it seems that Tai Sui has not been completely certain.

"Do you have any other questions?" Tai Sui looked at me. "Now that I've been completely honest with you, there may still be many aspects of me that you don't trust, but you should understand me better than before. If you have any further questions, I will do my best to answer them in any way that can increase your trust in me."

I thought about it very seriously for a while, and then asked, "Then, please answer this question for me."

“Ask away,” Tai Sui said.

"In your current view, is this new world we live in a fantasy world created by the Seal Bearer?"

I asked this question because I wanted to know the essence of this world, and also because I wanted to know the views of Tai Sui, the Lord of the Divine Seal, on this world.

When Tai Sui heard this question, he paused for a long time before slowly saying, "...I don't believe that this world was entirely created by his thoughts."

"What's the basis for that?" I asked.

“No matter what power he has now, at least when he made a wish, he was just an ordinary person like me,” Tai Sui said. “Although I cannot fully understand his heart, nor do I know what he was thinking when he made a wish, no matter how wonderful the world in his mind is, he cannot create a world with a complete history and culture out of thin air, nor can he design everyone’s life by his own hand.”

I can roughly imagine the ideal world that the seal holder desires.

He may well be like I was in the past, hoping that beneath the surface of his seemingly ordinary and boring world lies an unimaginable magical undercurrent.

Supernatural phenomena are real, demons and monsters are real, magic and superpowers are real... If only there were also "mysterious and handsome professionals" active in the dark side of the world, specializing in dealing with supernatural phenomena and demons and monsters. Just like in many fantasy battle comics, the peace of the surface world is supported by mysterious organizations that maintain order in the shadows.

One day, I unexpectedly encountered them, and then, without much effort, became one of them, joining an incredible adventure. Another magnificent world gradually unfolded before my eyes...

What a naive imagination! It's like a typical story that a child who never grows up would fantasize about, yet I can still understand the romance in it.

But my reason tells me that such a world must have countless flaws that cannot withstand scrutiny. A little thought into the details will inevitably reveal its inconsistencies and contradictions. And if too much attention is focused on those aspects, the illusion will inevitably crumble.

The person who held the seal clearly hadn't considered so many details.

"As it turns out, this new world we live in has too many real details. Everyone living in it has their own rich life, which cannot be his fantasy. If we talk about proportions, his fantasy is probably so small as to be negligible," Tai Sui said. "This new world may have originally been a possibility of the primitive world, and the divergence point may have been at the dawn of the human race, or even longer ago."

"The divine seal is more like a trajectory-changing device. It summons a possibility that the original world missed hundreds of thousands of years ago and makes it the current correct path."

“That argument doesn’t quite hold water,” I pointed out. “Are you saying that this contradictory history of humankind is some kind of naturally occurring possibility that our world should have had? That doesn’t seem like a future that would have developed logically.”

Tai Sui said, "Zhuang Cheng, since you already possess the power of the Great Impermanence to intervene in cause and effect and destiny, and have witnessed the chaotic state of order that will appear in the end times, you should be able to understand that the logic and reason that supports the operation of spacetime is not as indestructible as it seems."

"Entropy increase is an inevitable trend in the universe, and chaos is the underlying nature of spacetime. If this world is a sophisticated machine, it would be a miracle that it has been able to continue operating normally until today. Just like this blue planet we inhabit, it is merely a very accidental bubble in the vast and indifferent universe. "After becoming the Lord of the Divine Seal, I gained a perspective beyond that of humans and learned many, many things. A stone thrown in the air suddenly doesn't fall to the ground, one plus one suddenly no longer equals two, time suddenly stops moving normally... These inexplicable things are commonplace in the universe, and may have even happened in the primitive world, but they are becoming increasingly frequent in today's new world."

"It's like when someone is dreaming. The first half of the dream might be very vivid, but then suddenly incomprehensible scenes appear in the middle. Some people compare the world we live in to a dream created by a great spirit, which is indeed a fitting description. In the past, ordinary people recognized those absurd phenomena as unsolved mysteries of the world, while demon hunters confused them with strange events. To us, those are bugs in the world, but perhaps our existence itself is more like a bug in the world."

Therefore, rather than saying that the current contradictory world is a product created by the Seal Bearer, it is more accurate to say that the primitive world of the past is more like a man-made creation.

The idea that the primitive world was a state modified by an ancient civilization has a strangely convincing quality.

Nature's creations are inherently marked by randomness; things that are perfectly precise and harmonious would be jarring in the natural world. No matter how wondrous nature's artistry, no one would believe that a computer chip appearing on a grassland was randomly created. Some scientists believe the world was created by God perhaps because they perceive a meticulously designed, orderly pattern in their observations and research.

However, Tai Sui's definition of the new world was ultimately just a deduction based on his own understanding. Number Seven may have also been unable to accept that his world might be an illusion, and thus offered different interpretations of me and Xiao Wan in the past. Tai Sui might just be trying to stop me from overthinking, after all, he also admitted that he didn't know the full extent of the Seal Bearer's wishes.

If that's the case, he's underestimating me. I'm not that weak. Those things are irrelevant; regardless of origins, this world truly exists, and I truly exist. That's the most important fact.

"How exactly do you plan to stop the apocalypse? Just like Yama thinks, you want to restart human history to its original form... and destroy the 'current world'?" I asked.

Tai Sui said in a deep voice, "There is no other way."

"With the power of the divine seal, it should be possible to postpone the end of the world indefinitely while maintaining the status quo, right?" I asked.

“The divine seal can indeed postpone the end of the world, but it is not indefinite,” Tai Sui said. “Putting aside other things, if human civilization is to enter the universe in the future, the internal contradictions of human history will also expand with the expansion of territory.”

"While the Divine Seal is indeed extremely powerful, even a fragment of it can grant a mortal the power of great impermanence. A complete Divine Seal can distort time and space at will and recreate the history of a planet... Perhaps even if the territory of human history expands to the entire solar system, the Divine Seal will still have a way to continue to suppress its internal contradictions. But what about after that?"
"Even if we take a step back and assume that human civilization is forever confined to Earth for millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of years... as history accumulates, the internal contradictions of human history will also increase. Can the divine seal really continue to suppress the end of the world indefinitely?"

What he said seemed to make sense, but I had some doubts about his motives.

Is he truly planning to fight wholeheartedly for the human civilization that will emerge after venturing into the stars, or for the human civilization that will emerge millions or tens of millions of years from now?
If he were an ancient being like the Diviner or Xuanming, who had lived for countless ages, then it would be plausible that he possessed such a long-term vision and grand ambitions. However, before becoming the Lord of the Divine Seal, Tai Sui, he was merely a mortal scientist who had lived for a few decades. It's hard to imagine that this was his true motive. Or perhaps, after gaining the perspective of the Lord of the Divine Seal, even his standards for judging human civilization changed?
I think it's more likely that he simply wants to reset the current worldview back to its original form.

His family, friends, and lovers all exist in the original world. Even if they still exist in this new world, their memories would be vastly different, and they would no longer be the people he originally knew. As a character with memories of the original world, he feels no sense of belonging to this new world. Even though countless believers once worshipped him, he never accepted it readily, perhaps only feeling loneliness and solitude in his heart.

Wanting to go home—this may be the true wish of Tai Sui, the Lord of the Divine Seal.

“For this, you need all the fragments of divine seals that I possess…” I read aloud.

"Yes," Tai Sui nodded. "Are you willing to cooperate with me to save this falling apart world?"

"Why do you think that as long as you are honest with me, I will cooperate with you?" I retorted. "Once the primitive world returns, I will die, as will everyone I know... Isn't that just a terrible thing for me?"

“No, Zhuang Cheng, you won’t die,” Tai Sui said firmly. “Your friends won’t die either.”

(End of this chapter)