Chapter 420: The Chicken Or The Egg
Xiang Yu was in deep meditation when he sensed the reset approaching.
He focused, timing exactly when the new day would arrive.
The moment midnight passed, the cooldown on his enlightenment ability ended, and he activated it immediately. His awareness expanded instantly, and he could see everything in a completely new light. In this state, he felt the “system” raising his stats and smiled with satisfaction.
He had finally caught it.
Suddenly, he found himself leaving the enlightenment state.
“What’s happening?” he wondered, looking around. Although he had exited enlightenment, he wasn’t back in the real world but in an entirely different place. In this new location, nothing existed, not even void, just absolute nothingness.
Looking at his surroundings, he recognized where he was and panic flooded through him. This was the Absolute End concept.
He thought about running but paused, he couldn’t feel the destructive effect of the Absolute End that erased anything it touched. That made sense; he wasn’t actually there physically. He wondered if this was some kind of vision.
If so, he needed to pay close attention. He focused on what surrounded him, then closed his eyes to feel the concept itself. This was just the surface of what he had seen before – he needed to look deeper. He had to go further.
Suddenly, he found himself floating in a brilliant expanse of light. This place was made of such bright radiance that it filled everything. The light was so intense that he couldn’t see anything else except its overwhelming presence.
He wondered if this was the opposite.
The first place had been an end where nothing could escape, but this seemed like a beginning where everything was born.
He stared at the bright light, connecting it to his enlightenment state. When experiencing enlightenment, he always saw various lights surrounding him. As he observed this concentrated brilliance, he could see tiny strings of light spreading out from it. This was what he had been searching for – the Absolute Source.
He closed his eyes again and began feeling the concept around him. His face showed strain as he struggled.
He wasn’t making any progress. What was wrong with him? Did he lack enough enlightenment to understand it? He opened his eyes, staring at the bright light that stretched infinitely in all directions.
What was he missing?
If this really was an enlightenment problem, couldn’t he at least study the domain and upgrade it to law later?
He drifted through the infinite light while thinking of a solution.
“Thankfully, this place doesn’t seem time-limited like the initial enlightenment state, so I can take my time to figure it out,” he thought. Even so, he knew he should hurry. What if this place had strange time properties where time moved faster outside, and he got stuck here for billions of years?
Given what he had just done to his wife, he’d come out to find her in the invincible realm. His cultivation journey would end before it even began.
He shook his head. What was he thinking about? He needed to solve this quickly.
He paused. “End? Yes. That’s it,” he realized.
The concept wasn’t just about the beginning – it also included the end. Of course he couldn’t grasp it because it wasn’t complete. It was just like before when he had tried understanding the absolute end inside his spiritual sea. “It seems I can’t grasp the two separately,” he thought.
He closed his eyes and concentrated with everything he had.
Suddenly, his eyes snapped open, and he found himself floating at the center where the two opposing concepts met. On his right side was overwhelming light that gave birth to everything, and on his left was absolute nothingness that devoured all existence.
…
His eyes were completely glued to the cycle, he felt as though he couldn’t stop watching.
He saw the two absolute concepts fighting fiercely, each trying to consume the other completely.
In the midst of their battle where the two concepts collided, Xiang Yu saw all sorts of other concepts converging together as strings of light, then dispersing into an extremely beautiful light prism.
He watched all of this in awe before he finally realized what he was doing. He needed to focus on the absolute concepts, not these other ones. He shook the thoughts out of his head and concentrated.
He returned his attention to the two absolute concepts, watching them fight fiercely.
He wondered why they acted like this when they were supposed to be the same concept. He wondered if his conclusion had been wrong. No, there was no way he was wrong. He just needed to find a balance.
He remembered the yin yang concept.
He spread out his open palm, and streams of energy from the two absolutes flowed into his hands, forming crystal balls. The absolute end was absolute darkness that devoured every speck of light around it, and the absolute source was absolute brightness that encompassed everything that wasn’t nothingness.
He trembled slightly, feeling the weight of both concepts. He just needed to get them together.
He began pushing his palms slowly toward each other.
He remembered yin yang – it was all about finding order in disorder.
Even though the two were extreme opposites, he was sure they represented something similar.
It all came back to one thing: end or beginning, where did it start? While this might seem obvious – after all, there is no end without a beginning – couldn’t the same be said for the beginning as well? Is it really a beginning if it was already there?
That meant there must have been an end before the beginning.
But this didn’t mean that the end was now the start – far from it.
It all looped back.
There was end in beginning and beginning in end.
Existence in nonexistence and nonexistence in existence.
All the states could be true at once. It seemed contradictory, right? Existence and nonexistence existing at the same time. Well, he was just looking at it from the wrong perspective. Time came from the absolute source concept, so how could it dictate how these parent concepts behaved?
He took time out of the equation.
He slowly took all the other concepts out. When he took everything out and stopped using them to understand the absolute source but rather let it come to him, it did just that.
Unlike other concepts that focused on things within existence, the absolute end and source focused on existence itself as a whole. The absolute source birthed all of existence, and the absolute end dictated that at some point, all of existence would eventually come to an end. It would then be birthed again, and the cycle continued.
Xiang Yu chuckled at this realization, his eyes opening in the real world.
“So this is what a law feels like.”
…
Author’s Corner
Is it existence or nonexistence? It’s both. But how can it be both? It can’t. But it is. It’s paradoxical, and yet, it works.
The art of saying so much and nothing at the same time is harder than it looks.
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