With the plan to deal with the self proclaimed talented swordsman on his mind, he returned to the Blessed Heaven World in anticipation of his meeting with the rank 6 swordsman. The meeting is going to be in two years and two months, which means he has time to prepare and increase his strength through other means.
He entered the third dimension and used it to travel quickly to the Blessed Heaven World. When he got there, the first thing he saw was the constellation of stars in the heavens of the third dimension.
He had seen this constellation many times and had already gotten used to the sight. However, when he looked at the divine constellation this time around, he remembered something that he had intentionally ignored.
He remembered that the divine constellation is also a channel to acquire understanding and mastery of a pathway, not just a spying network for snooping on others.
After he remembered this other function of the divine constellation, he said to himself, ’I don’t need mastery of a pathway because of the Power Shifting Ability. But I have a lot of lifespan anyway. The lifespan isn’t doing anything, so let me use a little bit of it to see what this understanding of a pathway is about.’
’Who knows, gaining an understanding of the pathway might contain the secret to advancing to rank 9. Though I doubt that will be the case since the sect won’t be generous enough to leave such valuable information out in the open for everyone to see.’
He had ignored gaining mastery of a pathway because he didn’t need it and because it was expensive to acquire. But since he had a lot of lifespan on hand to use, he decided to give it a try.
He didn’t have any great expectations for what he would learn, though. So his attitude was nonchalant as he connected his Insight Stat to the constellation of stars in the Money Pathway to gain an understanding of this pathway.
He connected to the constellation of the Money Pathway because it is the only pathway that he could access and gain an understanding, since this is the pathway where the Divine Position of Gold Body resided.
After connecting to the constellation, he directed his perception to the core of the constellation of stars. This core is the Supreme Metac, and it is the foundation of the pathway.
The fact that the Supreme Metac is the foundation of the pathway is why he needs to connect to it and perceive its mode of operation for him to gain a better understanding of the pathway. This is the first information that he acquired after he connected the Insight Stat to the Supreme Metac.
As this information flowed into his mind, he realized something which made his eyes light up and say, "The Supreme Metac isn’t just the strongest Metac in the pathway. It is the source and foundation of the Pathway."
"Therefore, whoever controls the Supreme Metac will control the whole pathway. And whoever controls it will become the Dao Lord of the pathway. How interesting."
Then his mind was flooded with more information. He saw that the Supreme Metac was made of Branch Metacs, Core Metacs, and Divine Metacs. This made him realize that the more Metacs are in a pathway, the stronger the Supreme Metac will be.
When he realized this, he found it somewhat unsatisfactory, so he shook his head and said, "Saying stronger might not be accurate. It is more like the more Metacs a pathway has, the more robust and versatile the Supreme Metac becomes."
He changed his understanding of how the quantity of Metacs in a pathway affects the quality of the Supreme Metac because he had gained new information that made him change his worldview a few seconds after he made the first realization.
His perception of the Supreme Metac wasn’t by sight. He was not using his eyes because mere eyes couldn’t fathom the intricacies of how a Supreme Metac operates.
His situation was like that of a blind man looking at an object. His eyes couldn’t see the object, so he had to rely on his hands to tell him what the object was. In his case, the Insight Stat is the hand that he is using to grope the object.
But just like a blind man will fail to get a complete image of the object at a glance, the Insight Stat can’t help him gain a complete understanding of the Supreme Metacs in an instant. He has to spend some time groping and touching the Supreme Metac all over before he can get a complete picture of it.
Each moment he spends inspecting the Supreme Metac, he gains more information that updates the picture of the Supreme Metac that he has in his mind. But this update is not necessarily the correct one.
For sure, the Insight Stat will provide information. But what he understands from that information depends entirely on his comprehension ability.
It is like how a blind man can call an elephant a wall after touching its side or call the elephant a pillar after touching its foot, simply because the elephant is very big. What the blind man touched wasn’t wrong, but the image that the blind person used that information to form is wrong.
Of course, the more the blind man touches the elephant, the more information the blind man will acquire, which will help to make the mental image of the elephant more accurate to the true image of the elephant.
In this way, as long as he is dedicated to his pursuit of understanding, no matter how poor his comprehension ability is, he will eventually gain something close to the truth. This dedication will only cost a lot of lifespan.
Loki gained an intimate understanding of this because his understanding of the Supreme Metac became clearer and bigger the more lifespan he spent on perceiving the Supreme Metac. This made him somewhat uncertain.