Chapter 1035: Death of the Emperor

It was clearly a dead planet, but the moment Li Qi shouted, the entire planet rapidly turned into light.

The planet originally had no sun, but a new sun rose, and the clouds broke at dawn.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a virtual sun that appeared out of thin air at this moment, rotating around this world like a satellite.

The heavenly wind stirred, and in an instant, heavy rain poured down from nothing, causing ten thousand torrents to swirl.

Endless streams of water, deep and wide, gave birth to great rivers that flowed from the south of the mountains.

Some of these streams rapidly flowed into the basin, becoming the source of the sea.

Others twisted and turned thousands of times, high in the mountains and clouds, becoming flying springs in various caves.

Still others froze into ice in severe winters, winding through mountain ranges, their reflections clear and fresh, like biting cold springs.

The water flowed into a system of interconnected waterways. They swirled westward into the sea, merging and flowing together, forming long rivers and great waves, surging and raging, with waterfalls constantly hanging, their cloud shadows continuously curling, pouring down endlessly.

The formerly dark planet suddenly saw many living beings emerge at this moment.

Crane shadows danced gracefully, and hibernating insects began to stir.

Fish ascended carrying ice, and otters offered sacrifices while turtles emerged.

Wild geese flew north and swallows south, and plants began to sprout.

Field mice transformed into quails, and rainbows began to appear.

Duckweed began to grow, and cuckoos flapped their wings.

Hibernating insects all bowed down, and hoopoes cried loudly.

The Qi of the heavens ascended, and the Qi of the earth descended.

Tigers and leopards mated, litchi trees sprouted, earthworms and grubs intertwined, and pheasants crowed while chickens brooded.

Peaches began to bloom, orioles sang, hawks, doves, and swallows arrived together, and thunder began to sound.

Frogs chirped, earthworms emerged, melons, fruits, and bitter vegetables flourished, and decaying grass turned into fireflies.

Delicate grasses withered, autumn for wheat arrived, mantises shed their antlers, and crickets dwelled in walls.

Hawks and sparrows were captured, cicadas chirped in the cold, rice and quinoa ripened, and the earth was moist and humid.

Birds stored food, hibernating insects built their homes, wild geese arrived as guests, and sparrows entered the great water to become clams.

Chrysanthemums bore yellow flowers, jackals sacrificed beasts, plants withered and turned yellow, and pheasants entered the great water to become mirages.

The entire planet, mimicking the ecology of the world, changed almost instantly.

Of course, this instant is calculated according to geological time, and in reality, about twenty thousand years have passed here.

From a geological perspective, twenty thousand years is indeed the blink of an eye, and in that blink, the entire planet transformed from dead desolation to vibrant life.

Furthermore, it even began to adapt to cultivation; after the birth of living beings here, their talents would surpass most native civilizations.

Perhaps this is what it means for one to attain the Dao and for even his chickens and dogs to ascend to heaven.

As Li Qi's chosen temporary cultivation retreat, the moment Li Qi shouted 'So that's how it is!', this place was already destined to become a 'Place Near the Dao', and in the future, it might even become a tourist attraction like 'Li Qi Once Cultivated Here'.

And Li Qi was filled with joy.

After a long period of secluded cultivation, he finally took a step forward in the Second Grade.

He now understood the purpose of the First Grade.

Why these Great Powers can be called 'Heaven', why Heavenly Demons were stripped of the 'Heaven' suffix, and why the loftiness of 'Heaven' is not the reason First Grades pursue it.

Li Qi had understood one thing a long time ago.

That is, all living beings are not free, and this lack of freedom is precisely how they survive.

For example, a rope can tie up an ox, allowing it to work diligently in the fields for its entire life.

With the strength of an ox, can a rope truly tie it up? Can a person truly pull an ox?

But the ox doesn't leave.

Because the ox is accustomed to it; it feels that such a life is good, everything around it is familiar, and all things are so habitual.

Not to mention oxen, if you shift your perspective to beings with higher intelligence, you'll find it's the same.

An invisible shackles traps these highly intelligent beings between their three meals a day.

Of course, it doesn't have to be three meals a day, nor does it necessarily have to be eating, but they must exist in an environment where a 'habit' exists.

What is a habit?

A customary inertia is a habit.

Both oxen and these highly intelligent beings have their respective inertias.

This inertia manifests in all aspects, for example, three-dimensional space.

For Mortals, three-dimensional space is customary and almost taken for granted, but in reality, space is not three-dimensional; this is common knowledge for many advanced civilizations.

The dimension of space can even be arbitrarily increased, even approaching infinity, and this will not cause any problems, so... why habituate to assuming space is three-dimensional?

Similarly, physical rules can be changed, the speed of light limit can be changed; no environment is eternally immutable. This Universe is constantly developing dynamically, and what you take for granted might be a fantasy in the eyes of others.

But it sounds simple; in reality, everyone becomes accustomed to their living environment, including Li Qi and even other Great Powers.

It's not that they can't adapt to unusual lives; they just prefer habitual lives.

This is understandable and there is nothing wrong with it.

Choosing one's preferred lifestyle is perfectly normal. For example, Li Qi can live in infinitely dimensional spacetime, but he usually prefers to live in three-dimensional spacetime, and there's no problem with that.

But... what if there is a problem?

What if this 'habit' is a shackles, a restraint?

Just like an old ox.

A rope can tie an old ox in the field.

A habit can tie a Second Grade in the three-dimensional world.

How subtle and yet how terrifying a shackles is this?

They possess the body of a free man, yet they are not truly free.

Seemingly free and unrestrained, yet actually involuntary.

Perhaps some will say this is voluntary, a self-choice.

At this point, the problem arises.

So, are those who voluntarily become slaves considered slaves?

Or, how can one break free from 'habit'?

It should be noted that breaking free from habit can itself be a form of habit.

Is the preference for seeking excitement and an unaccustomed life not a form of 'habit'?

So, a huge problem has been presented: how can one completely break free from this shackles?

You always need an environment to live in; no matter what you do, you can't escape this confinement, can you? This can even be further extended, to 'subjective time' for example.

How can you escape the shackles of 'subjective time'?

Subjective time, that is, the changes and temporal order you perceive yourself.

In any case, when you demand change, your subjective time begins to flow. No matter how Great Powers traverse spacetime, his own subjective time is certainly constant relative to himself.

So, is being immersed in subjective time also a shackles, a habit?

Li Qi previously thought this was simply nonsense.

Subjective time, how could that possibly be escaped? No matter what you do, your consciousness and changes are bound to be marked by time, even though time doesn't exist, your changes themselves constitute a part of the temporal order.

In any case, this will not affect subjective time, that is, the existence of the self.

This is what Li Qi originally thought.

However, after a long period of secluded cultivation and contemplation, a thought suddenly occurred to him.

Is believing that subjective time is unshakeable also a 'habit', a 'shackles'?

If even subjective time is considered a shackles, then how can one transcend it?

What kind of action, what kind of theory, can transcend subjective time?

Subjective time serves as the yardstick for defining one's actions. If even this is abandoned, it means one cannot even define one's own spacetime, and has even surpassed the scope of all self-consciousness.

This is indeed difficult to understand, even difficult to contemplate; it has reached a level beyond imagination. Thinking carefully, under what circumstances can a self-consciousness transcend its own subjective time?

How can he detach from a metric that measures his own actions? This is essentially asking: how can a person detach from the 'self'?

How can you transcend your own 'self-consciousness' to perceive 'self-consciousness'? And all of this must be maintained without damaging your self-consciousness, and you must still possess self-awareness.

Destroying self-consciousness is simple, but to extract self-consciousness while still being able to self-perceive is as absurd as saying: 'How to eat a cake without moving it'.

Is it possible?

Incredible.

But... isn't the First Grade an incredible existence?

And the conjecture Li Qi made was 'Heaven'.

How to transcend subjective time, and even everything?

Although Li Qi didn't know how it was achieved, it was obvious that the entity of Heaven could possibly do this.

So, how does one approach it?

For this, Li Qi entered a second layer of contemplation.

Can impossible things happen?

This question sounds obviously foolish at first; how can something impossible happen?

But if you rephrase it, remove the 'can' and replace it with 'Can something that cannot happen, happen?'

Can something with a probability of 0 happen?

Obviously, of course it can.

Here, we need to apply the concept of infinity.

When selecting any number from a uniform distribution between one and two, the probability of selecting each number is zero.

Because there are infinite numbers in between, taking a finite number from infinity will result in an infinitely small probability, which is essentially equivalent to zero.

But as everyone knows, it's not that you can't choose one, is it?

You randomly choose a number, and you've selected one from an event with zero probability; there's nothing strange about it.

Applying this infinitely large event to another scenario is like dividing infinity by zero.

Infinity divided by zero, this equation is obviously impossible to establish.

However, using projective geometry, consider one and two as a line projected by light onto a sphere.

Every line has a point at infinity; parallel lines share the same point at infinity, non-parallel lines do not. All points at infinity of lines in the same plane form a line at infinity, and all lines at infinity form a plane at infinity.

So, can the point at infinity of the line between one and two, and its parallel lines, and even the resulting infinite plane, be directly defined using limits in hyperreal numbers?

Then each infinite sequence limit corresponds to an infinite hyperreal number, and the order of infinity is obvious here, where the possibility of choosing a certain point becomes an even higher order of impossibility.

From this perspective, it's still a bit strained, because essentially, this just means there are many non-zero infinitesimals near zero, and they replace zero.

But... can't this be done?

Absolutely it can.

What's wrong with using infinitesimals to replace zero? Admittedly, Li Qi also knows that stuffing an entire number field with an infinity will cause many algebraic problems, but so what?

The key is to consider what problem you are trying to solve and appropriately introduce the corresponding concept of infinity.

So, in this problem, what if we use infinitesimals to replace zero, even if it's a clever trick?

All of this is to solve the problem of dividing infinity by zero, which is to 'transcend subjective time' using this kind of specious method.

Using infinitesimals to replace zero, which is to use 'Heaven' to replace 'subjective time', in Li Qi's current understanding, Heaven is a simulation of infinitesimals, used to forcibly complete the difficult problem of 'infinity divided by zero'.

So, now there is only one problem in front of Li Qi.

That is, how to connect 'subjective time' and 'Heaven'.

This is still a big problem, as Li Qi is only 'cheating' through analogy, and even cheated twice, so it's not wrong to call it unreasonable.

This was just a small step for him, not a huge realization for Breakthrough to the First Grade.

But it was enough.

Knowing the possible function of 'Heaven' was enough to guide Li Qi's efforts for many years to come.

Although Li Qi hoped to be even faster, how much faster could he be?

To advance in the Second Grade, one must solve a large number of contradictory paradoxes, and then find the one that is not contradictory among countless contradictions.

It's very difficult.

Li Qi was already satisfied with this secluded cultivation.

He stood up and shouted loudly: "So that's how it is!"

The power of the Second Grade leaked at this moment, and Li Qi's forging of Myriad Heavens advanced a step further. This leaked portion of power allowed this nameless planet to enjoy immense blessings.

Li Qi rose happily and looked around.

Hmm, this rogue planet should become some kind of wonder. From Li Qi's perception, many civilizations have already detected the abnormal state here, and faster-than-light spacecraft are already rushing towards it.

Then, he saw that many exotic species born locally had already prostrated themselves towards Li Qi.

Li Qi was about to do something—

But at that instant, his pupils dilated, and he jolted!

A colossal, indescribable tremor! Swept across the entire Universe!

From the world, from Chang'an, the capital of Tang Nation, an unparalleled branching of possibilities emanated!

This tremor, this level of reality distortion...

This is—

This generation's Human Emperor, has reached the end of his lifespan?!