Chapter 701: Dimension reduction

Li Qi, who was listening nearby, was also a little surprised.

The Demonic Prince, actually so arrogant.

He actually wanted to face Sariputra in both wisdom and martial prowess.

And… from what happened later, the Demonic Prince clearly won.

It’s just that, unfortunately, Li Shiwei was only at the Seventh Rank, and had just reached the Seventh Rank at that time, so she couldn't understand the debate between the Demonic Prince and Sariputra, nor could she describe the event.

It seems no one recorded these debates, perhaps there was some taboo.

In short, the Demonic Prince won that time, both in the debate and in the martial contest.

“This really… fits his persona.” Yang Ning shook her head, “The Demonic Prince… truly makes one yearn, if only I could fight him.”

“I heard father fought him, and father even won.” At this moment, Li Shiwei suddenly said, “How come father’s reputation isn’t as widespread, only known around battlefields, while the Demonic Prince is famous throughout all Universes?”

“Your father… hmm, how should I put it, he’s rather low-key, perhaps?” Yang Ning said this, then waved her hand, raising her voice, and shouted at Li Qi, who was pretending to be busy, “Li Qi! Stop pretending, come over here!”

Li Qi was stunned.

Yang Ning could actually see through him? This really is—

This couldn’t have been done through perception; Li Qi was confident that with him having already advanced to the Fourth Rank, Yang Ning absolutely couldn’t see through him, so… Yang Ning was guessing purely based on her understanding of him.

They hadn’t seen each other for so long, yet he didn’t expect this sister-in-law could still make such a judgment.

Since he was exposed, he naturally stopped pretending, put down the cup in his hand, and walked towards Yang Ning’s table.

When Li Qi arrived, Li Shiwei clearly became much more reserved.

Even Yang Ning, who had called him over, had a somewhat complex expression.

How to put it, when she truly felt Li Qi’s Fourth Rank power, Yang Ning always felt a bit sour.

“I thought you wouldn’t call me over.” Li Qi said with a smile, sitting down.

“I originally didn’t want to call you; you’re too annoying, always pretending.” Yang Ning pouted, “I really don’t know what she likes about you.”

Li Qi just smiled, not responding.

Compared to Yang Ning and Li Shiwei, he indeed seemed a bit rigid, but there was nothing wrong with that; he truly couldn’t act unrestrained.

“Alright, let’s not talk about that. I called you over because I wanted to ask you, how did you defeat the Demonic Prince back then?” Yang Ning asked.

“Ah, that. In a fight between peers, I definitely couldn’t have won, so at the time, I thought of a way, took a shortcut, had a Breakthrough on the spot, and won by fighting from a higher position. It’s just… the cost wasn’t small; it took a lot of effort afterwards, and my teacher also helped, only then were the after-effects resolved.” Li Qi said with a smile.

He spoke of it lightly now, but that matter was indeed quite difficult; he truly had to fight a Utmost Person head-on to get out of it.

It was as difficult as ascending to heaven; even if he had to do it again, it’s hard to say if he could come back alive.

Li Qi’s relaxed demeanor made Yang Ning examine him again.

Then, the Golden Crow patted Li Shiwei: “Your dad is also very difficult, ah. You go play for a bit, I’ll have him come over and talk to you alone later.”

“Auntie—” Li Shiwei wanted to say something.

However, in a sense, she still inherited Li Qi’s adherence to rules; although somewhat dissatisfied, she still chose to leave voluntarily, giving her aunt and father some space.

After Li Shiwei left, Yang Ning sighed: “How long has it been, and you’re already at the Fourth Rank…”

“It’s not as easy as you think.” Li Qi said.

“Of course I know it’s not easy. How could it be easy to step into the Fourth Rank? I just… sigh, never mind, I don’t know how to say it, can’t explain it clearly.” Yang Ning’s tone was subtle, an indescribable feeling.

A mix of emotions, perhaps that’s what it was.

She had already lost what could be called ‘jealousy’ or ‘admiration’; it was truly complex, hard to describe what she was feeling, even though she was already at the Fifth Rank, Yang Ning found it difficult to articulate what she was thinking.

All thoughts mixed together, disjointed; just a second ago, she was chatting about adventures with her little niece, but the topic inadvertently shifted to Li Qi.

Whether it was inadvertent or intentional, even Yang Ning herself couldn’t tell.

“There’s no need to dwell on these things. Everyone has their own path; going fast doesn’t necessarily mean going steadily.” Li Qi said.

This was not comfort; Li Qi genuinely believed this.

He still remained cautious and meticulous to this day, not daring to be negligent in the slightest.

The higher one ascended, the more one felt like treading on thin ice. The ‘Dao’ possessed nearly infinite power; this power could shape worlds, and the current Reality Universe was shaped by the ‘Dao’.

Those who pursued the Dao wanted to understand the Dao, to chase the Dao, but the further they advanced, the more they would discover the void nature of the Reality Universe and the solidity of the logical System itself.

And those who pursued the Dao were trying to chase and control this power; they sought traces of the ‘Dao’ in logic, theory, thought, and symbols.

Such power almost only yielded to logic, or rather, it was logic itself; the world itself was born from logic in the void.

The more they understood, the more they feared this power, and the more they worried about taking the wrong path.

In this situation, ‘speed’ might not necessarily be a good thing. If one simply wanted to be fast, then directly merging with the Dao was the fastest shortcut.

“It’s not a matter of speed, but rather… you can clearly know what you want, what you fear, know where the path is, and at critical moments, you can distinguish many forks in the road. This is far, far more important than cultivating quickly. To be honest, I’ve thought about the Fourth Rank path a lot, hundreds of thousands of possibilities at least, but I don’t know which one to take, nor can I distinguish which one is correct.” Yang Ning sighed.

This point, which Li Qi made her most envious, was also where Li Qi’s true ‘Genius’ lay: he had an almost intuitive keenness for his own path and could always walk it without hesitation.

“The more you dwell on these things, the worse it gets. You need to walk ‘your own path,’ not the ‘correct path.’ As long as you practice your own Dao, then there’s no such thing as the Dao path being cut off, because you’ve reached your own end; this isn’t the end of the Dao, but your end.”

“If you walk the ‘correct Dao,’ even if you successfully advance, I don’t think… you’ll be able to continue, will you?” Li Qi said.

Walking one’s own path might indeed lead to the Dao path being cut off, but that is, after all, one’s own path.

Completely following the path of predecessors and absorbing their experiences will not lead one far.

But when Yang Ning heard this, she rolled her eyes: “It’s easy for you to say. The purpose of cultivation for all beings is not the same. You are a Genius; the Shaman God has high hopes for you, so of course, you can walk your own path, and in fact, you can only walk your own path, because you bear the task of pioneering a new path. But we are different; I just want to become stronger quickly now, so that Mount Luofu can have an easier time.”

Li Qi continued to smile and said: “The path you choose to become stronger, to protect Mount Luofu, isn’t that also your own path? Who says one’s own path must be one that you love?”

“It’s easy to say. Your own path… no matter how you choose, it’s your own path, but how many people step out without regret? To put it bluntly, sigh, never mind, talking about these things with someone like you is just asking for humiliation.” As Yang Ning spoke, a wave of irritation surged into her heart.

She must have been out of her mind to talk to Li Qi about these topics.

He doesn’t have these worries.

But Li Qi continued: “Perhaps you think these are all nonsense, but… actually, they are still very useful. At the very least, they can eliminate anxiety. When I advanced to the Fourth Rank, I also had this anxiety, but later I found that it was actually useless.”

“Everything, ultimately, seeks nothing more than self-consistency.”

Yang Ning just shook her head: “Self-consistency. What if your self-consistency doesn’t align with reality?”

“If it doesn’t align with reality, then so be it. Was the Universe like this from the beginning? What if the Universe had another possibility? Or perhaps not just one, but countless other possibilities. As long as a complete description method can be established logically, then it can actually be considered valid, can’t it?”

“For example, look.” Li Qi said, extending his hand to conjure a piece of Dao Principle, enveloping the wine glass in front of him, naturally re-describing the surrounding ‘space’: “By doing this, after scaling, translating, and rotating the various vectors of the three dimensions of space, forming a hyper-parallelepiped, you see, some dimensions are flattened, the scaling factor in that direction becomes 0, the change in volume scaling factor leads to the loss of some features, and also, the loss of one direction.”

As Li Qi described, and with a not-so-complex matrix and determinant description, space collapsed.

Space itself didn’t collapse, because spacetime fundamentally doesn’t exist, but the range within which matter could move in this space was now only in two directions.

In the normal world, there should have been three directions.

However, matrix A could span a three-dimensional space, but after being left-multiplied by matrix B, the new description produced, the world described by the newly appeared matrix C, could only span a two-dimensional space.

That is, one direction of space was ‘flattened’.

It suffered a dimensionality reduction attack; a direction representing the range of matter’s movement was flattened, and a brand new ‘description’ limited space to this state. The essence of space itself didn’t change, it’s just that now, matter couldn’t move in that direction.

Spacetime tells matter how to move, and now this small piece of spacetime tells matter: “You can only move in two directions. As for why? Because someone else told me it’s like this.”

Who told it?

Of course, it was Li Qi, who had already reached the Fourth Rank.

This was the power of the Fourth Rank.

Li Qi said easily: “You see, by slightly changing the interpretation of this world, phenomena will follow suit. In fact, neither the definition of matter nor the definition of space has changed at all; it’s just… an alteration of the interpretation, and everything naturally became like this.”

Yang Ning gazed at the wine glass in Li Qi’s hand.

This wine glass was ‘flattened’, but not in the sense of becoming a ‘painting’; instead, it was drawn out, becoming a ‘line’. These lines seemed to be infinitely many, constantly spiraling and intertwining, forming an extremely complex, yet no longer recognizable as a wine glass, special shape.

This was still a wine glass; Yang Ning could feel that the nature of the material within had not changed, space itself had not changed, but because one direction was missing, it transformed into this continuous fractal curve, which could infinitely fill two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, finally resulting in a three-dimensional wine glass composed of voxels, simultaneously possessing external and internal details on a two-dimensional plane.

Yes, the wine glass was two-dimensionally unfolded, becoming an infinite fractal curve. The inside and outside of the wine glass were simultaneously displayed on a two-dimensional plane, but this two-dimensional plane was an infinite fractal geometry, possessing the characteristic of filling space in non-integer dimensions.

She didn’t know what this was, but Li Qi had already shown her everything.

Such a bizarre and confusing state could never exist in the Reality Universe, but it could exist logically.

However, as long as it could exist logically, it meant that this phenomenon could exist, because it didn’t violate logic, which meant there was no paradox, and without a paradox, one only needed to create this phenomenon.

It’s like a brand new element in a laboratory, for example, element number 118 on the periodic table; it absolutely doesn’t exist in the Reality Universe, but as long as it can be logically explained and has a complete theory as its basis for existence, then it’s not impossible to forcibly create such a completely new element in a laboratory, one that the Universe has never synthesized on its own.

In fact, humans have already done this.

What Li Qi did was just a step higher than that.

Those spaces that only existed logically, the fractal geometries and three-dimensional Hilbert curves composed of material voxels that only existed in mathematical descriptions, these strange phenomena that he could describe, could all be directly manifested as ‘reality’, and supporting all of this was his Dao and cultivation.

Yang Ning stared at the wine glass; she understood what Li Qi wanted to tell her.

But… she couldn’t do it, understanding the principle was one thing, actually doing it was another, and that was the annoying part.

Then, Yang Ning turned her head and changed the subject: “I know now why Shi Wei doesn’t like you. Do you also like to say these things when you’re with her?”

Li Qi was stunned, then gave a bitter smile. The dimensionality-reduced space in his hand returned to normal, but the wine glass itself twisted, disintegrated, and turned into a pile of unrecognizable waste material.

Dimensionality reduction transformation is essentially a projection from a higher dimension to a lower dimension. This transformation and projection is like flattening a globe to draw a flat map; information is definitely lost in the process. Therefore, even if the space recovers, the lost information cannot be retrieved, and it naturally won’t recover its three-dimensional form.

This is entropy; information, once lost, does not return.