Chapter 763: Rabbit’s fourth grade

Inside the Bronze Palace, Shi Yan was teaching Shen Shuibi.

"You can try to create a relatively small Void, and this is the method; it saves a lot of effort." Shi Yan threw a spell to Shen Shuibi.

Shen Shuibi was not polite and immediately started reading it.

Upon closer inspection, it was a method detailing how to create a small Void with fewer Materials.

The Rank of this method seemed quite high, because the essence of the Void was extremely profound, and when used in battle, it could easily tear apart ordinary Fifth Rank cultivators, and could even threaten a small portion of special Fourth Rank cultivators.

The reason it was referred to as 'special Fourth Rank' was because some Fourth Rank cultivators, whose 'Dao' created worlds that could not exceed the speed of light, were therefore unable to escape the Void's devourment.

However, such people were rare after all, because the Heavenly Dao's limit could change this matter, which was a matter of course for most Fifth Rank cultivators; the Dao they created would naturally not be constrained.

But there were always a small number of worlds where the beings believed that the 'Heavenly Dao's limit' could not be changed, so their Fourth Rank cultivators were greatly restrained by the Void.

In any case, the Void itself, as a strange celestial body, actually held a very high position.

Therefore, the method of creating the Void... should be very valuable.

Shen Shuibi, with a feeling of trepidation, began to learn.

The principle was actually very simple: it was to compress mass.

However, while it sounded simple, it was difficult to do. One had to overcome the repulsive force between substances, then forcibly collapse them, and imbue them with strange characteristics through gravity.

Overcoming the repulsive force between substances required far more cultivation than blowing up a world; a Fifth Rank cultivator could not do it purely by brute force. They had to use such a high-Rank spell, accelerating it little by little through special means.

Strange...

Shen Shuibi felt a strange power in her hand.

Her power was replacing gravity, and then began to substitute for the substance in collapsing.

But soon, she failed.

This spell was too difficult to control, with countless mysteries contained within it, and the forces that resisted material repulsion.

It was not difficult to gather the energy to collapse these substances; the difficulty lay in precisely cutting into the bonding forces within these substances, and precisely separating every wisp of Qi.

One must know... Qi, in a sense, was 'infinitely divisible'.

Although in reality it could not be infinite, because space itself had pixel points, what she had to do was use computational power to approximate all the 'pixels' in this small团 of space, divide the 'Qi' into the smallest pixels, and finally compress them to form a mass point of infinite density.

As long as the substance itself collapsed into a very small region, and the density of this region reached a certain level, exceeding a certain threshold, a Void would form.

After that, this mass point would naturally collapse, devouring all the surrounding space-time and matter.

"Practice more." Shi Yan said after seeing Shen Shuibi fail.

Rabbit nodded, then began to concentrate on controlling, and at this moment, an elegant zither sound came to her ears.

Looking up, she found Shi Yan next to her, playing the zither as if no one else was there.

Shen Shuibi didn't pay attention; she continued to bury her head in deep thought.

If Li Qi were nearby, he would be able to see that what she was trying to do was compress a fist-sized substance below its Schwarzschild radius. The Void created this way would have very little mass and very little gravity.

After all, gravity would not increase out of thin air just because it became a Void. If a fist-sized substance was compressed into a Void, then the gravity of this Void would only be the gravity that a fist-sized substance should have, so it would not rapidly devour and expand. A Void of this size could not even suck up a piece of paper.

Those Voids that devoured endless worlds had gravitational ranges measured in light-years, and their own mass was enough to crush space-time.

However, although small, for matter directly touching the event horizon of this small Void, it was different. Although the event horizon created by the Void was small and its gravity could not drag anything, the event horizon itself was truly capable of tearing apart all matter. This was pressure from its essence; even such a weak Void could easily tear apart the most immense and hard substances.

Shen Shuibi's talent was still quite outstanding.

After some time, and after hundreds of failures, she finally found the trick.

And so, an invisible Void, smaller than an atom, appeared!

This Void was very weak, and the radius of its event horizon was extremely tiny, almost unable to cause any impact on the outside world.

Shen Shuibi immediately seized the time and began to observe, because if she was too slow, this Void would automatically dissipate.

Voids would also evaporate; if their mass was too small to be self-sustained by gravity, they would rapidly evaporate, disappear without a trace, and return their energy to the Universe.

She saw that the space-time curvature near the Void was very strong.

At this moment, two mass points that were very close in space-time would have geodesic lines that were not parallel. This meant that with the passage of proper time, the relative positions of the two mass points in space-time would become increasingly larger or smaller. Reflected at the macroscopic level, this meant that continuous matter would break its original geometric structure, in other words, be torn apart.

The separation speed of geodesics near any space-time point, that is, the stretching and compression speed of the relative positions of nearby mass points, was determined by the space-time curvature of that space-time point—

At the same time, she also observed... Celestial Pole.

Or rather, the 'singularity'.

Shen Shuibi's head felt as if it had been struck!

She realized the existence of something... a point of infinite density and infinite space-time curvature.

The singularity was the starting point of all things traced back to the moment before the Universe's birth explosion, or the center point of the Void. The singularity had infinite density, and the space-time curvature at the singularity was infinite.

What did this mean?

This point existed, but did not occupy space.

Space—time, began at that point and ended at that point.

An incredible existence without a fixed shape or volume, as the very beginning of a world, it might even possess the potential energy of all the matter that forms the Universe.

Therefore, the event horizon of the Void was enough to cut off Karma, because it itself was independent Karma.

Around the Void, within the event horizon, all Karma was cut off. The existence of the event horizon led to complete inability for inside and outside to interfere, so the inside of the Void and the outside of the Void were completely two different worlds, and neither could communicate with the other.

If they couldn't interfere with each other, they could be considered non-existent!

What would it be like to consider it non-existent?

The answer was... the Void remained 'static' relative to its own 'Celestial Pole'.

The Void itself possessed some properties of the 'Universe'.

Shen Shuibi immediately tried again—

This time, she wanted to prove that the world could be divided.

But as she began to think about this, she realized that Li Qi had already given her the answer.

The world must be divisible, and there must be a concept of 'basic pixels' in the world. Even the macroscopic world was discontinuous, divided into steps.

Think carefully, if the world were continuous, then any step could be divided into two steps, no matter how small that step was. In that case, you would never be able to complete a step, because you could only ever complete half of the current step.

Alternatively, find a wooden stick, and after measurement, its length is 10 centimeters. But this is only 10 centimeters as defined by humans; its length has an infinitely close possibility of being an irrational number near 10. It is only for convenience of understanding and practice that we make a compromise, choosing a relatively close 10 from the countably infinite to define its length. To infinitely pursue the precision of its length, the final result is more likely to be an irrational number; but humans have no way to express irrational numbers precisely, and when trying to explain this irrational number to others, they can only pick a rational number to represent it.

Just as when we represent a point on a straight line, we are actually using a line segment.

Irrational numbers are impossible to achieve under this division, because being able to be divided out means that the number is always rational, just that the number of decimal places is unknown. And irrational numbers are various numbers that cannot be found in reality; as long as you stop, it must be a rational number.

Therefore, the real world is divisible. If it is not divisible, then it is...

It is, it is, it is—

It was the infinite power displayed by the White Chen Fox King Bodhisattva back then!

Fractals! koch curve, coastline paradox, Sierpinski triangle, those things Li Qi had once shown, floated before Shen Shuibi's eyes.

The power displayed by the White Chen Fox King Bodhisattva back then was not only a hint to Li Qi, but also a hint to her at the same time!

These fractals themselves all demonstrated one thing, which was—the part and the whole can be self-similar, and the part can contain all the information of the whole!

This was possible, and had already been proven.

The overall and parts of complex Systems can indeed be the same. Part A and Part B, or even Part A and the entire whole, can have very similar fine structures or properties. A local part taken from the whole can reflect the basic characteristics of the whole.

They can even exhibit invariance under geometric or nonlinear transformations, achieving complete identity in characteristics at different magnifications, including structure and form, process, information, function, properties, energy, material composition, time, space, and other features.

So, the White Chen Fox King Bodhisattva said: "This, is Celestial Pole, Moon Essence, do you see it?"

Shen Shuibi only saw the entire Universe back then, but never saw the infinitely differentiated, with the local containing all the information of the whole.

In other words, the Void itself could be regarded as a static 'Universe'.

Then, it also avoided the self-referential problem of using the Universe itself as a reference frame, because this did not involve self-reference.

Shen Shuibi felt as if she had been enlightened, and an endless stream of inspiration poured out of her mind.

She immediately formed hand seals, and without hesitation, began to construct her own 'Dao', directly entering a state of seclusion.

Around her, the zither music continued to sound, elegantly and continuously.

Under this sound, the sleepy little Gou, the Chow Chow Earth Spirit, also gradually began to perk up.

Shen Shuibi herself seemed to not hear the zither music, but she only felt her mind become agile, many things became clear with just a thought, and she became much more clever.

Shi Yan continued to play the zither.

If one looked closely, this was a very ancient zither.

Ancient zithers are evidenced by crack patterns, because due to the Materials, most zithers of a certain Rank will not have cracks unless they are over fifty thousand years old. Conversely, the older they are, the more cracks they have.

However, the crack patterns also had Ranks.

There were 'snake belly cracks', with patterns crossing the zither surface, about one or two inches apart, similar to the patterns on a snake's belly.

There were 'fine cracks', like thousands of fine hairs, also evenly distributed, mostly on both sides of the zither, but not near the bridge. There were also those with cracks on both the top and bottom.

And there were 'plum blossom cracks', whose patterns resembled plum blossoms. These were extremely ancient, impossible to have without tens of millions of years.

These patterns were essentially formed by the zither body being vibrated by the strings day and night. Although the hidden parts of the cracks were corroded, when polished and re-lacquered, the patterns became more visible, and some cracks even resembled sword edges.

However, many ancient artifacts were still 'mortal objects', such as this ancient zither before them.

An ancient zither was not necessarily a Spiritual Artifact, because Spiritual Artifacts were called Spiritual Artifacts because they contained 'spells' or even 'Dao', and some Spiritual Artifacts could even Awaken intelligence and become a proper cultivator.

However, it was still very rare, because although it wasn't a Spiritual Artifact, the Materials of this object itself were very high-grade, able to withstand the power of a Second Rank playing the zither, unlike Shen Shuibi's flute, which directly exploded when playing the residual sound of creation.

The zither music continued, subtly conveying a certain wisdom.

Shen Shuibi, on her side, was also still continuing.

This was Shi Yan's method of expounding the Dao.

Rather than chattering endlessly, it was better to give a few pointers on key questions, and then express the meaning with a zither piece.

This was actually quite similar to Zhu Fengdan, but much gentler than Zhu Fengdan, and very different from the teaching methods of Yun Fang and the Early Stage Li Qi.

A long time ago, Li Qi was very responsible for Li Shiwei's education, but sometimes overly responsible, almost like drawing a path for a child. According to his teaching method, if you tied a monkey from Mount Emei there for a year, you could domesticate it into a proto-human.

Later, Li Qi also learned his lesson and did not continue this kind of training, but instead let Li Shiwei go out and explore on her own.

How to put it...

The result couldn't be said to be too good, after all, Li Shiwei's cultivation was still stuck, and in terms of talent, she was quite far behind her parents.

But Li Qi and Shen Shuibi didn't care too much.

A tiger father doesn't necessarily have a tiger cub; it's good enough to let her grow into the person she likes. Li Qi also had no throne for her to inherit; children and grandchildren have their own blessings.

Leaving these aside, about two days later, Shen Shuibi suddenly opened her eyes.

Her aura also changed accordingly.

"Hmm, how is it?" Shi Yan asked.

"Within a thousand years, I will solidify my foundation and definitely enter the Fourth Rank. Thank you, Senior."

"No need to thank me. Your foundation was already very solid before, and you even had the White Chen Fox King personally expounding the Dao to you. Now, I merely gave you a push. In fact, the answer was already in your heart; you just weren't confident before. I taught you the method of creating a Void, and when you saw it with your own eyes, you naturally became certain." Shi Yan smiled.