Chapter 1141 — The Second Type of Transgression and the Exile of the Observer
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
What Enya said was not difficult for Gao Yang to grasp, yet after hearing it he still sank into a long contemplation. In the course of that thinking, certain theories long left unresolved were confirmed, certain critical nodes he had previously failed to understand were filled in, and most important of all — he finally confirmed a conjecture he had held for a very long time but never dared to affirm.
The gods are a kind of "closed system" — or rather, the precondition for a god to hold within a civilization is the "closure" of that civilization in the corresponding domain of knowledge. When a system no longer produces new cognition, when the members of that system cease trying to seek answers to certain questions from the outside and instead direct every explanation inward, the foundation for the birth of a god takes shape.
Therefore, once such a system turns open — once external information can serve as the "solution" to certain questions within the system — the god that grew upon that system is immediately struck, and in a fatal contradiction goes swiftly mad.
It is a process akin to a bug freezing a running process, or an injection of external contamination crashing a system.
"So when the Final Defiance occurred, the collective current of thought did not actually shift violently — because only a handful of 'observer' individuals stepped outside the system, and the information they saw could not act upon the entire species at once," Gao Yang said slowly, ending his contemplation and looking at the great golden egg before him. "The 'shift in thought' was not the primary cause in the Final Defiance — it was not even an effective cause. The truly effective cause... was that the god itself was negated."
"From my own experience, that is so," Enya said softly, as though speaking of matters that did not concern her. "The bond between the current of thought and the god is exceedingly tight; it is by no means so simple as 'breeding ground' and 'product.' In a sense, the god is the current of thought reified and unified — the god is the current of thought. So the moment any tributary within that current touches specific information from outside the system, it is as though the god itself has touched that information; and if that information cannot be negated by the system's own logic, then... the collapse of the system becomes inevitable."
Here the voice from the golden egg halted abruptly. She seemed to be sorting through her shattered memories, and Gao Yang waited patiently for several seconds before Enya's voice came again: "...I still remember what happened in that final moment, when the dragons' vessel broke through the atmosphere and stepped into that region untouched since the Age of Myth... Though by then I had wholly lost control of anything, though even my thinking had come to a complete standstill, that feeling was still branded deep into my memory through the link between divinity and humanity.
"It was a cold and painful sensation of tearing, carrying the vast terror of being suddenly flung from a warm, comfortable place into a cold and unfamiliar one — like an infant at birth, abruptly torn from the mother's body and facing a hostile outer world. My divine part was forced to acknowledge the existence of the starry sky, to acknowledge that there is no heaven above the stars, to acknowledge that beyond the planet lies a vast and boundless 'extraterritorial expanse,' to acknowledge that its own might was but a faint glimmer on a speck of dust in the cosmos, to acknowledge that it was itself meaningless in the immense void of space... In an exceedingly brief span, the mythological system the mortals had built over millions of years was pierced through by cold, real law. Myth could not hold, and so the god could not hold."