Genetic Ascension

Chapter 1856: Meandering Thoughts.

Sylas sat in silence at the bottom of the ocean. There wasn't a single soul in sight, nothing but an endless darkness in all directions.

Even with so much of the ocean swallowed up by the defensive formation, the depth of the ocean still felt unfathomable. It just went to show just how large individual worlds were, let alone the star system, a galaxy, a universe beyond that.

There was so much to explore just on Earth. Even with his strength, Sylas grasped it would take him centuries to find and document everything. And by the time he finished, he would need another several centuries to make up for everything that had grown after his first pass through.

But that was why the idea was so fresh and clear in his head right now.

Everyone spoke about the universe and its endless depths. There were often books back before the Summoning that spoke of the dangers of space exploration, of things like the dark forest theory of existence, each one warning of the price that could come with too much curiosity.

But before such books became popular, there were other eldritch horrors, ones that spoke of unearthing monsters in the arctic ice caps, or hidden colossal squid in the oceans, or mysterious mythical creatures that called forests or lakes home.

And before even this, there were the creations of myths of all shapes and sizes, entire nation states built on a pantheon of gods and goddesses that demanded rituals... myths created and followed for no reason outside of fear and chasing what was bigger than themselves.

Humans, for as long as Sylas could recount and as long as history could recall, had always pointed toward the unknown and defined it with writings of fear and words of hesitation.

But every time that next step was taken, what came before was forgotten.

The fear of gods was replaced by the fear of the ice caps, the oceans, the forests. The fear of the environment was then replaced by fears of deep space, of aliens, of the unknown.

What would they fear after this?

Just the idea of sitting at the bottom of the ocean, in such darkness that one couldn't see even their own palm before their face, with countless stretches of the undefinable around you... Just how small could that make a person feel? How much fear would it fill you with?

When you stared at an abyss and it stared right back?

That concept of the endless was something that the universe was more than comfortable with. To not define things with numbers, or steps, but steep itself in infinity and to be okay with that. To not feel the need to have rigid parameters and deal with the limitations of humans and humanoids alike.

That was what separated creation from the weaker masses.

The humans of Earth overcame the gods they themselves created only to begin to fear exploration of their own world. And they had yet to even finish said exploration before this fear was replaced by what lay beyond.

Every generation drew their own arbitrary lines. It was a tale as old as time, a repeatable offense that could be summarized in a single line... Get off my lawn.

It was an amusing line and yet so very real nonetheless.

These thoughts... they seemed so far detached from the reality Sylas was dealing with now. They seemed to represent something meaningless to the current time and irrelevant to Sylas... But Sylas didn't quite feel that way. In fact, he felt that this mindset was something that had retained him back for so long.

As intelligent as he was, as bold, as arrogant, as indifferent to it all...

Even he couldn't truly accept the concept of infinity. He couldn't take a step off of a cliff and agree to fall as far as it took him. He couldn't skip those gates that seemed to be the crutches the living used to understand the vast endlessness of the universe.

There was a popular theory back before the Fifth Summoning. Or, rather, the Eighth Summoning.

The short of it was essentially that with as good as human technology was becoming, it would only be logical one day to simulate reality as the greatest means of progress. And if this was a logical conclusion that any advanced society would come to, then it was likewise only logical that the odds that the reality any one person had come to know was the true reality was a near-zero chance.

If every society came to this conclusion, and every one of them managed to simulate to the point of realizing that more simulations were the only way forward, then there might very well be an unfathomable number of said simulations.

How could you ever say to yourself that you were certainly real?

It was an amazing theory, the sort that seemed to have no easy holes to poke at.

But that was the thing with science, philosophy, maths, or anything of the sort reaching a certain level...

When you did so, complexity became the name of the game. At a certain point, logic, common sense, and intuition... simply were not enough.

When Sylas first heard the theory, he immediately found it ridiculous. He thought about proving how asinine it was himself, until his research led him to someone who had already done it for him.

The short of that proof was that simulating the universe perfectly would take more resources than the universe itself could provide, leading to an infinite regression from the need for more and more simulators in an attempt to form the desired result.

It was a beautiful proof in Sylas' opinion.

It was also a proof that didn't receive nearly the same amount of attention as the much easier-to-understand "common sense" theory.

This also didn't seem to be all that important right now, and yet, to Sylas...

It felt like the final piece of a puzzle.

The waters around him trembled and the glowing eyes of a King Beast opened right beside Sylas, a single eye being more than ten times the size of his own body.

Sylas didn't even open his eyes.

When the maw of the creature opened and it approached just close enough...

It seemed to be sucked into an infinite vacuum of space, vanishing into nothingness as though it had never been there at all.