One hundred and fifty-seven: soul, no soul

"So, I've been mistaken all along......" Seeing me navigate between the "Table World" and the "Source World" with ease, the Troll Witch Doctor Carlson Sr. sighed and said to himself. His expression looked a little abrupt, but more of a dazed loss, the wrinkles between his eyebrows seemed to be deeper, and the whole person's spirit showed a trace of heavy old age than usual.

"You...... You okay? "Seeing that he seemed to be devastated in his heart, I regretted that I was so anxious to tell him what I had found.

"Oh, don't worry about me......" Seeing my concern, the elder Carlson's brow furrowed a little, and his two long, slender ears moved twice, and he grinned bitterly at me with his big mouth baring two fangs, "...... You have to understand that you don't feel good about ideas that you've believed in for as long as you can remember, but they suddenly turn out to be wrong, and those ideas are the discoveries you're most proud of. ”

The more calm Carlson Sr. was, the more guilty I felt. You know, it was the old troll in front of me who opened a new window for me and spared no effort to help me, which gave me the opportunity to get in touch with a more wonderful realm beyond this figurative world. And what shall I repay him with? Completely subverted his worldview!

"I'm sorry......" I really wanted to do something more to compensate him, but in the end, all I could do was spit out those three words softly.

"Oh, hehehe......" Seeing that I was very embarrassed, the elder Carlson smiled open-mindedly, and turned to enlighten me, "...... You have nothing to apologize for, my friend. In fact, I should apologize and thank you more so that I don't go down a wrong path to the end of my life - if that's the case, that's fine, but if my life is longer than I thought, then I don't know how long this mistake will take, and that's the worst thing that can happen. ”

"Now I feel a little bit regretful...... "Seeing that Carlson Sr. was more open-minded than I thought it would be, it made me feel much better, and I joked with him," ...... I shouldn't tell you this truth and let you live your life in a daze. ”

"You stinky boy, don't get too carried away!" Carlson Sr. sr. struck me hard on the head with a wave of his staff - as always, no matter how much I tried to dodge and block, I couldn't block the attack, "Don't think you have some bullshit 'truth' just because you happened to find something I've gotten wrong!" In fact, I doubt that there really is such a thing as 'truth'. I'm more inclined to say that you've only found a way to explain the world better for the time being, and whether the world is ultimately what it is is still uncertain. ”

"But......" He gave me a gentle look, and suddenly couldn't help but laugh generously again, the corners of his mouth twitching at the corners of his mouth, and the two long fangs trembled, "...... Now that your findings are closer to the truth, I'm afraid I need to re-understand the world as soon as possible. ”

"As for you, Jeff, I still have a lot to offer you. Maybe my understanding of the origin of this world is a little skewed, but I think my understanding of the digital symbols of the source world is still above yours. With that, Magnus Sr. waved his hand, and without a moment's struggle, dragged me back into the digital space of a sea of simple characters.

In the time since, my life has been full and busy. The elder Carlson did not put me in that state between "being" and "non-being" as he did last time, isolating me from the outside world, but asked me to come here whenever the space-seekers dispersed and the world fell silent, and learn from him how to decipher the sky-wide digital characters composed of "0" and "1".

At first, I thought it wasn't complicated: I seemed to have a natural ability to recognize these characters, and even in the vast world of sources, I could easily recognize at a glance the characters that symbolized a leaf, a lock of hair, or a grain of sand. I was even able to see in these characters how the light was projected and how the wind was blowing. For me, it all seemed like an instinct, no need to learn or train.

However, I soon learned I was wrong. What Carlson Sr. wanted to teach me was not the appearance of the world through characters, but the rules that make up the world and the principles that make it work. He told me that in that concrete environment, we can only see the appearance of the world forever, and only by transforming everything into symbols can we truly see how the world works. What I need is not just to see the wind, but to know where it starts and where it ends. which fields control its speed and which in turn direct its direction; when it brushes off a thin leaf from a branch, and how it sends it into the pond; How is the water in the pond disturbed by the thin leaves, and how does it swing out of the layers of micro-waves......

The more I learned, the more I was amazed at the wisdom of the gods. "0" and "1", these two seemingly simple symbols, are themselves with the true god xìng: they can endlessly increase and transform to make up everything the gods want to compose. This expression may seem cumbersome and silly, but its basic rules are simple and solid, and they will not be confused or shaken. Yes, the more complex things in the world are, the more they should be described and expressed in the simplest way possible—God is God because they know it deeply and know how to do it.

In this flat world of boundless darkness and infinite digital piles, one of my previous conjectures gradually came to prove: this is indeed a world that is constantly in motion, and everything that seems to happen is in fact programmed into necessity, flowing in an irresistible and silent way in this source world. A butterfly flickering its wings on the east coast of the continent, gradually evolving into a breeze as it crosses the ocean, blowing the sand of an isolated island on the surface of the sea by sixty-five degrees, this is not an accident, not a coincidence, but a doomed and irresistible fate woven by the gods.

Many people have marveled at the providence of God, and now this providence hidden in the darkness is unfolding before my eyes with great clarity.

When I first gained my consciousness, I was amazed at the vastness and grandeur of the world. The towering cliffs, the vast sea, the countless rare birds, animals, plants, trees, and creatures...... Darimoth, our lord of the gods who dwells in the heavens, is so powerful that he can single-handedly open up a world so varied that it is unimaginable.

However, compared to what I see now, it is only as small as a slender grass on nine high mountains, and only when you understand the meaning hidden behind the boundless characters can you truly appreciate what is truly "vast". In fact, in contrast, it doesn't take too many characters to create everything in the world, and what is really difficult is to set the rules for their existence: how they act, what they can see, how they react when they find such a situation, how they will act when they find another object...... These settings often require dozens or even hundreds of times more difficult than their own existence, and all of this, the gods in the sky, no matter how big or small, have done it one by one.

In my past adventures, I sometimes really can't help but laugh at my enemies. They're stupid, and sometimes they won't attack you even when you're overtly hostile. If you're adventurous enough, you'll be able to anticipate even the reactions of these enemies in advance. Sometimes I even come up with ridiculous ideas like if they were some inanimate marionettes who were there to add some slashing fun to the adventurers who came here.

But now I know that maybe each of them can only react to a few of them, but what if there are dozens? What about hundreds? What about hundreds of thousands? What about tens of millions? With such an unimaginable amount of work, it may not be easy for even the gods to oversee and control the world. The gods have created this world to such an extent, and I don't know any words to describe such a great project, and we cannot ask for more from this world.

Although I am very simple at the moment, and I can't hold back the excitement between the lines, trust me, the process of learning all this is not as interesting as you think. In fact, I'd say it's probably the most boring and difficult time in the world since I got my own sanity. Faced with a vast sea of characters, one at a time, watching old Carlson dial through strings of characters of a few or even millions of words, and memorizing the meaning of each of them—I believe that even when I was not sane and was that muddy gate guard, I would have been driven crazy every day. Thankfully, there was only one such time every three or four days, and I was lucky enough to save some of my sanity.

But Carlson Sr. was by no means a qualified teacher, and he never showed me how to use these characters, let alone "follow them in a good way". The only thing he could do was to stuff the meaning of each character into my head and ask me to memorize them.

Note that what I mean by "stuffed into my head" is not a rhetoric, but it is what it is! You know, if you want to explain the meaning of these billions of characters one by one, I am afraid that the last king Darendil will kill me before my eyes, and I have not yet learned the simplest symbol. But Carlson Sr. had a peculiar method: whenever he pointed out a character time, he would head to the head, and of course, in the source world, his mind was also made up of characters—forming the translations of those characters—and then he would cast a powerful mental magic called "copying"—which he called "copying"—and forcibly instilled all of this translation into my mind.

Every time this amount of information poured into my brain, I felt a huge pain in my head, as if a boulder had penetrated my skull and rolled in my brain. But in an instant, I had more knowledge in my memory, and it was so familiar to me that it seemed as if I had been born to know it.

Carlson Sr. taught in a way that was more than simple and crude, and sometimes I even felt that he was unusually urgent, and wanted to teach me everything at once. The sense of urgency is as if if I hadn't learned it all today, the end of the world would have come tomorrow — to which I can only paraphrase what String Song Yayi once said: cramming is the most annoying thing. If it weren't for my thirst for knowledge—and of course, it's all interesting—I'd have given up long ago.

"You might as well copy your head and copy it to me!" I used to ridicule his teaching style to his face.

"Do you think I haven't thought about it? If it weren't for the fact that I still couldn't figure out how souls work, and I was worried that copying all my memories to you would interfere with your soul's independence, I would have done it a long time ago! Even now, if you're not worried about having an extra troll consciousness in your head, I can do it right away! ”

To be honest, I don't worry too much about having an extra troll consciousness in my head, but if it happens to be the aesthetic part...... Thinking of Marianne? Santa's gentle face, and I immediately declined the kindness of old Carlson.

In addition to this understanding of the original rules of this world, I also experienced another magical feeling. I remember the first time I came to see Carlson Sr., as soon as I stepped through the gates of the fortress, he sensed my presence and instantly took me to his magical cabin. At the time, I was amazed at how quickly he reacted, but now, when I am immersed in the source world, I also feel the slowness of this world. Although I can't make time "flow slowly in microseconds", as Carlson Sr. described, in milliseconds, I can turn countless thoughts, perform very complex memory calculations, and feel the slightest changes around me—if it weren't for that, I wouldn't have been able to learn the rules of such a complex world even with Carlson Sr.'s magical copying magic.

But, as Carlson Sr. lamented, we carefully analyzed the symbolic samples of each creature in the Gravel Fortress, but never figured out how our souls worked. But among the Skywaders who ventured into the Gravel Fortress, we made some special discoveries:

In each of the digital fields belonging to the Skywader, there is a strange and mysterious symbol. These symbols not only operate in the body of the space-wader, but also reach out to the distant heavens, and they are always in motion, never broken, and other digital symbols that symbolize their bodies, functions, and even clothing and equipment, etc., are closely related to this string of mysterious characters.

In fact, we suspect that these bizarre characters are the foundation of the Skywafers in this world, and all other numbers related to them are activated in this world from the unreachable unknown through this character - the reason why we guess this is because we have witnessed the death of several Skywaders. When they died, their bodies and equipment turned into a pile of dead things, not much different from the slain fortress guards, but the special symbol disappeared in an instant. And when they are resurrected by their teammates, or reappear in the stronghold as spirits, the moment the soul and the corpse overlap with each other, and all symbols are reassociated with the character, so that they can act.

Are these special characters their souls?

We can only assume this for the time being.

However, I have another conjecture on this issue: the Void Seekers are very different from ordinary primitives, although they follow the rules set by the gods in this world, but they do not have to follow the prescribed routes and movements of the gods without deviation, which may indicate that they are not the product of the gods of this world, but from another dimensional world, created by some other gods. Those special characters may be just a passage, a permit, or a compromise and constraint, a pact between the Supreme God Darimus and the gods of their dimensional world, so that they can enter the dimensional world in which we live, but must obey the rules of this world.

But this is a terrible idea: the engineering required to create the world we live in is so vast that if we were to create some life that can think and act freely with our own consciousness, how long and complex characters should it be to describe and represent it? I'm afraid that this one command is more complicated than the characters needed to create this world, and there are so many of those who are involved in the sky. If this is the case, the god of that dimensional world is only afraid that he is hundreds of millions of times more powerful than the supreme god Darimus—this idea is too blasphemous!!

Comparatively, I prefer to believe that those who are in the void are the sons or servants of God who have descended from heaven to the world, and therefore they have God-given freedom and transcendence. When they leave this world, it is natural to return to heaven and serve the gods again. And those special fields are the connection between the divine realm and them.

Whether it's the soul itself or the channel through which the soul transmits, there is no doubt that those magical characters are the most fundamental difference between the Void Seeker and the Primordial. However, we have observed that these characters are never repeated, even among the space-seekers. I'm sorry I can't describe those characters in terms of the original "0" and "1" - even though it's just a tiny program, but if I were to list them all I would be longer than I've ever written in the world - but it's not too difficult to translate them into the lingua franca of the continent: some people have symbols that translate to "192899", while others have "...... It's always numbers like that.

But no matter what we find in the Skywafers, it doesn't explain our own condition - aside from the difference in equipment, level, race, and all skills, there is no essential difference between us and the rest of the people in this gravel fortress in terms of character form, and there is no trace of "souls" to be found.

"Do you have any other ideas?" Puzzled, I asked Carlson Sr.

"It seems that to understand this question, we should probably look to soul magic for the answer." Carlson Sr. frowned, pondering.

"I remember that there are a few necromancers in your fortress, and they should know some soul magic, right?" My heart moved.

"Don't expect those walking dead...... "Carlson Sr. smiled wryly and waved his hand, finding the undead lich mage who represented the highest level in the fortress from the sky of digital characters. Visaly's symbol, "...... This guy doesn't even have a soul of his own, do you expect his soul magic to help us in any way? ”

I thought about it and gave up on it.

"So what do we do now?" I asked Carlson Sr. in a daze.

"What should I do?" The kind and generous old troll suddenly sneered, burst out of the violent and ferocious Benxìng hidden in the depths of his blood, grabbed my neck, raised his eyes and swept a piece of numbers, and the interpretation of this string of numbers immediately appeared in my mind, and then stuffed them into my mind, "Hmph, you haven't finished your homework today!" ”

"Can't you be lighter, it hurts!" The emerald digits of the sky rolled up my wailing and carried it far and wide......