Chapter 32: High-Dimensional Ants

Chapter 32: The Higher-Dimensional Ant

"Alright, alright, stop crying. This is all an illusion; you don’t have to shed a single tear," Jung said, patting Fang Xiaoling’s back to comfort her. "Things have reached this point, and crying won't change anything. Your priority now is to find a way back to the three-dimensional world. That is what matters most."

"What the hell do you know?" Fang Xiaoling hadn't used profanity in a long time, but she had too many pent-up emotions to keep it in. She tore the last blank page from Jung’s notebook, crumpled it into a ball, then smoothed it out to blow her nose. "You’ve never been an ant. You have no idea how helpless an ant feels when it’s being toyed with!"

Jung looked around. He suddenly missed the scholars he had been with earlier; perhaps they might have had a way to provide comfort. But he had left them behind, having walked far too long and too far a road.

"Wait! Hawking once said something," Jung said, as if struck by a thought. "Do you remember? He said that God not only plays dice but also throws them where we cannot see."

"So what?"

"That means your past doesn't define anything," Jung said, sitting down beside her. "Even if you weren't very lucky before and the rolls were low, it doesn't mean the future rolls will be the same. Since God throws the dice, surely He will eventually throw a higher number for you. Your future is filled with infinite possibilities. You only conclude your fate based on past rolls because you cannot see the future ones, but that is unscientific!"

"What kind of toxic positivity is that? I’m not buying it!" Fang Xiaoling turned her head away. She understood the logic, but she was currently at odds with her past self. "What if my rolls are low for my entire life? What if I’m just cursed? What then?"

Jung looked up at the stars in the night sky, remaining silent for a long time. When he looked back down and picked up the empty cover of the notebook from the ground, he said softly, "Then we snatch the dice."

Before he finished speaking, thick, white pages reappeared inside the cover. He continued, "And then, with all our strength, we force the dice to land on the numbers we want!"

Fang Xiaoling looked at Jung, as if seeing another ant waving a flag and shouting—only this ant was shouting: "We shall overcome humanity!"

"Ants... do they really have a chance to overcome humans?"

"Theoretically, it's impossible, unless..." Jung handed a pen to Fang Xiaoling and continued, "Unless it is a higher-dimensional ant that transcends humanity."

Fang Xiaoling stared intently at the confidence overflowing in Jung’s eyes—clear, steady, and devoid of any falsity. She took a deep breath and gripped the pen tightly. "What do I need to do?"

Jung pulled Fang Xiaoling down to sit. "Do you remember another thing Hawking said?"

"Hawking again? What else did he say?"

"Hawking was truly a great genius... His words helped me skip over dozens of possibilities that would have otherwise needed to be proven one by one." Jung drew two circles in the notebook. "Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That is the question."

"What kind of question is that?" Fang Xiaoling was ready to show her prowess, but looking at the two circles in Jung's notebook, she still didn't know what she was supposed to do. "I’m not here to discuss philosophy with you."

Jung was incredibly patient, as if he were Pinocchio, having finally carved the wooden nose and needing only to finish the final steps with absolute steady hands. "Look, if the circle on the left is the world of human dreams, and the circle on the right is the reality, let’s set philosophy aside. Let’s not argue whether humans existed first to create the dream world, or if the dream world existed first to create humans. Let’s assume that when a person falls asleep, a dream appears. Then, what is the prerequisite for a dream to exist?"

Roland's expression was like that of a student seeing a basic addition problem on a graduate entrance exam. She hesitated, then said, filled with doubt, "The prerequisite for a dream is that a person falls asleep?"

"Exactly!" Jung drew a five-pointed star in the right circle. "If this is the Astral Realm, and the circle on the left is the dream of the Astral Realm, I’ll add a condition: the spirits of the Astral Realm never sleep and cannot sleep. What is your conclusion?"

"Hmm..." Fang Xiaoling gnawed on the end of her pen, thinking for a moment. Suddenly, a spark of inspiration hit her, and she pointed to the left circle. "It’s a flat bottle! Because the spirits of the Astral Realm cannot sleep, there are no dreams, so the world of dreams is completely empty!"

"Excellent!" Jung excitedly wrote the character 'Wood' in the left circle in standard bold print, though he actually intended to draw a human figure. "Suppose a person suddenly appears here. Who dreamt it?"

"If the people in the Astral Realm can't dream, then who dreamt it?" Fang Xiaoling recalled the scene when she woke up from the Astral Realm. "Did I dream it? But that doesn't seem right. According to the flat bottle theory, I should have been sucked directly into the left circle because the right circle—the Astral Realm—isn't a flat bottle; it already contains you, so it's not flat."

"Very good! Let’s return to the question Mr. Hawking posed: which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

Fang Xiaoling’s eyes widened. "The dream represented by the left circle came first, and then I, in the Astral Realm, came into existence?"

"Exactly. To make it easier to understand, let’s give these two circles life. The left circle was always empty, then suddenly you were sucked into it and turned everything upside down. The right circle said: 'This violates the rules. The left circle is my dream; everything that happens there must be dreamt by my people!' But since the spirits in the right circle couldn't dream, it took a gamble and made an exception, carving out a 'pit' for you. That 'pit' is you, falling from the sky."

"Wait! Then what about the people I created? Do they each have a pit?"

Jung drew a horizontal 'Wood' character in the right circle and said, "The Astral Realm doesn't need to leave pits for them because everything is now in compliance with the rules. Whatever happens in the left circle can be attributed to you dreaming it while in the Astral Realm."

"So, if I want to return to that flat bottle, all I need to do is sleep here?"

"Yes, but you must be careful. The flat bottle is no longer flat. Once you return to the dream world of the Astral Realm, you will no longer be its god. Only the dream itself is god. As long as you are inside it, it can even control your thoughts, just like when humans dream. Sometimes people can control themselves in dreams, sometimes they can't; sometimes they feel their existence, sometimes they don't. Everything in the dream world is governed by the dream itself." Jung looked at Fang Xiaoling. "But if you can enter the dream with a conscious mind, it is equivalent to spanning both the Astral Realm and its dream world. Part of your consciousness goes into the dream, while another part remains in the Astral Realm, uncontrolled by the dream. Do you know what that means?"

"I’ve heard of people who have lucid dreams and can do anything in them because they know they are dreaming..." Fang Xiaoling realized. "If I can achieve a lucid dream, then to the dream world itself and the other lives trapped within it, I am that higher-dimensional ant."