What Enya had explained was not difficult for Gawain to understand, yet after hearing it, he still fell into a long period of contemplation. During that process, some long-unresolved theories were confirmed, certain key points he had failed to understand were filled in, and most importantly—he had finally verified a conjecture he had held for a long time but never dared to confirm.
Gods were some kind of "closed system," or rather, the prerequisite for gods to exist within a civilization was the "closure" of that civilization in the corresponding field of knowledge—when a system no longer produced new understanding, when its members no longer sought answers to certain questions from outside, instead directing all explanations inward, the foundation for the birth of gods would take shape.
Therefore, once that system became open, once external information could become the "solution" to certain questions within it, the gods born from that system would immediately suffer an impact and swiftly go mad amid fatal contradictions.
It was a process akin to a bug freezing a program, or external contamination being injected into a system and causing it to crash.
"So when the Final Defiance occurred, the collective ideology did not actually change drastically—because only a handful of 'observer' individuals had stepped outside the system, and the information they saw could not immediately affect the entire race," Gawain slowly concluded after his contemplation, looking at the Golden Giant Egg before him. "'Ideological change' was not a primary cause in the Final Defiance, nor was it even an effective cause. The true effective cause... was that the gods themselves were denied."
"From my own experience, that is indeed the case," Enya said softly, as though the matter had nothing to do with her. "The relationship between ideology and gods is extremely close. It is