"We succeeded?" Wei He was taken aback.
"Indeed." Lin Shi affirmed. "In fact, we succeeded too well, and thus gave rise to excessive greed."
He paused, a trace of remembrance and regret surfacing in his eyes.
"When someone could control the flow of time around everything, without worrying about expenditure, and when we at that time possessed nearly limitless energy...
What would he most want to do?"
Wei He pondered for a moment. "Let himself evolve infinitely!?"
"Yes." Lin Shi nodded. "When all you needed was a seed and a fixed amount of consumption to obtain fruit in an instant; when all you needed was a thought and some energy to accelerate evolution. That feeling was as though nothing was impossible."
"And so, we fell. We kept moving forward, forward, and forward again. A hundred thousand years, a million years, ten million years, even countless hundreds of millions of years—time no longer held meaning for us.
"We stubbornly pursued the end of evolution, wishing to find a more perfect ultimate evolution."
"And then?"
"And then, we saw this." Lin Shi looked toward the Gate of Silence.
"We consumed the time of all life to its very end. Only then did I understand that life itself had a lifespan. Whether flesh and blood or soul."
"You mean the very concept of life has a lifespan as well?" Wei He came to understand.
"Yes. From life's emergence to its end, it was fated from the very beginning. Though life endlessly begets life, it will ultimately be extinguished. And at the end of life, we saw infinite dead silence."
Lin Shi revealed a trace of sorrow.
"The concept of life, like all other concepts, was incubated here.
"So naturally, like other concepts, it possessed a similar lifespan."
Wei He quietly digested this information.