Seeing that the great one did not press further, Liriel knew her answer had passed muster for now. All that remained was the final question.
She calmed her breathing for a moment, steadied her mind, and slowly spoke.
"Where will the world ultimately return to?"
"In my view, the world's destination must also be divided in two—"
"If the desires of all living beings and things are restrained within creation, used to build a stable order, continually generating the stabilizing force that gathers scattered energy and suppresses the natural tendency of heaven and earth toward dispersion, then the world can remain stable for a long time."
"But once desire slides into unbridled plunder and exhaustive destruction, when what living beings take far exceeds what is newly born, the stabilizing force that sustains heaven and earth will continuously weaken. The force of dispersion will erode the existing rules layer by layer, and the final outcome will be... all matter dissolving into primordial particles and returning to boundless chaos."
Simply put, desire could make all things, and desire could ruin all things.
If desire could be restrained, using negative entropy to suppress the increase of entropy, then all things could exist. If desire ran wild and entropy increased without limit, then all things would become nothing.
After Liriel finished answering, she stood quietly to one side, seemingly waiting for the other party's questions.
Yet after waiting for quite some time, the other party still did not speak.
For a moment, she had no idea whether she had passed or failed. She could only lower her head silently and wait for the time being.
Through the frosted glass, she could see that the Decayer below also seemed to remain standing where he was.
Her side was done. She wondered how the Decayer's answers