Golden flame dust had seared a pure-white hollow into the voidlike darkness.
That great being stood at the center of the hollow, looking from afar like a deity.
The air remained utterly silent.
Neither Liriel nor Decayer dared speak, afraid of disturbing that great being's thoughts.
No one knew how long passed before It finally spoke:
"Your answers, I now understand."
It was still that mechanical voice, impossible to distinguish as male or female. Before, they had found it merely indifferent and distant, but paired with the scene before them now, it suddenly seemed divine.
"You both answered my question from your own perspectives. Though your answers could not achieve complete perfection, they still had their merits."
"You, the negentropic one reborn from ruin—your interpretation of desire was somewhat too forced and far-fetched. Still, some of the ideas you mentioned gave me a few thoughts."
Liriel lowered her head, her cheeks heating slightly.
She naturally knew that parts of her explanation had been wrong.
Classifying nature's exuberant flourishing and the growth of all things as "desire," forcibly imposing spiritual concepts exclusive to living beings upon inorganic matter and lifeless natural phenomena—it truly had been too much of a stretch.
Of course, if one insisted on explaining it in a literary sense, it could work.
But from the very beginning, she had clearly set the tone as wizard rationalism.
Thus, hearing the flaws in her answer pointed out left Liriel somewhat embarrassed.
"You, the one who bears civilization's remnants—interpreting the world through cognition, making the world follow cognition. It seemed self-consistent, yet it concealed a fatal flaw... The world could be defined by cognition, but the diffuse consciousness attached to the original world could not follow cognition along with it."
Decayer also understood that his answer had contained sophistry.
The "world"