"Time was nothing more than an illusion." In the end, the Great Shepherd summed up his story this way. "The so-called 'time spent cultivating' most of all."
"Illusion..." Lu Xiaoqian looked at the black blotches in the distance.
They were communities with lifespans of only two days, watched over by the Micro Shepherds—their homeland within another kind of time.
Or rather, a homeland within another illusion.
"But you were torn apart by illusion..."
"Yes. Who isn't torn apart by illusion?" the Great Shepherd said. "Language, faith in divine paths, the nobility or baseness of bloodlines, propriety, righteousness, honor, and shame... These are all illusions, things fabricated out of nothing."
After a moment, he emphasized, "Time is too, actually."
Lu Xiaoqian said nothing more.
In truth, she understood "time" better than anyone.
Within the domain of the Way of the Flow of Heavenly Things, time truly was an insignificant concept. The Way of Resemblance could not declare the difference between "past" and "future." And in the equations of higher physics, "time" really was something with barely any presence.
The only things that could prove the existence of "time" were irreversible causality, entropy, and humanity's subjective cognition.
But the existence of entropy was not absolute. Even the sequence of cause and effect was not unbreakable.
And as everyone knew, no seeker of the Dao liked mixing something like "subjective cognition" into their theories. That was usually where errors began.
Many irreparable mistakes came from precisely that.
Of course, time did participate in many concepts. Many concepts could only stand because of time.
Take the concepts of "fluids" and "rigid bodies." A "fluid" was not equal to "liquids plus gases." "Fluid" and "liquid" belonged to two entirely different conceptual domains. "Solid state" and "liquid state" described phases of matter, while "rigid body" and