"Your Majesty, then what does the past look like in your eyes? What can be changed, and what cannot?"
Wang Qi had noticed a crucial point.
"Past and future united as one" had two very clear ironclad rules.
First: the past was not unique, the future was not unique, and neither was the present.
Second: foreknowledge could not interfere with anything before the instant of attaining the Dao.
Yet in truth, these two points contained an enormous contradiction.
That was... the matter of "attaining the Dao" itself.
If the past could be changed, then the event of "attaining the Dao" was itself a "past," and also the "future" of an even more distant past.
A foreknower in that distant past could interfere with this matter by selecting the future. A foreknower of the present, or even of the future, could likewise interfere with it by selecting the past.
There was no reason to say, "No matter what, this individual is destined to attain the Dao at this exact point in time."
That was a little too deterministic.
Even if worldlines converged, there should always be some fluctuation in the precise timing, shouldn't there?
And chaos theory showed that in the macroscopic world, nonlinear matters like this found it difficult to possess a definite course of development.
In other words, the event of "attaining the Dao" itself could be disrupted.
It could be postponed, of course, but it could also be brought forward.
Even if a foreknower itself could not interfere with anything before its attainment of the Dao, and could not send retrocausal spiritual resonance back to an era before it possessed retrocausal logic gates, it could still have another foreknower do it for it.
So long as that other foreknower was older than it was.
Foreknowers were rare in