The End · Ring

"Upper and lower levels?" Negary raised a brow, paying little heed to Pigeon having named the multiverse where He resided the Scorching Soul Multiverse.

"That's right. Blueprint lies beneath Scorching Soul, while Big Monster lies above Scorching Soul."

"I wonder if you've heard of box theory." Pigeon spoke with great enthusiasm. "It was a theory I discovered while observing a place called the Infinite Multiverse."

"This theory can barely describe the existence of the Ring."

"If we could perfectly simulate the data of our world and place it inside a box, how would the lives within that box see things? And might the world we inhabit itself be an even larger box?"

"Could there be boxes within the box?"

"One layer wrapped around another—how could you be sure you had transcended, rather than merely arrived in another, larger box?"

"With endless boxes, how could you be sure you were not an existence casually described by someone else?"

"This concerns the question of self-recognition." Negary shook His head. Were those lives in the Book of Old Days truly false? To Negary, who could freely leaf through their entire lives, whether such lives were false or real was perhaps unimportant. What mattered was how one saw them oneself.

It was like the truth of the soul's origin at the very beginning. When you were human, you believed your memories and body were yourself. Once you possessed a soul, you believed the soul was yourself. Once you discovered the true spirit and its irreproducibility, you believed the true spirit was your true self. When you achieved the Path, you cast aside those casually generated origins and regarded the Path as your entire self.

Which one was truly you? What mattered was not what your self possessed, but what your self acknowledged.

The remnant-soul