"Did you get a clear look at what the starting point was like?"
While they ate, Lu Youqi asked Martin.
"No. I had just found its location when I hurried back."
"Weren't you curious about what the Abyss's starting point looked like before? Your ability is so powerful—did you never think of going to take a look?"
"I wasn't always this powerful. My ability is tied to my understanding of dreams. As we kept traveling between worlds, I also came to understand the connections between dreams in different worlds. That was why I could find the starting point. The old me simply couldn't have done it—I would only have gotten lost in the dreams of different worlds..."
Martin explained earnestly while Lu Youqi ate and listened.
"I used to think that dreams from different worlds were like grapes on a bunch, clustered together in heaps. That made it impossible to judge their relative positions. Dreams and dreams existed in parallel, with no hierarchy between them."
"But as we traveled through more and more worlds, I realized that wasn't how the dreams of different worlds were connected. Worlds had hierarchies, and dreams had hierarchies too, tangled together like tree roots."
"The highest-level nodes, after meeting their own needs, distributed energy to the level below. Then that level continued distributing it, passing it down layer by layer until it reached the ends."
"Depending on the energy level they could support, worlds also took different forms. Some worlds possessed an entire universe, while others had only a tiny galaxy. This caused human civilizations to have different potential for development..."
At that, Martin paused and looked toward Lu Youqi.
"It really was as you said—a flow of 'paint,' from high to low..."
"The Abyss's starting point was also a node. From that node onward,