A chilling wind blew in from somewhere, slipping through the gaps between people, causing the torches held high to flicker. The pine resin had burned down to almost nothing, dimming the light, while the zombie's face appeared even paler, as if powdered.
People didn't think much about the Mental Black Hole; after all, if Occam were alive, he would have razed it clean. But the Five Great Sacred Lands, whose words resonated with Ronald Cohen's last words and were connected to their own circumstances, were naturally of great concern to them.
" The Five Great Sacred Lands certainly exist, but their specific origins and locations have always been a mystery, even the Guardian of each Holy Land are not entirely clear about them," Situ said.
"Since nobody knows, how can you be sure they don't know?" Su Huilan asked a very difficult question.
"I wasn't sure before, but now I am," Situ laughed. "And I've even figured out the locations of the Five Great Sacred Lands."
"Really?" Alice's eyes widened. " Mr. Stone, please stop keeping us in suspense and tell us!"
Situ, however, was in no hurry to explain his deductions; instead, he began to discuss the concept of space:
"After proposing the Dream Entropy Equilibrium Theory, Master Nanke also proposed the concept of Multilayer Space. If we consider the universe as a world in a mirror, then its reflection depends on the projection of the world outside the mirror onto the mirror surface. Dreams are similar to reflections. If the universe is a layer of a dream, no matter which layer it is in, it comes from the projection of the world above it onto the dream surface, and is the result of the information input from the universe above it."
We don't need to worry about how many layers of dreams there are, because more layers are meaningless to us. We only need to care about the three layers of the universe, including the world we live in, one above and one below.
The central layer of these three universes is our world, known as the Middle-Layer Space or the First Space.
The next layer is the universe that determines the entire composition of our world; it is called the Top-Layer Space or the Original Space.
The next layer is determined by the First Space we inhabit; it is a projection of the First Space onto the cosmic mirror, and is called the Bottom-Layer Space, also known as the Third Space.
Qingmu suddenly remembered Professor Mei's Third Space Foundation. He had wondered why it was called that back then and had even asked the professor about it.
At the time, he was at Huang Ziqiang's invitation to treat Old Wolf at the hot spring resort. It was during a phone call with Mei Yiqiu that the professor mentioned the name and the triangle symbol, but it wasn't convenient to discuss it over the phone, so he didn't elaborate. After that, he encountered a series of events, including Bi Shenghua's kidnapping, Xia Xiaoxiao's appearance, and the Gray Brain Virus, and Qingmu forgot about the whole thing.
That symbol has now been proven to be the mark of the Awakeners' Alliance, and it's related to Ramla and even extraterrestrial civilizations. Could it be that the professor named the Third Space after Master Nanke's Multilayer Space Theory?
As Qingmu was pondering this, the curious Alice asked, "The previous level was the Original Space, and this level we live on is the First Space, so why is the next level the Third Space? Where did the Second Space go?"
" The Second Space has a different meaning," Situ said. "We all dream, and the space constructed by our subconscious during dreams is the ' Second Space.' Because it is limited by Mental Power and difficult to expand, it's like the cabin we're in right now, hence it's also called Narrow-Chamber Space. But if you connect these small cabins one by one, they can become a complete floor."
"So, connecting the dreams of countless people creates Third Space?"
"That's right, this is what we often call Group Dream."
"So you've been dedicated to studying Group Dream!"
"No, back then many people were studying the Group Dream. After the Alliance split, most of them went astray and became mired in the quagmire of war."
"For example, Kitano Masatake?" Qingmu suddenly said.
Situ paused for a moment, then sighed, "He is a true genius."
"An executioner too," Qingmu said.
Su Huilan replied, "My father said you're the number one genius in the Alliance. He shouldn't be any better than you, right?"
Situ shook his head and said, "I was just young and arrogant, and my sharp edge was too obvious. It was only because of a joke by Master Nanke that I was overrated as a genius among the younger generation. Kitano is older than me and is from the same generation as Master Nanke. Their generation was the one that truly produced many outstanding talents. It was precisely because of this that they were not convinced of each other's abilities. Coupled with the fact that they were living in a turbulent era, it led to the eventual disintegration of the Alliance."
"Since you witnessed that history, how can you say that World War II was a dream?" Qingmu asked.
"I'm not saying World War II was a dream, but I doubt the war's occurrence, especially given the involvement of so many Awakened within the Alliance, and that it was influenced by unforeseen factors."
What unexpected factors?
"Don't you all feel..." Situ looked up at the flickering firelight on the ceiling, "That no matter what we do, there always seems to be something in the dark influencing our decisions?"
His words made people think deeply. Sometimes, thinking about it, it's true. When you want to do something, you're very determined, but suddenly you hesitate, as if someone who doesn't exist is stopping you from doing it; when you don't want to do something, even though you know it's bad, there's always a voice in your head shouting: Go, do it!
"You mean... our consciousness is controlled?" Qingmu's heart skipped a beat, as if he had realized something.
Situ looked at him and said, "Why can we influence the minds of savages with the scepter in our hands? You should know very well that we haven't hypnotized them, nor can we completely control them. They all have their own thoughts. Now, we stand before them, and they see us as messengers of God, knowing that we are influencing their minds through the scepter. But what if we didn't show ourselves, but instead influenced them from the shadows?"
Qingmu looked down at the Soul of Wood in his hand, thought for a moment, and couldn't help but feel a chill run down his spine. "They will know nothing, only that they made all the decisions themselves. The conscious instructions I convey to them will be taken for granted, as if they wanted to do it themselves."
"So the moment you appeared, you became their god. Our gods never appear, but who can deny their existence!"
Situ's voice drifted around the cabin, out of the cabin door, and leisurely floated through the corridor, disappearing into the cabins on both sides of the corridor, where it echoed back, as if the mummies lying in the cabins had heard his words and resonated with them.
"Actually, I didn't think that much about it at first," Situ continued. "I stubbornly believed that the dream from the previous level was influencing our world. Whether it's war or other disasters, sometimes they arise from people's inexplicable thoughts. They could have been avoided, but they were destined to be unavoidable. So I've been searching for a way to escape the Middle-Layer Space and return to the Original Space on the previous level."
"I thought the Holy Land protected by the Alliance was the breakthrough point in the Original Space, because Group Dream need structural support. Without support, Group Dream cannot last and will collapse. My research on Group Dream is to figure out what kind of structure is needed to support a dream shared by all mankind, and thus deduce where the Alliance's Holy Land is. As long as we find them, we can find a way back to the Original Space."
"You found it?" Alice asked.
"No." Situ shook his head slightly. "While I can't prove my guess wrong, I've discovered things might be far more complicated than I imagined. Before today, I found two places, but I wasn't sure if they were the legendary Awakening Sacred Land. One of them is the area marked on Petru's sea chart—the starting point where we all entered Ramla."
"What about another place?"
"Another place..." Situ suddenly turned to Mrs. Larry, "Was the place where Mr. Yeger had his accident north of Santa Fe City, Argentina?"