After a moment of disorientation born from the natural human fear of falling from a huge height, either Bonger directly prompted the system or some of my natural defence mechanism finally worked as they should, deploying the flight spell once again. This time making sure to put its cast on constant loop with only a small delay between each cast I could finally focus back on the huge reveal that Bonger just graced me with.*What do you mean I can control it now? What do you mean with the entropy having a harder time to interrupt me now? Can you explain it first instead of just slapping me with that news right in my face, knowing I won"t get the meaning of what you want to say?*
While I was focused on my wait for Bonger"s answer, I didn"t dare to ignore the events around my real self. Being in the middle of the airs.p.a.ce of this strange, lascivious city was akin to putting a target on my back, as soon as anyone managed to somehow spot me. Rather than risking it all just for the sake of learning something I would learn anyway, I kept my eyes wide open with the energy vision in its full swing.
"Ah, this is a topic for a little longer discussion, but in short words, you can imagine magic as… matter, and abyss as antimatter. While this comparison is not perfect in any way, you can use it to imagine both of those forces as opposing ends of the same scale."
Keeping my descend stable, I was now halfway through my way down, finally capable of making up what was happening at the bottom layer of the city. Considering how high the walls were, I could delete the delay in the mechanism deploying my flight spell in just a few moments, to simply fly over the walls, rather than thinking of a way to pa.s.s through them unspotted.
*But if that"s the case, then where should I place entropy on this scale?*
Instead of trying to make sense of what I was just told right away, I decided to gain as much understanding of the project before even attempting to make any sense of it. With the events happening in the recent days, I already learned to respect how much I didn"t know about this world and the laws that ruled it, making me way more humble towards all sort of new information that I could use to my advantage.
"Hmm… Back in your original world, the entropy could only increase or remain at zero, slowly pus.h.i.+ng your entire world into the freezing death, where no matter would regain any energy in it, evenly spreading it all through the entire universe. But your world has only a single end of the scale for entropy to work on. With no negative energy in its true sense, there was no way for the entropy to decrease under its influence. But here… You could say that entropy always aims to reach zero on the scale I told you to imagine."
Placing the complicated words of Bonger into the simplicity of an image, I created an endless line in my mind, with a zero-point somewhere in the middle of my view… but how should I place the entropy? What should it by symbolised with?
"You are doing it in the wrong way… Eh… Instead of a line, imagine a typical chart, with both X and Y-axis. Then, the positive part of the chart, means your normal energy, the one you constantly use, while the negative one reflects chaos energy. Do you follow me so far?"
While it wasn"t that easy to think about concepts that could possibly make this entire world up, I still decided to ignore all the questions popping up inside my head, and just follow Bonger"s words. Simple chart, X and Y axis, done.
"Now, the hard part. Forget about everything that your teachers failed to teach you during cla.s.ses, that you managed to comprehend only when your intelligence broke through the roof of your innate potential with the help of the system. Forget about marking anything on the x-axis, the one responsible for the amount of energy and keep in mind, that it"s only the first of the transformations we will have to make in this chart of yours in order for it to explain literally anything. Can you do it?"
Well, the innate characteristic of the chart laid in the ability to quantify something depending on the relative position to the both of the axis, but who I was to argue with Bonger? For some reason, those system upgrades only unlocked this knowledge for him, barring me from it unless my dear system would decide to share it.
*Yeah, go on.*
Looking around, I used the tinies shockwave I could to propel myself forward, while keeping it small enough to prevent anyone from being alerted. Floating towards the city walls, constantly growing in my eyes the closer I got to them, I moved my attention back to Bonger"s lecture.
"Now is the hard part. Turn this chart from two dimensional, into three dimensional one, and turn the x-axis into a cone, like the one you saw back then when you tried to understand the images showing the expansion of the universe."
So far, so good. Considering how the universe was said to start as a point and expand at an ever-increasing rate, any angle at its corner would do since no matter how big it would be unless it reached full one hundred eighty degrees, it would still remain a cone.
"Remember what I said about leaving the values out of the x-axis? I told you this, because its not the height of the plane that matters, but its size that defines the amount of energy in it. I think you should see the point I"m trying to bring already."
Taking a moment to carve everything that Bonger said into my mind and slowly try to comprehend it, I didn"t even notice when I pa.s.sed through the walls of the city, finally reaching my freedom.
*Well, I don"t understand a thing of what you said, but there is one thing that seems obvious. The boundary of this world that separates the chaos place from the energy place… Is a place where the sum of the real energy is exactly zero. But if that"s true, then how come the insane amount of chaos energy almost killed me when I attempted to open the underdimension gate?"