It was just about breakfast time when all the kids gathered in a small-ish hall that Shufen arranged for us. It was flat and squared, with cushions lining the ground and a slightly elevated platform at the front. Perfect place to hold a lecture... while the kids ate.
Long Tao went around and shared the bowls of porridge, eventually giving me one, too, before retreating to the side and sitting down as well. Were it truly just the kids, this would feel like a nice, proper school setting. But no. There's that 500-year-old bastard sitting in the back, nibbling away at some grapes; there's that six-figure-old woman yawning on the other corner, and then there's a potentially multi-million-old monster sitting at the front, staring at me curiously.
I'd even let out Naǒ as she'd been cooped up for a while now, and the little thing frolicked and flew around the room for a bit before inevitably settling on the top of my head. Maybe I should shave? She does seem to think that my hair is a freakin' nest.
I've been organizing the possible lecture for months now, but, honestly, I haven't really crystalized it just yet. Massive gaps in my knowledge notwithstanding, modern scientific knowledge is like an unending web, where one field is intermittently interwoven with like a hundred others, with so many loops that it's impossible to count them all.
And though I wish I could just go through the curriculum like in the primary schools... yeah, I can remember jack all of that curriculum.
I guess the best place to start would be... the beginning?
"Alright, everyone," my voice quieted down the static hubbub as they all turned to face me. "The reason I called you all here is simple: from now on, every other day, we will take one hour of the day to discuss the world as your Master understands it. Why? Some of you may ask. Because I believe it will be helpful to you all.
"This won't be a lecture, but a conversation. I will posit certain things, and then we'll talk about them."
"And if we vehemently disagree with you?" Shufen chimed in from the back.
"Then I'm doing a good job," I said, smiling faintly. "I thought to start with a few fundamental laws of energy, heat, and entropy. For example," I paused for a moment, raising my hand and summoning a small burst of Qi above the palm. "Did I create this?"
"Uh... yes?" the ol' alchemist said.
"No," Long Tao said. "It was already there."
"Hm," I nodded towards him. "Energy cannot be created," the burst dissipated into the turbulent noise, fading away. "Or destroyed. It can only be transformed. The Qi that I use to harness that burst of energy had always been there--and once I destroyed it, it was returned. Because of this, my grandfather believed that the totality of cosmic energy had always been there--and that over the course of time impossible to measure, it underwent states."
"... so, there's finite amount of Qi in the world?" Rayce said.
"Hm, yes, but also no. There's a finite amount of accessible Qi," I added. "Because there's another law. Every time energy is engaged, small bits of it are 'wasted'. There's no such thing as a system that perfectly utilizes allenergy. The same case is with Qi. Every time we use Qi to do anything, tiny, imperceptible bits of it become... diffuse. They're not destroyed, we just cannot use them anymore. When you use a martial art, you take Qi within you, channel it through the meridians, and expel it--large part in what constitutes how well you understand and execute that art is how little Qi is wasted in the process. However, even with the beyond perfect understanding, it is impossible for you to not waste any Qi. Even if the amounts are practically invisible to even Divine Sense, some has been wasted.
"To be a bit more specific," I drew a few words with Qi in the air. "Think of every action you do as an instruction. You encode some abstract information both in that act as well as the product. That information isn't created. You simply take existing elements and rearrange them to whatever it is you want to do. And once your output decays, as all things naturally do, that encoded information isn't destroyed. It just changes shape. Sort of like water," I added. "If you heat up the water, you use energy. Be that the energy of the firewood or Qi or anything else. But if you leave the water alone, it will slowly cool off--corresponding to how hot or cold the environment it's in is.
"There is a fundamental catch, however, in all of this: every time we use Qi, every time we create those instructions... small bits of it become unusable. They're still there as they always have been, but think of them as... inaccessible. Energy cannot be destroyed, yes, but energy that we can use to do things with can be exhausted. This isn't just in relation to Qi--but to everything. And, over time, gradients of difference slowly cease to exist--if there is no cold room to heat up, is it even heat? If every point in the world is the same, then all those instructions are also the same.
"And lastly, there's something my grandfather called irreversibility. How large can those actions become before they're irreversible? If you split a piece of wood with an axe in two, is it possible to fit the two pieces back into one?"
"Yes."
"Should be fairly easy."
"Hm."
"Very well," I nodded. "But consider this--in your act of splitting wood, what else was there? There was the sound the axe hitting the wood made. The dust dispersed in the process. The small splinters that flew off. The very energy that you used to split the piece. You'd have to reverse all of those, not just the shape itself, to rethread the two pieces into one.
"There's a trap where it's easy--and wrong--to say that things, all else being equal, gravitate towards decay. But it's not quite right. There is a desired 'state'--no, even that is wrong. Just understand it as it being easier for certain states to be achieved than others. We use energy in any form to 'resist' that change, but in doing so, lose the ability to access just the tiny bits of it each time."
"... that explains it," Long Tao suddenly sounded out, his expression quite dark. "Why it's becoming harder and harder to become an Emperor."
"Indeed," Shufen added from the back. "During the Imperial Era, the number of Emperors and Empresses started at around two million. And with each generation, that number decreased. Everyone simply assumed that our Ancestors were far more talented and had a far greater comprehension of Dao, but if what you're saying is true, then... doesn't that mean that, at some point, there will be noEmperors?"
"And then the cycle begins anew," uh, I appreciate you two filling in the gaps, but I'm specifically not talking about cycles here. Okay, maybe Dao somehow does 'refresh' these worlds, as I did encounter a few hints towards it while living here, but it's sort of like how I used to 'refresh' my PC by re-installing the system once a year or so.
I've kinda done a bit of a speedrun as I tried to establish the fact that we're kind of, sort of, possibly dab-smack in the middle of the Heat Death, but I think I kind of lost the plot and just described a few things that are connected, but not so much in a chronological order that would let me now boldly proclaim, 'So, yeah, universe came along with post-Big-Bang expansion that had been happening since then, and some few trillion-quadrillion years later, because of that expansion and a bunch of other things I explained terribly, everything is just too uniformly distributed to do anything fun with it and unless photons do decay, it will all stay dead forever and ever. Good luck!'
... but hey, they're at least now engaged in a discussion about if it's possible to 'restore' the world so that there can be millions of Emperors again. Aah. It's nice to dream, isn't it?