Chapter 475: The Order of Time_1

Unlike the hastily convened meeting last time, this time everyone's faces were exceedingly grave. Thirty-Six and Jiang Shiliu also appeared in the conference room as holographic images.

Jiang Yu nodded towards Thirty-Six and Jiang Shiliu and then seated himself in the main chair, "Let's begin."

Ricks cleared his throat and said, "Thirty-Six and Jiang Shiliu's perspectives on this incident have deeply shocked us. It was due to our lack of imagination that we came to such a rudimentary conclusion, completely unable to explain some of the phenomena encountered by the elderly Cheng Ping."

"Before Thirty-Six shares his thoughts, I would like to talk about an incident I've experienced.

"Because this incident seems to be a proof of his conjecture."

Jiang Yu nodded again.

Ricks cleared his throat once more, "It was one of my students, a very diligent worker, but somewhat taciturn.

"Once, just the two of us were rushing an experiment, working overtime until very late. While waiting for results, we chatted, and he inadvertently told me that from a young age, he could see some strange sights and hear some strange sounds.

"When everyone started calling him a freak and distancing themselves from him did he realize that these sights and sounds were visible and audible only to him.

"He even gave an example, saying he saw a bouquet of flowers wither within seconds, but then in the blink of an eye, the flowers returned to their original state.

"I always thought that this student had a form of fantasy prone personality, and I even found him doctors, but I don't know if it helped. After all, I have too many students to devote all my attention to just him.

"Later, I heard he had fallen in love with a fellow student, and it seemed rather sweet. I actually thought that his condition had been cured.

"Unexpectedly, one day he just disappeared!"

The people present had obviously all heard this story, so there was no reaction when they heard this part?

Jiang Yu, playing along, asked, "Where was he found later?"

In Space City, it is impossible for someone to just vanish, since there are cameras everywhere in the streets and alleys. Even if someone had an accident and was shattered to pieces, some clues about their whereabouts could still be found using video recordings.

"That's the strange part," Ricks said. "To this day he still hasn't been found. We've checked the recordings, and he just vanished out of thin air, with many witnesses.

"However, because the event was so bizarre, the witnesses thought they were seeing things!

"Then another strange thing happened. According to the missing person's lover, she saw him again, and he told her he was now in a very peculiar environment.

"Everyone in the world had become very strange, their movements sometimes fluid, sometimes reversed, sometimes skipping.

"For instance, the action of clapping hands, one moment the hands are just opened, and the next moment they are already clapped together, and everyone seems to regard him as invisible."

"Later, many more claimed to have seen the missing person, but the encounters were too brief to leave evidence, so this was chalked up as the fantasies of the missing person's lover and friends."

"What's bizarre is that many people who claimed to have seen the missing person didn't know him before.

"For the missing person's lover to have hallucinations out of deep longing is one thing, but why would strangers have hallucinations?"

At this point, Ricks let out a long sigh, "Why didn't I think to consider these two matters together before?"

Jiang Yu was startled; he also couldn't immediately make the connection between the two incidents.

It was then that Thirty-Six spoke up, "We can think of the normal sequence of time for us as 12345. The sequence of time for Cheng Ping when he first entered the time anomaly might be 13245, or 32451, in any case, it's chaotic.

"And now, the sequence of time for the elderly Cheng Ping is 54321. Therefore, the sequence of time for Chris's missing student might be simply jumping like 15!"

All at once, Jiang Yu felt as though he understood a great deal, yet at the same time, his thoughts appeared vague.

Thirty-Six continued to explain, "Up to now, our understanding of time as a dimension has been too limited. We've always thought of it as a river, flowing endlessly forward.

"But in fact, it may not be like that at all. It may have neither a beginning nor an end, and not even a normal sequence!"

Jiang Yu finally understood everyone's grave expressions, why they were so solemn, and he too found it hard to accept such a conjecture.

After being stunned for a long while, Jiang Yu found a huge flaw: "No, that's not right. According to what you're saying, time has no order at all.

"Then our meeting right now, the next second we could be back at breakfast time, and the following second we might go two thousand years into the future.

"Wouldn't we then be plunged into endless chaos!"

Leaning forward, Thirty-Six said, "Our evolutionary process is not just about the first cellular life forms, the first species to perceive the world with light, the first fish to walk on land, or the first Homo sapiens to use fire.

"There's another line we cannot see, or rather, we haven't noticed until today, and that is the evolution in the aspect of temporal consciousness.

"Using the word 'consciousness' might not be precise, but I can't find any other word that really conveys the idea.

"Everyone is clear, although we live in a three-dimensional universe, we also have contact with the dimension of time.

"Previously, when we deduced the evolutionary process of life, we only did so in spatial terms. The progression of time was naturally considered to move clockwise from past to future.

"But this is very abnormal, isn't it? Why can we touch the dimension of time, but not consider that there might be an evolution related to the time dimension?"

Jiang Yu leaned back in his chair somewhat absent-mindedly. He felt that his expression at that moment must be similar to how people in ancient times must have felt when they realized humans evolved from monkeys.

Thirty-Six waited for a sign from Jiang Yu to continue. As Jiang Yu gestured for him to go on, Thirty-Six added, "By the logic of environmental-induced evolution, it can be speculated: The dimension of time must have caused us great changes.

"Otherwise, it would be as if a multitude of fish evolved on land or a multitude of monkeys evolved in the sea—our existence would be completely incongruent with our environment.

"The reason we didn't notice this before is because we were only nestling in the Solar System, completely ignorant about time.

"Now it's different. As we learn more and more, I think it's time to lift the veil on the dimension of time."

He paused, then continued, "I assume that time is chaotic. In such an environment, it's possible that one second, the first life form had just appeared, and the next second, it could be when Earth is destroyed.

"Our ancestors had to evolve a capability to order time, or rather, a time-ordering capability that was beneficial to themselves in order to support our evolutionary process.

"That is to say, the first life forms had to make it possible for themselves to enter what we now consider the next second, and then the second after that, for the evolution of life in space to continue!

"Don't think of time as a river, but imagine that we are in the midst of a vast ocean, with every second of time chaotically surrounding us.

"The first single-celled organism granted us the ability to move into the next second seamlessly, without us even realizing it.

"This evolution has continued up to now. The capability we possess has become so natural that it neither requires training nor conscious judgment, and we're not even aware of it—it's a natural behavior and ability.

"Like when we were learning to walk, we had to be careful not to fall, but do we need to be that cautious when we're grown? Not at all.

"Everything happens subconsciously because we've habituated to 'walking' like this, so much so that we don't realize how difficult 'walking' is.

"Of course, the ability to order time can sometimes deviate, but these deviations only last for a fleeting moment. We can only barely sense that something is off before the deviation corrects itself.

"Almost everyone has experienced such illusions, where you arrive at a new place or meet a new person, yet for a moment, the unfamiliar environment or stranger feels incredibly familiar.

"This phenomenon is the result of temporal ordering going awry."