Chapter 3634: The Source

“Why do you think that Panama is the best place to start searching?” Rui raised an eyebrow.

“It’s rather simple, actually,” the Divine Doctor remarked. “In hindsight, what intention would you infer from the Panama Manifold?”

He turned towards Rui. “The manifold tree was implanted at the very exact epicenter of the continent and then trapped the entire continent in a higher-dimensional spacetime manifold, separating it from the rest of the world while diluting the flow of time within the manifold. If you had to attribute intention to this event, what do you think could have been the intention?”

Rui understood why the Divine Doctor suspected that the Panama Continent might contain more hints as to the ’virus’ or the foreign agent responsible for negatron matter production. “…The most natural conclusion feels like it was created to hide and protect something from the rest of the world.”

“Exactly.” The Divine Doctor mused. “As we have discussed, it is theoretically possible that all of this is devoid of intentionality and is just some natural process or coincidence, but it is statistically deeply unlikely. If we assume that there was intentionality with the Greater Panama Manifold, then there is one very natural conclusion as to what that intentionality was.”

His eyes sharpened.

“To hide something from the outside world. Let us say you had to hide something that was extremely precious, such that everybody would want it, and was also extremely delicate, such that excessive interference from external factors would disrupt it, then it makes sense that you would want to hide that thing from the rest of the world,” the Divine Doctor remarked. “It is very natural that you would want to hide it and guard it. However, what if…”

He turned towards Rui with a serious expression.

“What if the thing that you are trying to hide is too large and too widespread over a large area? So much so that hiding it through ordinary means is almost impossible?”

Rui’s dark eyes widened. “In that case, you would need extraordinary means of hiding it from everybody else…”

The Divine Doctor nodded. “Extraordinary means such as a higher-dimensional space-time manifold that essentially weaves a pocket dimension around a given territory. This way, everybody outside would be completely ignorant of what you are trying to hide, and they would never be able to directly find what you are hiding.”

“That would explain why the manifold tree tried to maintain a stronghold over the Panama Continent, too,” Rui realized. “The point of having a ’Beast Domain’ over which the manifold tree and the Eldritch Chimera had full control was to ensure that nothing inside that territory would be able to interfere with the thing that you are trying to hide from the rest of the world.”

“Correct,” the Divine Doctor mused. “The manifold was to hide the ’Source,’ let us call it, from the rest of the world. The Beast Domain was created to protect the Source from internal factors. It served as a kingdom for the Manifold Tree and later the Eldritch Chimera that assimilated the Manifold Tree, most likely to protect this Source.”

“That would explain why the time dilation in the Greater Manifold was the opposite of that of the Mellow Manifold,” Rui realized. “By reducing the flow of time within the manifold, they can ensure that the probability of some internal dysfunction leading to the disruption of whatever they were trying to hide within the Panama Continent would be minimal.”

It was in consideration of Murphy’s Law, which stated, ’whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.’ An added asterisk was that the more time something had to go wrong, the likelier it was to go wrong. Thus, by reducing the time, one could reduce the probability of it going wrong.

That must have been the purpose of the time dilation of the Greater Panama Manifold, Rui speculated. One hundred and eighty-seven thousand years was a long, long time for something to go wrong, so much so that it was basically guaranteed.

But through time dilation, the manifold turned it into a mere one thousand three hundred years, which was still quite a lot of time, but it reduced the probability of some error by a drastic margin.

“However, something did go wrong even in those one thousand three hundred years.” Rui realized as he gazed at his hands. “…Us.”

The Divine Doctor nodded. “We were the factor that went wrong inside the manifold despite the time dilation. Ancestral humanity on the Panama Continent survived the Epoch of Evolution. We survived the Beast Domain. Not only did we survive, we evolved through violence. We evolved from homo sapien to homo martialus and gained the ability to walk a certain path.”

“The Martial Path.” Rui’s tone was one of certainty. “Our survival and our evolution into homo martialus was the thing that went wrong. We gained more and more power as a civilization. We gained the ability to walk the Martial Path, and we began conquering the continent, the dungeon, and eventually made most of it ours.”

“The Eldritch Chimera must have been asleep or in hibernation for more than a thousand years, for when it woke up and saw that its internal ’kingdom’ had been conquered by a native species that had survived its arrival, it tried to claim it all back, leading to the Beast Incursion and the Era of Darkness, and eventually, we won that war too, slaying the Eldritch Chimera and the Manifold Tree,” the Divine Doctor continued this line of thought. “We unfolded the manifold that had been erected by this ’virus’ to hide whatever it was trying to hide from the rest of the world.”

Rui’s expression grew grim. “So the ’virus’ wanted to hide the Source of the negatron matter production so that it wouldn’t be disrupted. A Source that is inside the Panama Continent. Something that is large and spread over a large amount of area. Something that is precious enough that others would want and seek, thus disrupting it. And something could only be hidden by a large manifold—”

He froze as the realization dawned on him.

Chills crawled across his skin as he felt a dread second only to the Transcendent Fear.

“It seems you figured it out.” The Divine Doctor’s expression grew grim. “That’s right. The answer is esoteric matter. Esoteric matter must have been what the virus implanted into the Panama Continent. It must have been what the virus was trying to hide from the rest of the world with the manifold. It must be the machinery through which the virus acts. And…”

The Divine Doctor’s eyes sharpened.

“…It must be connected to the negatron matter production in some way or another.”