Chapter 168: The Monarch of Death Tesranach (5)
Many mages throughout history had conducted various thought experiments on the manipulation of time and space. Most of these experiments inevitably led to a single question: How does one resolve the paradoxes of time travel?
Just as Karnak had once wondered about the origins of the Overkill technique, the mere act of traveling between past and future inherently created contradictions.
Several hypotheses had emerged to address this problem. One was determinism, the idea that no matter what, the past could never be changed. Even if one thought they had altered the past, their actions were merely events that had always been destined to occur.
Then there was the mutable versus immutable history hypothesis, which suggested that while minor details could be changed, greater fates could not be altered.
Another was the history rewriting hypothesis, which stated that the moment one changed the past, the original future would vanish, replaced by an entirely new timeline.
And lastly, the parallel world hypothesis, which proposed that every choice created infinite branching realities, each containing a future corresponding to its divergence. There were also those who claimed that the very existence of paradoxes was proof that time travel itself was impossible.
But that last theory had already been rendered meaningless the moment Karnak successfully crossed into the past.
Among these, the theory Karnak had once believed in was history rewriting. The moment he returned to the past, the future he came from would cease to exist, and time's continuity would become bound to him. Thus, he alone would retain knowledge of the vanished future while shaping a new one.
"When I was making the Obelisk of Transcending Space-Time, all the data pointed to this theory being correct."
But now, this theory had been disproven. He had met Lapicel, someone who had also traveled from the future. If history rewriting were true, then the future he had come from no longer existed, meaning Lapicel could not have followed him into this timeline.
On the other hand, Demphis's explanation made sense of many things. Why did the returning figures resemble those from his past, yet still feel slightly different? Why did Elezar and Demphis know of Lapicel, while neither knew Karnak and Varos?
If this world was some kind of parallel universe, then most of his lingering doubts could be answered.