Rivers of the Night

Theron suddenly stood.

The Alpha looked up in confusion but quickly followed over, lumbering like a curious golden retriever. However, Theron didn't pause to explain, just accelerating further until he was outside.

Theron stood on the riverbed, looking up to see the raging waves above him. His eyes seemed to be trying to calculate something, but not finding everything he wanted in this specific location, he moved with a continuous series of [Shadow Steps] before he came to an abrupt stop again.

His head tilted upward once more before he shot into the distance again.

Theron must have continued this exact process for an entire three days. By the end of it all, he felt his Mana running on empty, and his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue.

By now, he should be able to stay awake for at least a few days without feeling the adverse effects. But the problem was that he had been in a hyper state of focus from the very start.

It was all worth it.

'I've got it.'

Theron squeezed his eyes shut as though trying to blink away his fatigue. He pressed his thumb and fingers along the sides of his forehead, rubbing back and forth.

In these last few days, he had spent more time calculating than he had maybe in his entire life combined.

When he first stepped into the Dark River, he had the impression that the waves of the Dark River were designed. Because of that, he followed against them, pushing against the tide to find the location that this "mysterious expert" wanted to protect.

In the end, he found the location of the cabin.

This seemed to seal the mystery. Obviously, this had been created by some shocking expert, and thus Theron had found who was responsible for it all by finding the legacy of the unnamed cultivator.

However, what Theron hadn't done was go back and ask himself how everything had worked out so perfectly if he was now sure the unnamed cultivator couldn't have possibly been the one to forge the Dark River.

That was when Theron understood something.

The unnamed cultivator might have been less talented than he was, but his comprehension of Dark Mana and his Dark Mana Control were well beyond Theron. In fact, those two comprehensions were beyond Theron's individual understanding of Water Mana right now.

That was to say that, much the same way Theron could find the most difficult-to-reach location of the Dark River, so too could the unnamed cultivator.

Thus, the unnamed cultivator took advantage of this ready-made environment to locate their inheritance and test their inheritor.

That left the obvious elephant in the room:

What created it all in the first place?

And therein lay the problem.

By comparison, finding the location most difficult to reach was far easier. This was because this point was a central region where all of the Dark River's might seemed to coalesce into a singular point.

However, because of the way the waves moved, ebbed, and flowed, there were seemingly an infinite number of points they began from.

Imagine for a moment a tsunami's wave. Pinpointing where it reached its peak was as easy as observing it after it had already grown large enough to swallow the coastline. However…

Who could determine the exact point where that wave began?

There was a saying that a flap of a butterfly's wings in one country could very well cause a hurricane in another. Theron had read about this concept in his library just now—the root of chaos and the three-body problem.

When systems had too many points to consider, judging what would happen in a distant future was impossible.

However, if that was the case… why did the entire Dark River seem to form a single point of chaos? The most difficult location to reach? The location Theron deduced, the unnamed cultivator deduced, and even Patriarch Nightingale had deduced in part?

That was the key to it all and what Theron had been frenziedly trying to calculate for the last three days.

The conclusion Theron reached, though, was that while he had enough raw data to come to the answer now… he didn't have enough background knowledge to calculate it.

Luckily, he had a way to get that background knowledge—and quickly.

He collapsed to the ground and began to snore instantly. It was a light, gentle snore, but it just went to show how fatigued he truly was.

The Alpha stood over him for the next day, silently protecting its master until Theron's eyes suddenly snapped open.

Pulling himself up into a meditating position, Theron sent his mind into the library once more.

It had formed an enormous collection of books after Theron stepped into this world. Because of that, Theron realized that the library was capable of growing and evolving. The moment it stepped into a new world, it was able to produce the foundational knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, and every relevant physical and metaphysical science one could think of in a brief instant of time.

Unfortunately, because it was so efficient at this, the same library it had only taken Theron days to clear before would likely take years to clear now, even though Planet Nightingale was a relatively simple planet.

However, these details didn't matter right now—not when Theron felt he was so close to unearthing this mystery.

'No, not geology. Not marine biology. Not fluid dynamics… something else, something…'

Theron found the books related to the three-body problem again. His eyes scanned the books one by one.

The three-body problem was an illustration of chaos—a simply explained but difficult-to-truly-grasp system of physics. The short of it was that a system with three independent gravitational bodies was impossible to predict.

He had already read it, but…

Theron's eyes shifted.

'There has to be a reason the answer is not just the cabin. What could possibly force a chaotic system to have the same answer again and again?'

Theron's eyes suddenly shone violently.