Hypotheses

Void Realm, Time Continent. "What are you thinking about?" Yaxiu was slightly taken aback. Turning his head, he saw the Sword Princess leaning in close right before his eyes—extremely close. Their noses were nearly touching, their warm breaths kissing first. Yaxiu could even see his own reflection in her sly eyes. In a flash, Yaxiu marshaled his formidable psychological fortitude to suppress his body's instinct to dodge, staring right back at her with wide eyes. One second, two seconds, three seconds. A faint, misty flush blossomed across Sonia's egg-white cheeks, but as if refusing to back down, she kept staring back without blinking once. Suddenly, she stuck out the tip of her cherry tongue to lightly lick her lips. A smile spread from the corners of her curved mouth, dancing across her lovely face and jumping into her clear, large eyes, reacting chemically with the nervousness in her pupils. Carried along with her gaze, it invaded Yaxiu's nerves like a virus, making him unable to suppress a grin as well. *Thud!* The instant Sonia turned her head toward the source of the noise, Yaxiu immediately raised his fist and declared victory: "I win!" *I wasn't playing a staring contest with you! How old are you to be acting so childish?!* The village girl fumed in exasperation, turning an unfriendly glare toward the Witch, who had fallen out of the car and interrupted them. "What are you doing?" "I... I was just thinking maybe I should walk further away to give you two some space..." the Witch said bashfully. "Look, the curtain of reverse golden rain actually provides great cover. Once I'm ten steps away, I won't be able to see you at all. It's completely safe! Sorry for disturbing you, I'll leave right now!" Diya had intended to slip away quietly, but precisely because she had been so careful, she lost her balance while leaving, tripped over the car door, and accidentally face-planted into the ground. In truth, she felt quite regretful herself—after all, in the past, she had only ever read the glossed-over forewords in fairy-tale picture books. She and her sisters were all deeply curious about the ten-thousand-word full text that the Sword Princess and the Watcher would enact afterward. Even though Sonia had practiced her acting in front of a mirror, the Witch's words made her face burn, heat creeping all the way to the tips of her ears. She hastily rushed over to grab her: "You're not disturbing us! Come back and sit down!" "Then what were you two doing just now?" Diya asked curiously. "We... we were just playing a staring contest!" Sonia argued defensively. "Whoever looks away or blinks first loses!" "Sigh, Sword Princess, you're so childish." Yaxiu sighed, giving a helpless shrug. "How old are you? Can't you be a little more mature?" The village girl's face turned bright red—this time out of sheer fury. She felt the rage burning right through her stomach, and was positive that if she drew her sword right now and unleashed a full combo of Blood Blossom Water Moon on the Watcher, it would land a hundred percent critical hit. "Oh right, I found some interesting information in that sorcerer manual from earlier," Diya said. "It's an investigation regarding the Seven-Colored Tail." Just moments ago, their car had run over yet another blind sorcerer projection wandering the main road as if it were his own living room. The sorcery spirits dropped by sorcerer projections were handed to the Sword Princess to sell, while the sorcerer manuals were mostly leafed through by Diya. Only particularly tough manuals were left for Yaxiu to handle. To be honest, Yaxiu was quite satisfied with this garbage-sorting system. Diya filtered out most of the "ordinary" sorcerer manuals, so Yaxiu only ever saw the especially explosive ones—each containing at least a dozen R-18 tags, constantly refreshing his understanding of biodiversity with every read. At the mention of the Seven-Colored Tail, Sonia immediately snuffed out the fireworks in her heart, while Yaxiu drove onward, giving chase to the White Ox. "The owner of the manual gathered a lot of information on the Seven-Colored Tail, and after conducting on-site verifications, disproved most hypotheses," Diya said. "Among the hypotheses he knew, the most likely ones are the Three-and-a-Half Sorcerers Hypothesis, the Seven Sorcerers Hypothesis, and the White Ox Hypothesis." "Among them, the Three-and-a-Half Sorcerers and Seven Sorcerers hypotheses are actually the same thing. Sorcerers believe the 'seven colors' of the Seven-Colored Tail refer to the colors of sorcerers' void wings. Although ours are all Silver Wings and Golden Wings, if you look closely, everyone's wing color and wing shape are unique. Calling them different colors wouldn't be an exaggeration." "Thus, some sorcerers believed that if seven distinct void wings could be brought together, it might trigger the Void Realm's mechanics to manifest the Seven-Colored Tail. The Three-and-a-Half Sorcerers Hypothesis was a simplified version extended from that premise: if everyone was a fully manifested Two-Winged Sorcerer, three and a half sorcerers would make up seven void wings." "There's also another variant—the Golden Seven Sorcerers: only fully manifested golden void wings count as 'one color,' while silver void wings don't count at all. Therefore, seven fully condensed Two-Winged Sorcerers are required to trigger the Seven-Colored Tail. This speculation has its basis too—sorcerers believed that once they gathered seven Golden Wings, they would turn into 'seven drops of rain' and fall upward along with the reverse golden rain." Yaxiu and Sonia nodded repeatedly as they listened. Although the reasoning sounded absurd, compared to the Golden Fish Secret Poison, this Seven Sorcerers Hypothesis was already remarkably convincing. Moreover, the advanced Golden Seven Sorcerers version even took into account the reverse golden rain, the largest-scale mechanism on the Time Continent, giving it immense persuasive power. Even Yaxiu felt it was highly probable. Though he had only experienced the baptism of the Golden Fish Secret Poison, Yaxiu had a vague intuition: the Void Realm's smuggling mechanisms were all probably like brain teasers, or cases of the blind spot right under the lamp—impossible to fathom when you didn't know the trick, yet seemingly dead simple the moment you found out, as ingenious and conspicuous as a detective novel's murder trick. Yet that didn't mean smuggling through the Void Realm was easy. On the contrary, a sorcerer still had to fulfill some exceptionally harsh conditions. Take the Golden Fish: it had no requirements regarding your location as long as you could fly, but aside from "childhood sweetheart sorcerers" like Yaxiu and the Sword Princess who grew together, any other Silver Sorcerer had to have extraordinary luck to encounter and persuade another sorcerer to team up for flight. Therefore, the Seven-Colored Tail could most likely be triggered anywhere on the Time Continent, but the conditions were so stringent that an individual sorcerer could hardly ever meet them. The Golden Seven Sorcerers Hypothesis possessed all of those qualities; Yaxiu felt it might very well be the truth. However... "Three and a half is one thing, but seven sorcerers... isn't that threshold way too high?" Diya nodded. "By a stroke of luck, the manual's owner did manage to gather three and a half sorcerers once. But try as they might, right until the Domain of Stillness caught up to them, they failed to trigger the Seven-Colored Tail mechanism. So the Three-and-a-Half hypothesis is basically false. The Golden Seven Sorcerers version remains unfalsified, and was considered by the manual's owner to be the highly likely second choice." "Only second?" "Because the other unfalsified one, the White Ox Hypothesis, is even more likely," Diya said. "Sorcerers believe that the four legs of the White Ox are the conduits to the Seven-Colored Tail." Yaxiu and Sonia promptly looked up toward the distant white pillars on the horizon. "Oh, right," Sonia suddenly recalled. "When white light passes through a triangular prism, it refracts into seven colors... That's common knowledge in the light sorcery faction!" "Yes, the manual's owner noted that as well." Diya nodded. "The White Ox Hypothesis posits that the White Ox's four legs are actually four tails. If a sorcerer can run inside the White Ox's legs and use their own soul as a triangular prism, they can refract the Seven-Colored Tail. Then, the sorcerer can ascend along the pillar of light within the leg up to the third layer of the Void Realm." Yaxiu decided to take back his earlier thought: the White Ox Hypothesis was indeed far more convincing than the Golden Seven Sorcerers Hypothesis. After all, gathering seven sorcerers was impossible even for Yaxiu unless he whaled on gacha for four more operators, and the end result of that hypothesis was merely turning into raindrops falling toward the sky. The White Ox Hypothesis, on the other hand, had an ascension pathway already laid out. Besides, Yaxiu was a fan of such scientific deductions as "white light refracting into seven colors." "So what kept the manual's owner from verifying the hypothesis?" Sonia asked. "The White Ox moves too fast," Diya said. "It never stops at all, advancing more than ten seconds with every passing second. Furthermore, the forelegs are often where the Flowing Gold River breaches its banks. For a sorcerer to bypass the Flowing Gold River and enter inside the forelegs is practically impossible." Yaxiu said, "Then what about the hind legs..." "The Domain of Stillness lies behind the hind legs," Sonia mused. "If a sorcerer fails to maintain relative rest with the hind legs and gets tossed into the Domain of Stillness, there's no saving them." "And no one knows whether the White Ox's four legs are lethal," Diya added. "The manual owner's most successful attempt only got him within ten meters of a foreleg. He never witnessed what happened to anyone who ran inside the legs; they might just be crushed to death by the ox." "What's more... he had a feeling that the White Ox's four legs might not exist at all." "What does that mean?" "Even though we can clearly see the white pillars from here," Diya said, "once you get close to the legs, the white pillars become invisible. The manual's owner was only able to gauge the forelegs' position by the density of the Flowing Gold River. When he pursued the hind legs, he turned around only to be swept into the Domain of Stillness. The closer he got, the less he could see the legs. It was almost like..." "Almost like a rainbow," Sonia said.