Chapter 3659: The Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Echo: A Truth Outside Their Own Minds

Kael’s question did not create a schism, but a silence.

It was a silence not of absence, but of deep, shared thought.

The easy comfort of their shared world was gone, replaced by a profound sense of uncertainty.

They could not ’un-ask’ the question, nor could they ignore it.

To do so would be to live in a world that was, at its heart, a comforting lie.

So they began to search for an answer.

But this was not a search for a new feeling, a new shared experience that would erase the doubt.

It was a search for something they had never needed before: a truth that existed outside of their own minds.

They began to look at the world not just as a source of feeling, but as a source of information.

The rough texture of a stone was no longer just a memory of the mountain, but a clue to its history.

The warmth of the sun was no longer just a feeling of comfort, but a sign of a distant, burning star.

It was the beginning of science, of philosophy, of a new way of being in the world.

A way that embraced not just the comfort of shared feeling, but the cold, hard beauty of objective truth.